Your goal with this assignment is to decide which of the interests you identified in the first assignment you want to spend the rest of the semester researching. The best way to do this is to start exploring each of your interests, hunting for reliable sources that can help you identify an issue or problem that you want to address with your project. As with the first assignment, you will do some work when the draft is due and then extend that work as you revise your post.
Part 1: Read things to decide on your issue
We’ll talk together as a class about the research notes organizer and other ways of keeping track of the things you read this semester. By the first deadline for this assignment, I want you to have added at least three sources to your research notes organizer and made a provisional decision about the issue you want to address this semester. Keep in mind that an issue needs tension: there should be a clear indication that it presents a problem, or in some way requires further research to better understand the implications.
When you’ve finished, draft a post in OpenLab including as much of this process as you would like. This might mean including a link to your research notes, or it might just mean sharing the issue you’ve identified through this process. You have the option to share your post with your classmates or keep it private so I’m the only one who sees it.
Part 2: Describe your experience with the most helpful source you found
Once you’ve drafted your post and we’ve had a chance to discuss together as a class, I will ask you to describe your experience with the source that was most helpful as you tried to find your issue. Sources can be helpful for all sorts of reasons and I want us to talk together about the various features that you found useful (and what technologies created those features). I want you to use the same process you did with your first post:
- Describe your experience with the source
- Classify your experience (referring to the glossary of experiences)
- Describe the feature/s prompting your experience
- Try to identify the technologies that created those features (referring to the glossary of technologies)
To Sum Up
Part 1: Draft your post on our course website
- Come up with a creative title
- Set a featured image (this could be your visualization, one of the things you included in it, or something else!)
- Share a link to your research notes (if you’re comfortable sharing!)
- Share the issue you want to address this semester
- Compose a description of your experience with the source you found most helpful (describe, classify, describe, determine)
Part 2: Expand your post, making sure the finished product includes
- A title
- A featured image
- The issue you want to address this semester
- A description of your experience with the source you found most helpful (describe, classify, describe, determine)
- A list of works cited (if you cited anything)
- An attribution statement for your featured image (TASL guidance here)
FAQs
- How will you grade this? This assignment is graded on a pass/fail basis. If you engage with the task and turn in a project, you will get 100%. This sort of project is likely new to you, so things will be confusing! Do your best and I will give you feedback so you understand the expectations going forward.
- Do I have to share my post with the class? You can choose to share your post with classmates or share it only with me (set your post to private if you only want me to see it).
- Can I use generative AI? I usually say no to this question because I think this is the time to follow your own inclination to find an issue that matters to you (not discover what others already consider important). But I’ve realized that students only build AI literacy skills by engaging critically with generative AI. Instead of asking you not to use generative AI, I’ll say that generative AI is a source and needs to be treated as such. If you use it, make sure to include it as a source in your notes organizer and consider writing about your experience with it for the second part of this assignment (as I have in my example post).
- Can you share an example of what a finished product is supposed to look like? Yes! You can check out an example post I created.
