For my second media project, I decided to create a fake twitter page for Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shalott”.
Here is the project:
I thought of this idea because I think we can relate to the Lady of Shalott’s isolation. Whereas she is trapped in a tower and can only view the outside world from the reflections in her mirror, we sit at our laptops with our eyes glued to our screens from which we glean bits of news. I also saw us posting tweets and facebook status updates as us “weaving” our own personal narratives. Originally, I had planned on creating an art installation, but the logistics were too complicated, so I decided to focus solely on the modernized aspect. I googled “Twitter in the classroom” and found a teacher’s blog where the teacher had posted a twitter page for William Shakespeare (http://ichooseawesome.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/choose-a-fake-twitter-template/). I downloaded his template and changed all the pictures and text to create a page for the Lady of Shalott. I chose to create a fake twitter page instead of creating a new twitter account because not all students have twitter and they may not be comfortable with posting their assignments publicly on the “twitterverse”.
I think this could be an engaging way for students to try to relate to a character and see things from his or her perspective. I would evaluate students on their ability to capture the tone and theme of the literary work in the tweets and hashtags. Please do feel free to use this fake twitter template if you so wish.
Here is the template itself in editable form:
1 response so far ↓
TMD // Jul 24th 2014 at 9:22 am
Dear Elaine,
Thanks for introducing this twitter project. As seminar members noted in class, there is a certain irony to this work — a solitary literary figure connected to other solitary literary figures through social media. It invites discussion of what constitutes loneliness or isolation and of how social connection through the Internet might be different from or similar to connection through digital media.
I could see this project being usefully extended through a more complex writing component entailing dialogue (in the form of Twitter exchanges) between the various characters represented, assuming that members of the class assume the identities of various solitary literary figures.
You’ll note that I’ve uploaded your project again in PDF form and have placed the new version earlier in the post so that individuals reading the blog who didn’t see your presentation are able to contextualize your comments. It’s always better to convert to PDF in scenarios where viewers may be working on multiple platforms.
Thanks again and Best regards,
Teresa
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