 TEAM PROJECT
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| Early in the quarter, we will organize into teams of three
to five students each. Each team will elect a project manager
and also specific leadership roles for its other members suited
to the nature of its task (e.g., research manager, bibliographer,
technical director, public relations or class liaison officer,
etc.; all participants in teams will fill out a brief form
each week to log their individual activities). Each team will
have a different task: |
1. Discussion Team:
This team will be responsible for leading two class-wide,
week-long online discussions on topics of its choice. One
discussion will occur by e-mail through
a common class e-mail address akin to a "list"). The
other will occur through a Web-accessed,
"threaded" discussion forum limited to our class ("Web-accessed"
means that you can use Netscape or Internet Explorer from
any location to contribute; "threaded" means that the discussion
runs along organized threads of subjects). All students in
the class are required to contribute at least three messages
to each online discussion, guaranteeing a sufficient number
of participants for the discussions. But to make the discussions
successful, the Discussion Team will need to accomplish such
things as the following: do preliminary research and brainstorming,
formulate topics (or clusters of topics) that are at once
focused and of potential general interest, prepare the class
as a whole for what is to come (perhaps by getting feedback
on possible topics), and guide the discussion as it proceeds
(i.e., seeding it with messages, keeping things going, steering
it, etc.). The e-mail discussion will occur during the sixth
week of the course (May 10-14) and the threaded discussion
on the seventh week of the course (May 17-21). |
2. Timeline Team:
This team will create a timeline of events in such areas as
society, popular culture, the arts, literature, theory, and
technology relevant to "postmodernism." The team will need
to decide on the mix and proportion of ingredients in the
timeline, do research, and use an automated
database to enter timeline events in a form that will
be viewable and searchable on the course Web page on Postmodernism.
(I have already designed and set up this database to allow
students to use any Web browser to enter information remotely;
the information is then automatically viewable on the Web.)
While no such timeline can ever be "complete," enough progress
should be made on it by the end of the seventh week of the
course (May 21) for the class as a whole to see its overall
design and critique its emphases. |
3. Web Links Team:
This team will build for the class Web page on Postmodernism
a set of annotated links to online resources relevant to postmodern
society, culture, and theory. This task will require planning
to decide on areas of exploration, researching Web resources,
selecting the best or most representative resources, and writing
brief annotations or descriptions of each link. As in the
case of the Timeline Team, the
Web Links Team will make use of a Web-accessible
database to enter its link information. The database will
automatically format the information for viewing on the class
Web page. Eventually, the Timeline and Web Links databases
can be "related" to each other so that each can display cross-refer
to the other. A good set of links should be created by the
end of the seventh week of the course (May 21). (I keep a
variety of theory and cultural studies on my Voice
of the Shuttle page that may be used to begin Web research.) |
| On information technology used in this course,
see below. |
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WWW links in this syllabus are to non-required,
online equivalents of print texts or information pages about an
author or work