Assignment: Personal Question (Fall 2015)

Due: Saturday, September 19th, 2015, 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 Saturday, September 12th, 2015 at 11:59PM (UTC-12), your mentor will send you a personal question targeted specifically to what you wrote on the first three assignments (and, if you submit it early enough, the mini-proposal). This question will ask you to think deeply about the topics you have chosen. For research ideas, it might ask you to synthesize and describe the viewpoints of different communities or research methodologies on your ideas. For project ideas, 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.

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

Please include a copy of your question in your assignment so that your classmates can see the question you were asked. Please submit your assignment as a .pdf, .docx, or other common document file via T-Square. You can find the assignment submission page by going to T-Square, clicking CS6460, clicking Assignments, and then clicking the assignment title. Resubmission is allowed any number of times up to the due date.

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

Grading Information

Your assignment will be evaluated on the extent to which it follows the directions and achieves the learning goal on a simple rubric: Does Not Meet Expectations, Meets Expectations, and Exceeds Expectations. Any assignments graded as Does Not Meet Expectations will have the opportunity to revise and resubmit once.

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. Peer reviews are due one week after the due date of the assignment, and count towards your participation grade.