Depending on your level of participation in class, you can earn up to 10 points each day. At a minimum, you should speak up in class at least once every day to ask a substantive question or to provide a useful comment or answer to a question in class.Additional points will be awarded based on your effort in classroom activities.

Points: max of 140

For every definition you add to the Glossary on the course blog, you will earn points.

Due: December 10 (can be done at any point in the semester)

Points: 2 points per definition (maximum of 10 points if you do 5 definitions)

Due: In-class activity done over the course of ten consecutive class sessions (beginning Oct. 1)

Points: 50 (5 points per freewriting exercise)

Find 3 peer-reviewed journal articles that discuss the results of a research study of an ICT that you are studying. Write a separate blog post for each article. Each post should have:

• Proper APA or MLA style citation for the article
• Description of the research question
• Description of the methodology used
• The extent to which this article takes a social informatics approach to the research study

Due:

• First blog post: October 22
• Second blog post: November 5
• Third blog post: November 12

Points: up to 10 points per blog post (30 total)

You will sign up to meet with me for a half-hour appointment. We will review your work so far and discuss what the rest of the semester will look like.

Due: Appointments to be held from Oct. 14-20. Use this Google Doc to sign up for a time slot.

Points: 50 points

Due: December 3 by the start of class (6:05 pm). Late assignments will lose 10 points per day.

Points: Up to 200

This assignment includes three parts:

• Annotated bibliography
  • Must include at least 10 peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles. For each article, you need to:
    • Cite it in MLA or APA style (use the same style throughout this assignment)
    • Describe the research methodology used by the author(s)
    • Discuss the extent to which the authors considered the standard aspects of the social informatics perspective (information, technology, individuals, organizational/institutional context)
    • Explain in what specific ways the article is relevant to your topic
  • Must include a mix of at least 5 other sources (e.g., magazine or newspaper articles; datasets; books or book chapters; entries from encyclopedias; miscellaneous web pages). For each source, you need to:
    • Cite it in MLA or APA style
    • Explain in what specific ways the source is relevant to your topic
• One-page essay about how you found your sources in which you:
  • Detail your strategies for finding sources. Tell me about how you decided which databases to search, what your search terms were. If you used bibliographies or reference lists, please mention this.
  • Describe what criteria you used when selecting sources.
• One-page critical literature review
  • This is an essay in which you use the 10 journal articles you found to review the current theoretical issues in your topic area and to discuss the current state of what we know about it.

Each student will do their own work on this. While you and your teammate will of course be using the same sources in your assignment, the writing about those sources and how you found them (the three parts of the assignment) should all be individually written.

Please use Google Docs to turn in your work.

First Presentation

Due: October 29

Points: Up to 120

Each team will do a 10-minute presentation in which they:

• Present their research question
• Explain a bit about their topic
• Describe their methodology
• Discuss how their search for sources has been going

Final Presentation

Due: December 10

Points: Up to 200

Each team will do a 20-minute presentation in which they:

• Present their research question
• Explain a bit about their topic
• Summarize their literature review
• Describe their methodology
• Discuss their findings

December 17, 6 pm - 8 pm

Points: Up to 200

In this in-class exam, you will each be given a newspaper or magazine article describing some issue with an ICT. Your job is to describe in an essay how you would design a research study that takes a social informatics perspective to address some part of the problem mentioned in the article. You will need to explain in your essay:

• what the research question is you'd be trying to answer
• which methodology would you select to do your research and why

This is an open-book, open-web exam. While all written work in your essay must be your own, you may search for background information in your own notes, our readings, or any published sources you find online.