Monday March 23

Hope you all had a great break!

We are going to begin class today by reviewing your experiences with Wikipedia - we will spend the rest of class tightening up your research plans (and taking a look at a publication venue for your projects => Kairos Special Issue on Undergraduate Research.

If you look at the bottom of the assignment sheet on Developing a Research Plan, it asks you to formulate a research plan that includes:


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

In class - we will work in small groups, through your blogs and through whole class discussion (as a team) to make sure each of you has a strong research question. Your question needs to be:
1) related to the writing/technology issues that are the focus of this course;
2) ask a question that is in dispute or not yet answered;
3) sufficiently focused or narrow so that you can throroughly explore your topic within the format, length, and time constraints of this assignment.

To put it another way, this means that your hypertext essay needs to connect to the theory from the readings, it needs to use that theory to explore ideas about writing and technology in a new way - so as to pose new ideas on your topic; and it needs to present that exploration in-depth and with references to the ideas of others.

The outcome of today's class will be revised research plans (including plans for gathering/thinking through your research process) that should set you up to write a focused hypertext essay that meets the requirements.

We will discuss schematics and work on designing your sites on Thursday.