Archives for the 'Collaborative or Community Analysis' Category
Collaborative/Community Analysis Guidelines
Description
What interests you about collaborative or community writing on or for the Web? This assignment asks you to explore, analyze, and explain a topic in which you’re interested. You could investigate an online community or collaborative writing situation, or you could write about practical, technological, editorial, social, or ethical issues related to online communities or collaborative writing on the Web.
Requirements
- Select a topic related either to collaborative writing or community writing on the Web, such as the impact of technological changes, a case study of a specific collaborative or community writing site, or the stylistic features of collaborative or community writing. For example, you might choose to write about how the recent changes at Facebook have affected users. Or, you could observe how people on aa LiveJournal community discuss controversial topics. Or you could write about how scientists are shifting away from traditional peer review to online collaborative models for academic publishing.
- Come up with questions to help focus for your analysis. For example: “Why did Facebook users react so vehemently to the changes in feeds? How come the Facebook management didn’t see that coming? What does that say about how people see audience on the Web??”
- Conduct academic research in the library and on the Web to help you learn more about your topic. You should collect at least THREE library sources about your topic, and as many Web-based sources as you wnat.
- Conduct “field research” where you collect specific examples of content which relate to your topic and analyze them. This might include archiving posts, taking screen shots, or other types of research. You will need to provide specific examples in your analysis.
- Create a hypertext (series of at least four Web pages) that presents your research question and answers it by presenting your evidence. To create the hypertext, you will need to:
- As you collect information and come to conclusions, make a plan for how you will organize and present your information to the reader (an outline, a cluster map, or a set of index cards). Use this plan to generate a list of pages you will create for your site and a list of content that you will need to create or locate to present as evidence.
- Write paragraphs and sections of text which present information to the reader. You should use a more academic style and tone than the one you used for your autobiographies.
- Collect links, images, and any other media related to your topic.
- Create a template for your pages which specifies font, color scheme, positioning of page elements, and navigation using HTML and CSS. All pages (except for the index) should use this template.
- Build an index and Web pages (at least four) which present your analysis to the reader.
- Create a credits or works cited page where you cite all of the sources you used in your research and that you used to make the Web pages.
- Publish the site on your Niagara Web space and send the instructor a link.
Grading Criteria
The assignment will be graded on:
- How well you thoroughly explore, discuss, and analyze your topic.
- How well you incorporate academic and field research into your hypertext.
- How well you create a hypertext which is usable and accessible to your readers.
- How creative you are in presenting your material in ways which take advantage of the Web as a medium.
- How well you pay attention to conventions for Web writing and standard English usage.
You can earn a maximum of 200 points for this assignment.
Due Date
The final version of the project is due on November 8.