Final Project and Presentation

Final Paper Assignment for Core II

Your final work for Core 2 is to produce a project proposal that includes a basic proof of concept. Yes, we will be reading it for a grade, but your true audience for this proposal are the gatekeepers who hold institutional purse strings, allocate resources and space, approve curriculum, or administer technology resources. Your job is to convince this hypothetical reader that your project is intellectually and/or pedagogically vital, builds on but doesn’t duplicate existing work, is done in the most effective and efficient way possible, uses the right tech, and most importantly: that you can pull it off in the time frame that you have available to you: the ITP Independent Study.

Your project proposal should be 12-15 pages in length. You are welcome to follow the guidelines for the NEH Digital Humanities grants, or another discipline specific set of requirements. This proposal will be the basis for your ITP Independent Study proposal. Generally, it needs to include:

  • an abstract or summary with a clear problem statement
  • a project narrative that gives the practical, historical, theoretical, and technical contexts for the project proposed
  • an environmental scan of projects that operate in a similar technical, scholarly, or pedagogical space as yours
  • a clear, relevant, and detailed work plan or project timeline
  • proof that you have a strategy to complete the project within one semester

Proposals typically include a budget; you may choose to include this, but it is not required. You may find it useful to include your personas and your use case scenarios. Some disciplines may have other, discipline specific requirements; please include those if relevant. We’ll share a grading rubric with you in class on April 30.

The proof that you can complete the project can incorporate your biography, or a description of how the proposed project builds on your previous and related work, but in this instance, you need to complete a proof of concept for the project. This will be different for each of you, but it needs to demonstrate that you have learned enough about the task at hand that you will be able to complete it. Most of this learning is technical, but it might not be exclusively technical.

Some examples of past proofs of concept:

  • When proposing a group wiki assignment, one person created a simulation of one assignment at the halfway state, with the text edited in character by the user accounts for each of the 4 personas described.
  • When proposing an online resource for images for use in teaching theatre courses, one person created a record for one image in Omeka.
  • When proposing a mobile app, one person found an open source quiz app they could build on, changed the text of one of questions, and recompiled the app.
  • When proposing a student assignment to create multimedia historical maps of NYC neighborhoods, one student created a sample map with the Google Maps API that contained a map point for each type of media expected to be used (video, audio, photograph, text).
  • When proposing a game, a student might present a draft of the game’s narrative, or present one element of its gameplay.

You will be turning in a text, and giving a presentation. The presentation will take place on one of the last two weeks of class, May 14 or 21. These will be 10 minute presentations, with 10 minutes for discussion/feedback. We will invite all ITP faculty to join us, though we don’t expect all will be able to make it for both of the days.

Here is the grading rubric.

The text will be due May 24th. Please upload it as a Word or PDF (or other text) file to the Files area of our course group. We will not give extensions.

Collaborative Assignment Design Assignment

ITP Core 2, Spring 2018: Collaborative Assignment Design Assignment

You will collaboratively craft, with at least one student from another discipline, the scaffold for a final project in an undergraduate course that engages with one or more of the core ideas explored to this point in your ITP experience. (Your work on this assignment can link to your own final project for our class, or your own field, or a class you actually teach, but none of that is required).

We’ll discuss the details for this assignment in class on March 5th, and the assignment plan is due on March 24th, when you and your partner will post to the course blog the scaffold of a final project with at least three discrete, connected tasks, intended for an undergraduate course. All groups will read all assignments, and we will discuss in the first hour of class on March 26th.  

The post should have the following elements:

  • A brief statement of the context of the course (discipline, level, institution type, instructional mode, is it real or imagined)
  • A statement about the place of the assignment within the larger learning goals of the course; why is it the final?
  • A draft of the assignment, addressed to your students
  • A statement of the technologies used in the assignment, and why
  • The criteria you’d use to evaluate the assignment

Midterm Assignment

Your midterm assignment will be to create a project proposal that has two scope variations: one full, and one reduced version.

Your proposal should follow this structure:

  1. An introductory descriptive paragraph, which should include a problem statement, and say *what* your tool/thing will do.
  2. A set of personas and/or user stories.
  3. A use case scenario (where would someone find your tool/thing and how would they use it). Keep it short.
  4. How you will make the full fledged version. This is your “ideal world” version that fulfills all of your visions and fantasies (what tools you will use, how you will get them, how confident you are that all the moving parts will work together, etc).
  5. Your assessment of how much time the full-fledged version will take, and how much of the skills you currently know and what you would have to learn.
  6. How you will make the stripped-down version. The stripped down version is the minimally viable product. It is the most *bare bones* version to prove that what you are trying to get at is viable. (what tools you will use, how you will get them, how confident you are that all the moving parts will work together, etc)
  7. Your assessment of how much time the stripped-down version will take, and how much of the skills you currently know and what you would have to learn.

You are welcome (but not required) to repeat the last two steps with scope variations in-between the full fledged and bare bones version.

In previous years, this assignment asked you to propose two projects. If you are, indeed, trying to choose between two projects and fleshing them both out would be useful for you, you can fulfill the midterm assignment by offering what’s above for each idea, minus the stripped-down version.

The proposals will be submitted using Social Paper on April 5th prior to class. You will be asked to review and leave substantive comments on at least two classmates’ proposals before class meets on April 9th.

Class that week will be dedicated to workshopping the proposals. The format we will follow will be that each participant will choose one of their two proposals to present orally. You will have 5 minutes to present, and we will have 5 minutes for feedback. Think of this as a pitch. You will want to lay out the project abstract, present very short versions of your personas, give one use case scenario, and then talk about how you would build it, and how long you think it would take.

Preliminary Project Brief

In no more than one thousand words, write a blog post (if public) or upload a PDF to our private group that does the following:

  • describes the problem that you wish to address with your ITP project
  • addresses at least 3 of the 5 Ws and H in Chris Stein’s Contexts and Practicalities
  • identifies one audience that your project is targeting and states how a member of the audience would engage with your project
  • presents a model for your project (first step in a broader environmental scan), describing how yours is different
  • states what skills you have that will enable you to do your project as well as what skills you need to develop

Due date/time: Saturday, February 17 by midnight

Be prepared to present your project in a 3 minute elevator pitch when we meet on February 20.