For Class Thursday, March 26

Work on your research plan. This writing is an important part of your research process. Before you begin looking for references - you need to think about what you expect to discover/show, and the kinds of references you will need in order to develop your exploration. Doing some solid work on your research plan can save you from taking on a project that will be too much work, a project that does not have enough readily available information, or a project that is too general or too narrow. Perhaps more importantly it can help you develop a *reserch project* ("tips", "how to essays" and reporting essays are not research essays).

Include:

Statement of purpose (what you hope to show/discover)
Detailed statement of your research question
List of the information you need to gather
A preliminary list of sources
Plan for gathering your information

Do some in-depth thinking about whether your question is broad enough or focused enough.

For those of you who have changed/re-focused your research topic - you will want to up-date your user analysis (check back to the writing we did in response to Johnson-Eilola's prompts on who your users are & how they will use the site.

In class on Thursday, we will look at Johnson-Eilola's presentation of structures and navigation devices in common use for web sites. You will identify those features on some sample sites - and then we will discuss correlations between how a site is built - and how it is used.

At this point, you will look at your user/user context analyses - and at your research plans - and we will do some discussing about what kind of structure will work best to present your information to your users.

For Thrusday:
Blog 14: Revised research plan

For Monday, March 30
Blog 15: overview of your experience with Wikipedia. This reflection should include:
1. a link to your post
2. your user name so we can follow your participation in the history
3. a discussion of what you posted & why you chose to post it where you did; how long your post stayed "up" & how & whether it was edited; a report on your discussions/interactions with other editors; your speculations about why your post was received the way it was (some reflections on how wikipedia works).