Pecha Kucha Research

For your research topic, you will need to find twenty-five sources.  For each of those sources, create a blog post which answers the following questions:

1. What website is your source from?
   
2. Who is your source?
   
3. What are their credentials?
   
4. What does your source say about your topic?
   
5. Do you believe your source?
   
6. Why or why not?
   

This will be worth 300 points.

Rights Assignment

For your right, answer each of the following questions.  Support your answers with at least ten cites.

1. What is your right?
2. Why does your right exist?
3. Describe what it means to exercise your right.
4. What limitations exist on your right?
5. Why do those limitations exist?
6. If you had to give up this right, what would you want in return?

Inconvenient Truth Fact Check

Check the accuracy of each of your five facts by doing the following:

1. Create a blog post for each fact.
2. For each fact, verify it with at least three sources.
3. For each source, provide the following information:
• Who is the source?
• What credentials does the source have?
• How credible is the source?
• What does the source say about the fact?
• Do you believe the source?
• Why or why not?
4. After you have checked your fact against at least three sources, state whether you believe the fact or not, and explain why you believe that.
   

Middle East Conflict Questions

Support your answers to the following questions with fifteen sources.  Wikipedia and pictures will not count toward your source total.  

1. How did your country get involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East?
2. What is the history of your country's involvement in that conflict, from when it entered until now?  (This will likely be a long answer...)
3. Who are your enemies in the Middle East?  Why?
4. Who are your friends in the Middle East?  Why?
5. What does your country want out of the Arab-Israeli conflict?
6. What is it prepared to give up to get what it wants?
7. What will it not give up to get what it wants?

Reflection Post Questions

1. What did you learn?
2. What was your research question?
3. What was the answer to your research question?
4. Did your final product answer that question?
5. How?
6. What did you do well on the project?
7. What could you have improved on the project?
8. What would you change about what you did on the project?
9. What would you change about the assignment itself?
10. What grade do you think you deserve on the project?  Why?

Status Report Assignment

For your Status Report, you need to answer the following questions:

1. What have I accomplished on my project so far?
2. What do I still have left to do?
3. What has been harder than I thought it would be?
4. What has been easier than I thought it would be?
5. How would I do my project differently if I could start over again?
6. What do I need to get accomplished before Spring Break?

Post your answers up on your own blog!

First Impressions

Image via Wikipedia

We're almost a third of the way through the Exhibition Project, which is pretty exciting. Here's what I'm all fired up about:

• There are a ton of neat project ideas out there. Students are looking at deep issues, and looking at interesting issues, and looking at deep and interesting issues. I just tried to stay out of the way -- often the hard part was narrowing down the great ideas into something that was do-able.
• I'm excited about the types of projects, too! We've got a bunch of people making movies, which is excellent. Some of my favorite projects that I did in high school were the ones where I got to make movies. Good times. I'm suprised that so many folks want to do a scrapbooking product, but it works for me. My question is this: where have y'all come in contact with the scrapbooking project before? Was it a ninth-grade project or something in middle school or what?
• I think the use of blogger and delicious has gone fairly well, too. Both platforms are pretty simple to use when you get right down to it, and it's been fairly easy for me to grade, too. A bit time consuming, though -- I started doing some math on this yesterday, and I figured that if everyone does their full complement of 30 index cards, as well as their 15 daily progress posts, that's a minimum of 2700 posts that I need to read. Add in Product Prospectuses and a couple other types of posts that will need to be done, and we're talking about me reading well over three thousand posts by the end of March. So far it hasn't been so bad...

These are things that I'm not exactly concerned about, but have struck me as potential concerns to keep an eye on:

• I'm worried about folks falling behind. This is a big project with some demanding hoops to jump through, and while it's possible for folks to make it all up at the end, it'll be a painful, painful process. I probably need to be clearer about benchmarks during class -- "Today the goal is for you to have your eighteenth index card completed" kind of thing...
• Similarly, I'm worried about folks not having enough time to complete their projects. If you fall behind early, then you will sacrifice time trying to catch up, which means that there won't be sufficient creative time to do the projects justice. Benchmarks are the key again, I think.
• I'm also a little worried about what to do with folks when they have finished the research portion of their project and are in the creation portion -- but cannot do any of that creation at school. I'm thinking of folks who are making models or maybe movies. Most of that work has to be done outside of the classroom -- but those folks still have to come to class anyway. I'm thinking that it turns into the privilege of a study hall -- do the homework you would normally do at home so that you can free up time to be doing your project.

Those are my first impressions, for what they're worth. Agree? Disagree? Something to add? Suggestions? Leave them in the comments...

Hello, World!

This is a test to see how things look...