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I'm a big fan of Serendip and publishing papers online. I've been allowed to further expand the kinds of experimental writing I started last semester in the Nonfiction Prose course, and feel that, for the first time as an English major, I have a grasp on what an "essay" actually is (a trying, a testing, an experiment, according to the OED). But while I like posting my papers online, I do feel that the papers stand alone in the class - we don't integrate them into class discussion much, either online or in person, and I'm wondering if our learning as a class would be furthered by considering some of our classmates' questions brought up in their papers. 

Further, while I love posting in the online forum, sometimes I feel that the forum is less of a discussion than it is an assignment. Few people respond to what others have written (guilty as charged by my own standards), and I think we could have a more active dialogue in class if we wrote less out of necessity and more toward collaborative response. 

On an individual level, I've introduced an element of a sort of scientific skepticism into both how I write and how I think. As an English major, I'm taught that nothing is as it seems, and that the truth doesn't exist, but these claims were always made within the confines of literature. Now that I see them extended into the realm of science, I'm left wondering, then, how we sort the useful nothingness-it-doesn't-matter from the not useful. Where can we take something as fact enough and integrate it into our understanding of the world? (This is all quite a headache...) 

I'm interested in seeing where we as a class evolve. Not only do I see the material in class as a constantly shifting (set of?) story(ies?), but I see the class itself as a story. Where we began, who the characters are, and where I think we will end up changes with every class. I think it's interesting to think of ourselves and our lives as both a piece of evolution and an evolution in themselves - maybe thinking that may gives us a better idea of the intricate web of evolutions that is the evolution of our universe. 

Anyway, I'm glad that we get to keep on keepin' on, and I'm especially interested in contrasting my newfound scientific skepticism with my well-worn English skepticism in the second half of this course and seeing where the two cross over.