I agree with everything that Sample talks about in his article. The essay is becoming more and more tedious the longer I am in school. I have written so many long essays with endless citations, research, and endless nights for absolutely nothing. Half the essays I had to write for my classes dealt with topics that I had no interest in. There is no chance of me ever wanting to approach these papers a second time to try to find something about them that I can make into a publishable and read paper. I wrote the essay because I had to and it was getting graded. I didn’t care about the topic and my only goal was a good grade. I think that this essay explains that there is so much more that can be done in a Humanities course. It doesn’t always have to be a final assignment that is 10-15 pages long with a works cited.

Having blogs and wikis in class’s means that the student’s thoughts and ideas are getting more acknowledgement than a simple paper than only a professor reads. Their opinions and findings are out for anyone to see. Not only does this give students more encouragement to actually care about their work, but they are conscious of the effort they are putting into their work, and it makes it more fulfilling if the effort you are putting into a course is actually noticed. I had a class where I contributed to an on-going class wiki that had me post two annotated bibliographies for articles on any topic that I wanted. The wiki allowed students to put their articles into categories of topics. Not only was I contributing to this wiki, but I was able to help anyone that needed to further study a topic I was reading into, and I now had at least 50 articles to reference if I decided to begin new research on a topic. This interaction and contributing allowed me to feel like my work was worthwhile, and that it actually mattered. It made me feel better that my work could help someone else, and that it will actually be read by more than one person. I think that Humanities courses could really benefit by branching out further than the typical class essay.