Limited Fork Theory Development Practicum (English 414)

A course that offers students an opportunity to learn and apply Limited Fork Theory in exploring interfaces between technology and writing toward production of innovative forms of text, sound, and image (still and moving) that can inhabit a variety of cyber and physical spaces.
The primary display of the outcomes of the work can be websites, wikis, blogs, film forms,and still images and designed to inspire future innovation in what it means to utilize text. Even journal entries, three dimensional objects, and handwritten notes may be filmed and/or photographed, and audio commentary recorded so that a digital form of the work may exist online in public forums to maximize possibilities for access by anyone with internet access.
The purpose is development of a broad palette of thinking options and text options for students. There's also emphasis on developing cyber materials in ways that broaden their accessibility to those with various types of sensory and other compromises
The approach is thematic rather than monolithic allowing students to draw information from any and all areas of their experience toward investigations of their own devising within a thematic context, this semester: framing systems. Limited Fork Theory is the study of interacting language systems: any/all visual, sonic, olfactory, tactile systems/subsystems on any/all scales for some duration of time.
CTools is the hub from which the class bifurcates, using blogs to document their journeys through a Limited Fork consideration of framing systems. The blogs can contain information that is often lost when the emphasis is on a final project generated by a learning journey. Here, the investigations themselves are documented. Students become able to map out a rationale for decisions made and questions asked as they configure and reconfigure possibilities, implications, and consequences of their evolving investigation of framing systems.
Students are asked to try to devise an investigation that they believe they could commit to for the rest of their lives, if necessary. In an attempt to frame their experiences as human beings who take on multiple roles, what emerges as important? What do they want to know about framing systems? What are the framing systems they've encountered? What are alternative framing systems to framing systems they think they already know? The purpose of the class, then, is not to produce a final project, but to become lifelong investigators who have the authority to construct and conduct an investigation. The purpose is to give control over form to the student so that if it is necessary to invent forms to express ideas and concepts, they will know how to invent and will trust that they have the authority to invent.

By the end of the class, students submit in their public blogs --in which anyone can comment-- their location in their investigations at the time of the post. I don't want to in any way suggest that these ideas can be completed or exhausted within a single semester of being introduced to a theory, developing an investigation, conducting the investigation, and drawing conclusions; what is submitted is an analysis of findings so far, which may include findings of the need for reconfiguration. So the dead end may be investigated; the nature of the dead end, behavior of the dead end --dead on every scale? at all times? in all locations? in all realities?