Assignments 1 and 2 (Summer 2017)

Due: Sunday, May 21st, 2017, by 11:59PM UTC-12 (Anywhere on Earth). Note that you should submit both these assignments in one PDF, but clearly mark where one assignment ends and the next begins.

Assignment 1: Introduce Yourself

Who are you? Why are you taking this class? What do you hope to get out of this class? What experiences do you have with educational technology, as either the designer, the recipient, or some other stakeholder? Are there particular problems you’re interested in addressing in this class? Your Personal Statement is essentially an introduction to you. We’ll use it to tailor the course topics and library materials to common interests, to help match you with classmates that might be interested in working on similar problems, to connect you with a particular mentor if one is well-suited for your ideas, and to begin to brainstorm any steps that will need to be taken to support your goals.

The main goal of this assignment is more organizational than pedagogical: these Personal Statements will serve as valuable tools to use in organizing and structuring the class. This assignment also aims to build community, introduce you to your classmates, and provide information to the teaching team to pair you with the ideal mentor.

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.

Assignment 2: Exploring Educational Technology

The first four weeks of this semester are a time to explore the area of educational technology in which you are most interested. In Assignment 1, you introduced yourself and your general interests in educational technology. Next, you’ll explore educational technology more thoroughly, adopting an understanding of the space before deciding next week where to zoom in.

From the course library, choose three or four areas to read about in depth. Digest some of the introductory material, and use it to inform your further explorations in the field. As you go, take notes on what you find. Summarize the research that you find interesting, and note the open questions that you have. Think not only of what you would like to work on, but what others might want to work on as well.

Your submission may take the form of a handful of short summaries of work you find interesting, or one or two longer descriptions if you already have a stronger idea of the direction you want to move. Either way, your submission should also include some early brainstorming for the area you might be interested in going in multiple areas.

The main goal of this assignment is for you to learn about the expanse of the educational technology community, in order to make an informed decision of where to focus going forward. The secondary goals are for you to help your classmates adopt a similar understanding by sharing your findings with them, to start to have the background necessary to select teammates, and to provide your mentor and classmates with the information necessary to help you find more material.

Submission Instructions

Assignments should be submitted to the corresponding assignment on T-Square in accordance with the Assignment Submission Instructions. Most importantly, you should submit a single PDF for the two assignments together. Make sure to clearly delineate where Assignment 1 ends and Assignment 2 begins. 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 describes how to access the assignment.

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

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

As with all assignments in this class, each milestone will be graded on a traditional A-F scale based on the extent to which your deliverable met expectations. One grade will be assigned to Assignments 1 and 2 together. 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. Your mentor may note that the lower grade is for one assignment or the other, or both together. 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. Due to T-Square restrictions, your grade will be provided on a 5-point scale: a ‘5’ is an A, a ‘4’ is a B, a ‘3’ is a C, a ‘2’ is a D, a ‘1’ is an F, and a ‘0’ is a failure-to-submit.

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.