Assignments Week Three, Global Connections Learning Community, Spring 2011
- Week Three, Tuesday, 25 January - Tuesday, 1 February
- 26 January, Last Day to Drop with a Refund
Reading for the Week, HIS 112:
Early Contact: East Asia
Worlds Together, Worlds Apart, Chapter 12
Worlds of History:
- Emperor Kangxi on Religion”, 638-641 [x]
- Japanese Edicts Regulating Religion, 642-644 [99-101]
- [Matteo Ricci, Jesuit Missionaries, 93-98]
Power Points for the Week, HIS 112:
Logistical Tasks for the Week, ENG 112 and HIS 112:
Note: Please try to complete these logistical tasks by Thursday, 27 January.
1. Set up the blog you will use for ENG 112 and HIS 112. Your Blog differs from the Online Discussion Forum on the Forum tab. We’ll use the Online Discussion Forum to hold online group and class discussions. Your blog will be a place to collect and share your own personal work, and it will be one of the primary points of contact between you, your group, the class, and me.
If you have never kept a blog before, it is easy; but, like all tech, you've got to stumble through using it a few times to learn how easy it is to use. To set up your blog for the course, follow these instructions for setting up your blog for the course.
Please, follow the instructions I've given you above closely, especially the part about writing down and saving in two separate places the email address and password used to access your blogger account . If you loose your blogger log in information, I have no way to recover it for you, and you'll need this information every week as you access your blog. Every few semesters, there’s a student who doesn’t take this advice seriously, and they end up having to reconstruct their blog. Write this information, and put it in two places where you can find it.
After reading and following the instructions, if you still need help, get in touch, and I'll be happy to set up a personal appointment this week to help you set up your blog.
Note: If you set up a blog for the Global Connections learning community last semester, you can use that blog for the Spring learning community sections of History and English.
2. Important: Make a record of the web address of your blog, that is, the address others can use to view your blog. This address will start with “http://” and ending in “.blogspot.com” To find this address, use your web browser to log onto blogger.com, that is, the client you’ll used to create your blog posts this semester.. Once on the blogger dashboard, look under the title of your blog and click on the link near the title to, "View Blog." Once you have followed the “View Blog” link, the web address in the address bar of your internet browser is the web address of your blog. Again, if you need help with this step, get in touch, and I’ll be happy to set up a personal appointment this week to help figure out your blog’s web address
3. Now you have set up your blog for the course, fill out the Contact and Consent Form. To fill out the Contact and Consent form, you will need the blog address for your blog. This should start with “http://” and end with “.blogspot.com”. I'll use the information you provide to finish setting up the contact information for the class on the Forum web page (this is where your blog address will be published) and to make sure your committee and I will be able to contact you and read your blog. To fill the form out, you'll need your contact information for the course, including the web address for your blog/URL you wrote down when you set up the blog for the course in exercise two above.
4. Buy a set of 100 4x6 index cards for note taking for the paper.
Reading for the Week, ENG 112:
1. Read the notes below on the pre-writing process of developing an academic paper based on sources.
Writing for the Week, ENG 112:
1. Take notes on index cards on two of the primary sources you decided to use for your paper. Bring your stack of notes to class on Tuesday, 1 February.
2.
a. Develop a working thesis for your paper.
b. Develop a working outline for your paper.
c. Post your working thesis and a working outline to your blog. Here are instructions on how to create a post to the blog you created for the course.
3. As you begin developing your notes, working thesis, and working outline for your paper, post any questions you have on the process to the thread on the Online Discussion Forum titled: “Questions: Prewriting Paper One.”
Prewriting an Academic Paper Based on Sources
The prewriting of an academic paper based on sources breaks down into a fairly standard series of steps. To get a handle on these early steps in the process of writing an academic paper, read the following. It is taken and modified from http://www.bowdoin.edu/writing-guides/research%20papers.htm, which is a brief research guide for those writing history papers. You can find any number of such guides by googling, “research paper” and “process.”
Take Notes: Take notes from your primary sources. Do this as you read and then re-read the primary sources you’ve decided to use. It is best take notes on note cares, so that you can arrange notes by topic or point when you prepare to write; however, a digital file and use copy and paste to move notes around can work almost as well. The note taking extension for Firefox, Zotero, or the program Endnote are useful, working alternatives. Regardless, make sure to note on each note the source for the note, so you can document it later.
Analyze notes: Over the course of the wfter you have taken notes, look over all the note cards you have compiled so far. Do this even if you have just started taking notes. Look over your notes, noting interesting recurring patterns in your data, or interesting questions that pop up. The point is that you must analyze your notes as you do your research. Constant analysis will suggest themes to look for when researching, and will help you develop your argument. Do not wait to analyze your notes until you have finished taking them; it doesn't work like that.
Prepare outline and develop thesis: After analyzing your notes, prepare an outline of your paper. An outline is your tentative scheme for organizing and writing the paper. The main purpose of the outline is to determine the structure of your paper. Without an overall sense of how the component parts of your research will address your topic (and hence support your thesis), you will have a very difficult time writing your paper. Through preparation of an outline, you should begin to get a sense of the argument you want to make to answer the question posed for the paper. This argument is your tentative thesis. You should keep your tentative thesis in mind at all times when writing; you should ask yourself if your material supports it, or if you need to modify it.
TAKING NOTES
Your paper is based on your reading from different sources, so your notes must be sufficiently complete to be meaningful after the source has been read. Since you have to document your paper and cite your sources, your notes must contain adequate information about the source from which the note was taken.
The method all the programs try to reproduce is the use of the note or index card. Using 3"x5" or 4"x6" index cards is a convenient and flexible method of organizing your research. When you take notes, write only one note on each card. In addition to the note itself, write:
a. in the upper left hand corner of the card, the appropriate category or topic/subtopic to which the note refers. Write in pencil, as these may change over time.
b. in the upper right hand corner, the name of the source.
c. the page number(s) of that part (or those parts) of the source that you have used in taking the note. If you have used more than one page, indicate your page numbers in such a way as that when you start to write your paper, you can tell from what page each part of your note comes, for you may not choose to include the whole note.
This separate card method will make organizing your information much easier. When you come to outline and to organize your paper, you will be able to sort your notes in any way you please--by subtopic or point for example--and to arrange them in any order you please. You may even find that you want to recategorize some of your notes. Such flexibility is impossible if you take notes in a notebook, but it can be duplicated to some extent using a large digital files or one of the programs I mentioned above. You will also be able to document your paper without having to refer to the sources themselves again.
In taking the note itself, paraphrase or quote your source or do both; but do only one at a time. Paraphrases and quotations require special care. Anything between paraphrase and quotation is not acceptable: you either paraphrase or quote, but do nothing in between.
To paraphrase a source (or part of a source) is to reproduce it in words and word orders substantially different from the original. When you paraphrase well, you keep the sense of the original but change the language, retaining some key words, of course, but otherwise using your own words and your own sentence patterns. As a rough guide, if you copy more than three words in a row from a source, these words should be in quotation marks.
To quote a source (or part of a source) is to reproduce it exactly. When you quote well, you keep both the sense and language of the original, retaining its punctuation, its capitalization, its type face (roman or italic), and its spelling (indeed, even its misspelling).
Note: Almost all of the above is a modified quote and was taken and modified for this class from http://www.bowdoin.edu/writing-guides/research%20papers.htm
