Homework Three

Primary Objectives:

  1. Extensive research begins on your topic
  2. Understand the template that you'll need to fit your project into, including what each section is for
  3. Write an outline of your project, following the template

Overall Requirements:

  • Write new blog posts for your activities, explain things, include links to resources
  • Create a folder on Google Docs using your WOU account; share it with your instructor
  • Put things in your shared folder: papers you find, pdf's, spreadsheets, notes and figures you create
  • Create an outline of your project following the given template; put it in your shared folder

Questions/Tasks:

  1. Using your WOU Google account, create a new folder in Google Docs. This folder will be exclusively for your project. It will be where you write your proposal, final paper and where you'll keep all your notes, figures, ... Inside the folder, make at least the following subfolders:

    • Proposal
    • Final_Paper
    • Final_Presentation
    • Figures
    • Notes
    • Documents
    • Calculations
    • Source_Code

    Share this folder with your instructor and allow them to edit not just view. Here's an example of what I mean.

  2. This week you're going both wide and deep. For the wide, continue to do free-form research into your topic, letting it take you wherever it goes. Explore, learn, write it down. Do a lot of it. Put in many hours of work.

  3. Go deep. By now you should have identified one or two areas that you really need to know a lot more about. Put in quality time doing just that. Learn deeply about just that one topic. Get detailed, keep notes in your shared folder. Do tutorials, download books and read, install software and learn to use it, ... Learn the technical details. Be informed.

  4. Write up blog posts about your research. Write at least one where you try to teach your reader something. Don't just write about something, write as if you are teaching another person what you've learned. Can you teach it to them?
  5. Take a look at this template for the paper you'll write: Paper template We will talk about this during class, but make sure you understand the format, the sections and what they mean. Figure out how you will fit your topic into this format.
  6. Lastly, follow the template and write your own outline of the entire paper using Google Docs in your shared folder. Under each section heading write a brief explanation of what that section will say or do. Sections 3 - 6 are the critical ones for now. I'm not expecting that you'll figure these out this week, but we need to start getting these things nailed down. If the template wasn't clear, here's the structure you want.