Digital Research Projects

The purpose of this digital project is to analyze digital artifacts related to the topic you have chosen for social bookmarking through Diigo. In analyzing these artifacts, you will grapple with their significance in terms of global issues discussed in Controversies in Globalization and the broad phenomenon of the Arab Uprisings from 2010 to the present. I encourage you to follow and comment on each other’s work, though it is not a graded component of this project.

Instructions

1. Weekly Research Blogging (100 points total): Beginning in week five and continuing for the next ten weeks, you will post to your personal class blog a solid paragraph (five to seven sentences) reflecting on two of the items you bookmarked in Diigo during the previous week. Each of these blog entries should point out something important about each bookmarked artifact (i.e., valuable information it contains or interesting human perspectives and then express your thoughts on how these new pieces of information or perspectives add to what you know or understand about your research topic. You will write ten of these blog entries in all, each of which will be scored as follows: 3 points for each summary and four points scaled for the depth of the reflection, as shown in the sample rubric below. Weekly blogs are due on Fridays at 5:00 pm. After posting the entry to your blog, copy and paste your text into the relevant Canvas assignment.
2. In-Class Presentation (50 points total.): In the week before the final submission of your digital project, you will make a brief presentation in class to share some of the most significant ideas you have developed about the topic you researched during the semester. You will only have six minutes, so you may choose to showcase a couple of particularly interesting artifacts you found or you may choose to quickly share more of them and provide a minute or two to describe your general overview of them.
3. Final Research Report (100 points total): At the end of your 10 weeks of blogging you will compose a reflective summary of what you learned about your topic and how it has changed your understanding of the Middle East. This final research report will be between 1600 and 1800 words excluding footnotes or lists of sources, posted to your blog either as an attached file or pasted text. A successful reflective summary will not only repeat main ideas or basic descriptions of the 20 artifacts collected through Diigo; it will go beyond that to account for differences in point of view, such as the five perspectives on globalization, and the global systems and influences at play in your artifacts. It will show the evolution of questions about a topic to answers and explanations. To do that, you will need to draw on relevant global issues from Controversies in Globalization to substantiate your reflections and add nuance to your understanding of the topic. You may compose these documents in whatever format you find most suitable for sharing with the class as your final blog entry: it could be a traditional MLA- or APA-style document attached as a downloadable file, or it could be in a more web-ready form posted directly to your blog as viewable content with embedded links. See the separate rubric for a detailed explanation of how this work will be evaluated.