Assignment: Reflective Assignment 1 (Fall 2015)

Due: Saturday, August 29th, 2015, by 11:59PM UTC-12 (Anywhere on Earth).

Assignment Instructions

The first six weeks of this course build towards your ultimate project proposal. In order to propose your project, however, you'll need to pick a problem you would like to help solve or a phenomenon you would like to investigate. You've spent the first two weeks of the semester acquiring knowledge about the field of educational technology, so it's time to start to engage in some preliminary thought about what phenomenon or problem you might want to research or solve.

In your personal statement, you described the general area or areas of educational technology in which you were interested. In this assignment, zoom in on those. Try to identify a particular phenomenon or problem in which you are interested. Discuss what you know about that phenomenon or problem at present, as well as what additional information you need to learn to prepare to address it. Don't worry about picking the wrong idea: you can change your mind later. Part of the goal of this assignment is simply to learn how to structure and describe a problem or phenomenon, so even if you change ideas later, your work here will still be a useful learning experience.

The primary goal of this assignment, as stated above, is for you to learn how to describe and state a problem or phenomenon. The secondary goals of this assignment are to reflect on what you've learned of the community, to facilitate getting feedback from your classmates and mentor, and to help the teaching team identify common interests and connect you with classmates interested in the same problems.

Your assignment should be approximately 500 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 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.