Procedures for Assignments


From week to week, the assignments will vary, and there are several equivalent ways to submit your coursework. To some extent, then, you should feel free to do whatever suits your working style and the problem at hand. However, here's a general model for the activities:

  1. The problem of the week. Each week has some problem to address. This could be to find something on the web, to propose a research project, or to examine an issue such as access. In most cases, I pose some questions and set out a starting activity or readings.
  2. Exploration. Treat this problem as a common base for our class discussions. Where there are readings, you should look at all of them, but you'll probably go more deeply into some than others. Also, you may find additional sources you can share with the class.
  3. Learning through writing. Write about what you learn in the WebBoard asynchronous conference for that week. If the week's problem is a question such as, "How should we read the web?", I'm less interested in a straight quote from an "expert," and more in your own ideas backed up by evidence, including your experiences, quantitative data, ideas from readings, research studies, what you've learned from classmates, what you've observed students doing, and so on.
  4. Dialogue. In general, the main discussion is done in the asynchronous conferences, not the chats. Mostly, I'd like to see you engage with the issues raised by the readings and by what your classmates say. It is a response, but also an invitation to dialogue around the topic.
  5. Documenting your work. Then, for the purpose of documenting the work you do put all your written work, whether that be WebBoard messages for a discussion, or a project proposal, into a single file. If you write only one message in a given week, you could use the URL for that message. If you write several messages, or if you do work not represented in webboard, you should make a web page or a section of your eportfolio for that week.
  6. Building your eportfolio. Link the file representing each week's work from your eportfolio.
  7. Submitting your work. At the end of the week, post a single URL to that file in CTERbase. Check back in a few days to see whether I indicate that the assignment is complete or that further work is needed.