Assignment 5: Collecting Your Sources (Fall 2018)

The next two weeks of the semester rely heavily on your grasp of the literature and related work surrounding the problem or question you’ve chosen to tackle. So, for this week, your sole focus is going to be on preparing that foundation so that you’re positioned to excel on the Qualifier Question and Project Proposal.

Assemble an annotated bibliography of the most pertinent literature surrounding your project area. An annotated bibliography in general is a list of sources with small summaries attached to each for you to more easily refer back to when you start your project. Sources should be cited in APA or SIGCHI style.

Your annotated bibliography should have at least 20 sources (25 or more is recommended), but it could certainly be higher; many papers have 40 citations or more. At least 15 of these sources should be scholarly sources: peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers, published books from reputable sources, or editorial articles by established experts. You are welcome to also include non-scholarly sources such as secondary sources (newspaper articles), blogs, corporate press releases or web sites, etc., but you should have at least 15 scholarly sources. It’s also fine to have only scholarly articles. You should also try to organize these sources into sections or categories based on what areas they reflect.

The sources you select should cover the range of topic areas that you’ve identified in your previous assignments. For example, if you were working on a tutoring system for math education, you might look at literature around math education, intelligent tutoring systems, and informal educational settings. If you were looking at the interaction of gender and online education programs, you might look at online education, gender in social media, and gender in education. If you were looking at developing content to teach data science, you might look at literature on the parts of data science you want to teach, online instructional design, and instructional design for data science. You may find some sources that cover multiple areas; these would be your most core related work.

To each source in your annotated bibliography, you should attach a brief 100-word summary. This summary should briefly summarize the article and its major takeaway, and then specifically note what its applicability is to your work. The goal of the annotated bibliography is to give you a source of reference for the higher-level theories, goals, and ideas you want to keep in mind when you get into the details of your project.

In assembling your annotated bibliography, you are encouraged to use the sources you’ve found over the last four weeks. If you do the math, you’ll find this assignment will be far longer than your previous assignments (minimum 20 sources x 100 word summary per source), but if you’ve been gathering sources all along it may also be the easiest one to assemble.

Your writing on this assignment can still be somewhat informal and reflective because your summaries are specifically intended to help you as you approach the next two assignments.

The main goal of this assignment is to give you a solid, organized foundation in the literature from which to build for the next two assignments. The secondary goals are for you to be able to get feedback from your classmates and mentor about angles you might not be considering, and share what you have found with others who may be working in the same area.

Submission Instructions

Assignments should be submitted to the corresponding assignment submission page in Canvas. You should submit a single PDF for this  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 (through OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.) 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 an 11-point scale (0 to 10), in accordance with the grading policy outlined in the syllabus. If your deliverable receives a 9 or below, 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. Resubmissions may receive up to a 9. 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 mentors 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.