Topics

Lecture on the Collaborative Presentation and Collaborative Website.

We’ll watch Life and Death by Powerpoint.

Student-created Collaborative Website Examples: here, here, here, here, and here.

Studio time for continued team work on the Collaborative Projects.

If you have questions about setting up your team’s website on OpenLab, you can review part of this past lecture and check out the OpenLab’s Help > Creating a Project.

Due Next Week

Weekly Memorandum: Each team member should write one page discussing from his or her perspective the work of the team as a whole (e.g., what you have decided, how work is delegated, what other meetings/conversations are you having) and what his or her specific contributions are to the team project during the week (e.g., adding sources, quotes, and writing to the team’s research database document.

Topics

Studio time for Collaborative Projects.

NB (nota bene–note well): For the team projects, those students who are in class regularly are expected to take a leadership role. Other team members should follow their lead. Of course, teams should discuss and deliberate best approaches for completing the project, but at the end of the day, team leaders need to move the project forward and team members need to make meaningful contributions to the effort based on their executive decisions.

Regardless of how your team divides up writing responsibilities on the project, all team members are expected to read or skim all sources and background reading found by other team members. The point is that no one can write intelligently in a given section (e.g., introduction, problem, solution, or recommendations) without being informed by the research that your team is conducting together.

A question during class today regarded how much approximate space to give to each section: The introduction should be very short (one or two pages) and its purpose is to introduce your reader to your report–not your overall problem and solutions. It should briefly account for your problem, its solutions, and recommendations, but briefly. Finally, it should include a road map sentence or two about the overall layout of your report. Let’s say about 10% of the document. The problem section should cover the background, history, how the problem came to be, what is the problem currently like, and what is the problem projected to be in the future. It should be about 25%. The solutions section should be more substantial–including at least two solutions including their history, context, current status, future projections, costs, pros and cons for each. It should be about 50%. Then, there is the recommendations section–your analysis of the solutions and your recommendations about which are the best, most effective, best impact for least cost, etc. It should be about 15%. Your references follow after.

Focus on the analytical research report. Learn about your selected problem and its solutions. All team members should be doing this research and learning so that everyone is able to make informed contributions to the research report’s writing. Save the website and presentation work until later. Remember, the report anchors the website and presentation–those can’t be done until the report is in an advanced draft form. And, think about how the work that you did on the article summary project and expanded definition project applies to the writing that you do on your research report–summarization of sources, providing background and context, defining useful terms, etc.

Due Next Week (after Spring Recess)

Weekly Memorandum: Each team member should write one page discussing from his or her perspective the work of the team as a whole (e.g., what you have decided, how work is delegated, what other meetings/conversations are you having) and what his or her specific contributions are to the team project during the week (e.g., adding sources, quotes, and writing to the team’s research database document.

Topics

Discuss the Collaborative Research Report Project.

Show sample report layout in this Google Docs file and the research database in this Google Docs file.

Setup shared Google Drive folder and separate files for your team’s report and research database file.

Use studio time to plan, delegate, and conduct research.

Due Next Week

Weekly Memorandum: Each team member should write one page discussing from his or her perspective the work of the team as a whole (e.g., what you have decided, how work is delegated, what other meetings/conversations are you having) and what his or her specific contributions are to the team project during the week (e.g., adding sources, quotes, and writing to the team’s research database document.