Coursework

The foundation of in-person classes are professors and students meeting for lectures and to discuss readings, debate etc. And while some learning happens together at the same time much learning happens on the student's own time (e.g. writing papers, doing readings etc.).

In the classroom, students will be expected at times to make spoken presentations and to participate in each class – i.e. being in class, asking questions, showing you've learned from doing the readings, etc (an abbreviation of et cetera, Latin for "and other things"). Usually the written work is designed to complement or to prepare for the work done in class.

All written work must be completed for a student to pass the course.

Participation

So, let's get this out in the open. Participation is always difficult to assess. Even in face-to-face classes, I can measure what I see, but I don't know the work that has been done behind the scenes (especially if you are a quiet or shy student). So typically, I have had students assign themselves a mark for participation each class – based on a rubric assigning points for attendence and for degree of participation.

I will take attendence and at the end of each class, will request that you assign yourself a mark of 5 for the quality of your participation, and I assign a mark for your reading annotations. At the end of each term, you will write up a process letter explaining the quality of your participation, part of which will be to assess your contributions to class discussion.

Profile

The first thing to do in this class is put together a profile to introduce yourself to your fellow students and the professor. I am going to suggest that you make a profile in the vein of an RPG character sheet, but you can also do something else which is creative - like a prose description, verse or a video...

Notes

The key to academic success is practice – especially practicing writing. Writing is hard for everyone, especially when a genre is unfamiliar or the expectations are unclear. I'll make the expectations clear and over time the expected norms of writing will become familiar to you. Above all I just want you to get used to writing without worrying too much about being perfect at it.

We are using Obsidian to help you practice different kinds of writing - citing works properly, turning the texts of experts into your own words, and then processing these ideas.

Exercises

Each week (usually during the Wednesday class), we will complete exercises to introduce you to different tools in the Historical Games Studies/ Medievalist toolkit. This might be me demonstating how to use Hypothes.is or getting you to complete a multi-stage library search on your own.

Feedback

You will be asked to provide comments and constructive criticism to written work completed by your peers (expectations set out here). We'll use the annotation tool hypothes.is to make comments on each other's work.

Process Letter

A "proces letter" is a term we use to describe an end-of-term self-evaluation of your own work. You will write this up as a way to justify the grade you will assign to yourself for first term, based on guided questions I will provide. Some of your work will be done in groups, so part of your letter will be the pleasant job of acknowledging those who did an exceptional job and the more difficult one of calling out those who were less satisfactory.

In the second term, the class will work on a group project or two, that we will work on each week in order to develop a new historically- inspired game.

Each week you will:

• prepare for class by completing the assigned readings and making annotations on the texts (primary sources, secondary sources, images, websites) with Hypothes.is.

• attend seminars, where I will lecture or lead a discussion and answer questions, or run an exercise

• complete weekly exercises (usually begun in class) intended to practice foundational skills of History/ Medieval Studies/Historical Game Studies

• write notes for the class and your gameplay with Obsidian

• play games and think about them and then write about them.