Primary Objectives:

  1. Learn some things about your topic!
  2. Research one or more topics
  3. Refine one or more topics
  4. Identify 3 or more preliminary questions or issues with your topic

Overall Requirements:

  • Write new blog posts for your activities, explain things
  • Write blog posts with links to resources you're finding

Review

By now you have several ideas. If you have one you feel really good about, and the instructor has indicated it will be a good one, then go ahead and tentatively proceed with that idea. No need to explore others unless you're still questioning your topic. Do the following questions/tasks for your one topic only.

If you're undecided, then you'll need to continue to explore multiple topics this week. Do the following questions/tasks for each of the topics you're considering.

Questions/Tasks:

  1. Step 1: learn more about your topic. Spend a few hours scouring the web for information. What can you learn about it? Have people been writing about it? Publishing articles on it or something related? Which companies are involved, or are leaders? Which technologies does it involve?

    The point of this free-form exploration is to begin to try to capture the breadth of your topic. What all does it involve? You're going wide, not deep at this point.

    Capture your findings in a few blog posts. Keep things organized, so put similar things together in a each post. Make lists, organize links, ...

  2. Now for some work (surfing the web should have been the fun part). You need to identify 3 or more questions or issues about your topic. What is undecided? What is controversial? What is unknown? Are there consequences? How does it work? What is its future? ... Try to identify questions that you can answer.

    This is probably going to be hard right now. You don't know that much about your topic yet. So do this in an iterative fashion. Research leads to questions, which should lead to more research, which might generate new questions, ...

    Write up your questions/issues in one or more blog posts.

  3. If those cycles of research and questioning has led you to re-think or refine your project topic, then go ahead and write up a post about your new direction.
  4. Come to class Wednesday, prepared to tell the class about what you've learned, in detail. Teach the class about your topic.
  5. Come to class prepared to listen to the presentations and ask questions. Each student should ask at least one good question.