Class participation (10%)
I expect active participation from all students enrolled in the course. This means participating in the attending synchronous sessions of class, participating in synchronous small group discussions and doing the weekly quick writing. This course will require experimentation with new digital environments and a willingness to try, and perhaps sometimes struggle, with new modes of working and studying. Participation can be boosted in excess of 10% through rich engagement in the Chat.
These are not graded with a letter or a number (missing, unsatisfactory, satisfactory, excellent). If you complete your quick writings and have all satisfactory, you can reach about 8 out of 10 points. If you have 3 excellents then you can expect a full 10 points. More than 3 excellents can push you above 10%.
Blog writing 40%
There will be 6 short writing assignments in the research blog (they are graded on a 10 point scale, but make up 40% of your total grade, I will count only the 5 best). The format for this will be a blog, a key form of 21st-century public writing. Unless noted, a typical blog will be about 750 words plus several well chosen visuals. They will be either reflective pieces on a conceptual issue that has arisen in class or a lab report-style write-up and critique about a project or experiment carried out. The main point here is to learn to communicate ideas in an open forum and to develop a voice for public, web-based, media-rich writing. Students who are proficient in other blogging platforms or sustainable web development may opt for those.
Two assignments 30% (15% each)
These two assignments will be open ended, web-based applications of the work that we have done in the rest of the course.
Final assignment 20%
This final assignment is an exercise in which you will create a storymap from a portion of an old traveller to Arabia. It will be done in groups of two students. It will consist of two parts: the storymap itself as well as a recorded "making of" video.