Personal Question (Fall 2017)

Due: Sunday, October 1st, 2017, by 11:59PM UTC-12 (Anywhere on Earth).

Assignment Instructions

Before you can move on to proposing a contribution to the educational technology community, you need to demonstrate your mastery of the portion of the field to which you want to contribute. Because everyone’s interests and project ideas will be different, there is no question we can ask everyone that will be simultaneously deep enough to be challenging and general enough to cover everyone.

So instead, by the end of week 5, your mentor will send you a personal question targeted specifically to what you wrote on the first four (or five, if you submit Assignment 5 early enough) assignments. This question will ask you to think deeply about the topics you have chosen. For the research track, it might ask you to synthesize and describe the viewpoints of different communities or research methodologies on your ideas. For the development track, it might ask you to describe the broader issues or pedagogical challenges associated with your intended designs.

The primary goal of this assignment is to demonstrate your mastery of the portion of the field to which you want to contribute. In simpler words, the primary goal of this assignment is to show off what you know and how you can think. This is the closest thing this class has to a test. Adequately completing this assignment will require a significant command over the literature on your topic (in other words, several citations to others’ work in your area).

Your assignment should be approximately 1000 words long. This is neither a minimum nor a maximum, but rather a heuristic to simply describe the level of depth we would like to see. Feel free to write more, or if you believe you can complete the assignment in fewer words, feel free to write less.

Submission Instructions

Assignments should be submitted to the corresponding assignment submission page in accordance with the Assignment Submission Instructions. Most importantly, you should submit a single PDF for each assignment. This PDF will be ported over to Peer Feedback for peer review by your classmates. If your assignment involves things (like videos, working software prototypes, etc.) that cannot be provided in PDF, you should provide them separately (either through the class Resources folder or your own upload destination) and submit a PDF that links to or otherwise describes how to access that material.

This is an individual assignment. Even if you already plan to work on a team for the project, this assignment should still be completed individually.

Late work is not accepted without advanced agreement except in cases of medical or family emergencies. In the case of such an emergency, please contact the Dean of Students.

Grading Information

As with all assignments in this class, this assignment will be graded on a traditional A-F scale based on the extent to which your deliverable met expectations. If your deliverable receives below an A, you may revise and resubmit it once within two weeks of the original due date or one week of receiving a grade, whichever is later. Note that this should not be treated as a de facto free pass to submit sorely lacking work initially; we reserve the right to deny resubmission or grade a resubmission more harshly if we perceive the original submission was lacking in earnest effort.

Peer Review

After submission, your assignment will be ported to Peer Feedback for review by your mentor and classmates. Grading is not the primary function of this peer review process; the primary function is simply to give you the opportunity to read and comment on your classmates’ ideas. All grades will come from the graders alone.

You will typically be assigned four classmates to review. You receive 1.5 participation points for completing a peer review by the end of the day Thursday; 1.0 for completing a peer review by the end of the day Sunday; and 0.5 for completing it after Sunday but before the end of the semester. For more details, see the participation policy.