Course Info

Objectives

Course Design

Grading

Required Texts

Readings

Writing Assignments

Final Project

GENERAL DIRECTIONS: Your assignment is to work with your team to design, construct, and publish a website illuminating the issues and controversies surrounding your team's topic. Your first goal will be to distill from the plethora of information about your topic the things that are most important for the general public to understand. Your second goal will be to synthesize that information in a website that is concise, accurate, accessible, and straightforward-de-emphasizing technical details and jargon wherever possible but respecting the complexity of the underlying theories and issues.

The specific content and format of each team's site will be up to you, requiring teams to exercise creativity in making their websites attractive, informative, and easy to use. The papers you write in the first half of the semester will supply some of the raw materials needed for the site, but we expect teams to go well beyond a mere compilation of academic papers. To test our sites and get helpful feedback from our potential audience, we may invite members of the general public, perhaps students from the local high school or patrons at the local library, to review our sites in the pre-publication phase. Teams may also be asked to give guided tours of their sites in presentations to the campus.

DUE DATES: An initial version of each team's website must be ready to present to the class no later than Nov. 20, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. The final version of the website will be due by 5:00 PM on Wednesday, December 20, the date of the final examination for courses in our time slot.