A few comments about the first week of your blog contributions

First, I want to thank you collectively for having, overall, done an excellent job with your posts. The overwhelming majority of your posts were rich with insights, some developed others merely briefly mentioned but all the same rich fodder for thought.

I'd like to remind many of you, however, of an important aspect of the assignment's requirement: namely, a) to work on occasion with a source and b) for that source to be on occasion academic in nature.

Most of you did indeed incorporate a source in one or more of your posts--though some of you made your lives a bit too easy by just using the source I've provided or one of your peers already provided before you. I'd like to ask you to be a bit more creative and find your own source, though of course you can most certainly also address a source already provided by someone else before you.

Where almost all of you have called short thus far is with regard to point b): that on occasion one of your sources should be an academic essay or book (realistically speaking: just a chapter or section from it). If I recall correctly it's been only (some of) those of you taking the course for graduate credit that in fact brought those kind of sources to the table. I'd like all of you to do this as we move to the next round of posts next week.

If you are unclear whether or not you found a relevant academic source please ask me. The source may be a discussion of the film or the filmmaker; it may also be a discussion of a topic relevant to the film or to the class at large (globalization) that you then mobilize in your discussion of the film at hand.

You can find such academic sources online but perhaps more likely you may have to use one of the academic search engines LOVE LIBRARY provides here: http://iris.unl.edu. You might just type in the film or the director's name in the search box and see what happens. For instance, if you typed in "Dirty Pretty Things" you'd get 5 sources. Click on one or more of them to see where they were published (in a newspaper, in which case the article isn't academic, or in an academic/scholarly journal?) You'll see that the article "I's Wide Shut..." is a relevant article, as is "Border Politics and..." You'll also notice that both texts can be downloaded as a PDF.

If you have questions about how to do scholarly/academic research please ask me. Note that Google can be helpful finding some academic/scholarly materials but is ultimately limited; it's not a substitute for what a library search engine can do.