All students are expected to participate in a team project (see past examples), and to make active contributions to that project at each stage of its preparation. Team interactions and planning may include asynchronous, synchronous chat, telephone, and/or face-to-face meetings.

This is where much of the course work is done. You will learn about a topic in the area, but also about the work of the other teams. In addition, you will learn more about how to work collaboratively and to use a variety of technologies to facilitate the work, planning and communication of a group. For this to succeed, the groups will have to work in an independent and self-directed manner. Each team will need to take responsibility for dividing up tasks, setting project goals, and working effectively to meet them. You will need to conduct a thorough search of primary resources, including web-based materials, over and above class assignments for your team project.

Each project has five milestones: (1) Project Proposal, (2) Annotated Bibliography, (3) Outline Draft, (4) Presentation, and (5) Final Report"

1. Project Proposal

The project proposal is a place in which to articulate your plans for the project, both to help you shape a reasonable effort and to facilitate responses from others.

• Request for proposals
• Project ideas

2. Annotated Bibliography

The annotated bibliography is a means for identifying those resources that inform and define your own effort.

Build a library of resources on your topic, and post an annotated web page that lists these sites, with brief explanations of what each site contains, what views are expressed, and how it relates to your project. This collection can be updated as the semester goes along and as you find additional material.

How should you do the annotations? Look ahead to the presentations and your final paper. Think about what would have been useful to have written when you first found the resource. For example, you would probably want to have a description of what it was about, any special features that you might need to return to, how it supported a particular argument or position on the issues, what sources it drew upon, how you might use if later on, and so on. For one site, you might say nothing more than "example of lawsuit over copyright of web materials." For another you might feel the need to write a couple of pages summarizing a complex argument about distinctions between computer crime and ordinary crime. You can use the text you write now later on in the final paper itself.

More specifically:

• Organize the sites; don't just list them. You're going to find some sites that are examples of a problem, others that are essays stating positions. You don't need an elaborate categorization at this time, but you can start to group sites into major categories.
• Summarize the content. It's very easy to forget what was on a site, or worse, to find that it's disappeared two months later. You need to summarize what's important about it and especially, what you found useful in terms of your own project.
• Evaluate the content. If there's a key theme in this course it's that we want you to question conventional assumptions about new technologies. Even at this early stage, you can start to identify flaws in claims or especially strong arguments. Say not just "good" or "bad", but why.
• Begin to frame the issues and positions being discussed. This first phase is just a step towards a final white paper, but even now you can begin to lay out your ideas and how they relate by the sites you select, how you organize them, and what you say about them. It might be evident, for example that you're seeking to identify "the seven dimensions of web content reliability" or the "the ways privacy issues in the web cause us to rethink privacy issues in general."
• Many web sites have annotated links within them. Usually, these simply summarize what a site is about. Yours will probably include that aspect, but go beyond that to include more evaluative information. My "literacy web page of the month" in the JAAL columns (the series that includes "How Worldwide is the Web?") is one example you might look at, but please remember that the purpose there is not exactly the same as yours here, so your annotations will look somewhat different.

3. Outline Draft

Develop an outline that frames the major positions for your research question. Rather than a skeleton outline, this is a rough version of the developing project, addressing questions such as: What are the basic issues at stake? What arguments are different sides putting forth? What critical areas need further study?

4. Presentation

The project presentation is an opportunity to display the work you have done up to that paoint and also to solicit responses and suggestions from classmates.

Present your project to the class. Each group will have time to present the project's goals, problems encountered, current status, early results, and next steps. The class will ask questions, offer new perspectives, or discuss how its issues relate to those of other groups.

Let me know well in advance if you need any special AV support. You may make your presentation interactive if that seems appropriate.

Please plan to be flexible on the time, but you can think of it as follows:

• One person: 10-15 minutes plus 15 minutes of discussion
• Two people: 20 minutes plus 15 minutes of discussion
• Three people: 25 minutes plus 15 minutes of discussion
• Four people: 30 minutes plus 15 minutes of discussion

5. Final Report

The format of the final report will vary according to the project's purpose and audience. Every project needs a narrative presenting,

• what it is,
• what problem it addresses,
• how it relates to other work,
• what approach was used,
• what results were achieved,
• what implications it has (how you interpret the results),
• where it might go next, and
• what you learned from doing it.

A project that is primarily software or web development would likely have a much briefer narrative than one that examines an issue in depth. Similarly, a project completed by one person would like be somewhat smaller in scope than a team project.

The primary criterion for evaluation is quality of the ideas and the presentation, not length, but to give you some idea, a typical issues examination project done by two people might be ~6,000 words (~24 pages). The best guide here would be to look at previous projects. Look also at the Request for proposals and your own project proposal for a guide.