THE PROJECTS
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About The Projects: A
major part of the course involves the creation of two Team Projects:
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For the purposes of this exercise, the class will be divided into teams
of four or five students each.
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Each Team will be required to research and design two projects, one of
which is due midway through the semester; the second of which due toward
the end of classes.
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Your project should grow out of one of the assignments, and should
address issues raised by the readings, lecture and discussion related to
that assignment.
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Your presentation must be carefully researched, logically
argued, and clearly communicated. Technology is not a substitute
for these fundamental attributes of a good paper. For guides to good usage,
see Strunk and White's classic, The
Elements of Style, available online through the Bartleby web site.
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Your project must draw on both primary (that is to say, on
documents such as those reprinted in Major Problems) and secondary
sources (such as the scholarly articles reprinted in Major Problems).
(For a discussion of primary and secondary sources and how to evaluate
them, see Reading,
Writing and Researching for History: A Guide for College Students
by Professor Patrick Rael of Bowdoin College.)
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Your project must draw sources from both the AU Library and from
the World Wide Web. The Library remains the
most important source of information. Most books, scholarly journals,
and documents of all sorts are NOT available in digital format or accessible
on the web. Nor is it likely that they will be soon. Thus your
research should begin with the AU
Library and with the rich resources available to you through the
Washington Research Library Consortium (WRLC). During the week before the
projects are do, we will schedule a orientation to the library, focusing
on materials that are especially relevant to your projects. You are
also encouraged to integrate new sources into your project paper.
For example, texts, photographs and other materials may be scanned and
incorporated into your paper (subject, of course, to copyright restrictions).
You are encouraged to embed images (or even sound or video) into
your project, and to establish links to other web sites wherever
this seems appropriate. For a list of useful web sites, click on
A
Guide To Cold War Web Sites.
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Your project must be presented in the form
of a mini web site. It should be prepared in hypertext markup
language (HTML), using Page Composer or some other web authoring tool.
(For details, click on Help for your Web Project).
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Your web project must be posted on a server prior to the date on which
it is due. You should also bring a disk based version to class on
the day when it will be presented (as a backup in case the network or server
is down).
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Your paper must represent your work and your work alone. If you draw
ideas and important information from a source, you must identify that source.
If you use language that is not your own, it must be placed in quotes and
its source identified. Failure to do so, plagiarism, is one of the
most serious violations of the Academic
Integrity Code.
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You must identify all of your sources. In the text itself,
you may use parentheses (containing the name of the author and page number)
or footnotes. In either case, the citation
should be hyper-linked to a separate bibliography page. Your
bibliography page should use a standard bibliographical format. For
example, consult the Turabian
Style Guide -- a brief online handout based on Kate L. Turabian,
A
Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations and
The
Chicago Style Manual. For citing web-based sources, see A
Brief Citation Guide for Internet Sources in History and the Humanities
, which is also based on Turabian's, A Manual for Writers.
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The rules of copyright must be observed. While traditional copyright
rules permit limited "fair use" for educational purposes, placing materials
on the web (& thus "publishing" them) presents special difficulties.
It is especially important that you cite the sources for any materials
(including images) that you use.
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Above all, web-based materials must be subject to the same rigorous rules
used for evaluating printed material. Indeed, web based materials
must be scrutinized even more rigorously. After all, information
that you find in a library has already gone through a rigorous selection
process managed by editors, publishers, reviewers and by highly trained
professional librarians; but literally anyone can post material
on the web. Thus, you will need to evaluate material by asking:
who "published" the material? when? how credible is the source?
what bias or point of view shapes the form and content of the material?
etc., etc.
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You will be asked to make a very brief (10-15 minute) presentation of
your project during class. Please organize this presentation very
carefully. Your presentation should not be a detailed report, but
rather an overview, so that members of the class can visit the site and
review it on their own.
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For some helpful guidelines on working with groups, click on A
Word About Teams.
A Model Project: The
Space Race -- This project was one of two designed by a team of
students in History 207: The United States since 1945 (Spring, 2000).
For additional student projects, see also History
Projects.
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