How will the Final Homework
(Assignment 4) be graded?
An excellent document that could be used as a model for Homework #4 is
John December's
New Spiders Roam the Web. Some of its good features:
- There are many links to other documents, and the anchor words are
all well-integrated into the flow of the document.
- It's about the right length, 4 or 5 screenfuls.
- It uses HTML features such as italics, headings, and lists.
- The tone is serious but lively.
- Unfortunately, there is a typo in the document.
Another good model is Bertrand Ibrahim's and Steve Franklin's
Advanced Educational Uses of the World-Wide Web.
This paper is written in a more academic style than is December's;
there's an Abstract, Introduction, Conclusion, Footnotes, and
Bibliography. You can follow this format if you want to, but it's
not necessary. Unfortunately, there is a serious split infinitive
in this document.
Here are some criteria we will use in assessing final project.
Spelling and Proofreading
There should be no indication that
you wrote the document two hours before it was submitted, even if
that was the case. A tip: at the ea> prompt, enter
spell doc.html
where doc.html is the name of your document. All words not in the
dictionary will be listed. There will be many false positives, but
all misspelled words will be listed as well. Note that the
spell
command is not a substitute for careful proofreading!
Style and tone
Your document should be thoughtful, serious and
lively. Try to avoid cliches, hyperbole, unsupported opinions,
slang, jargon, and passive sentences.
Take advantage of what HTML has to offer
HTML offers hypertext
links to other documents, of course; but there's much more:
- internal links (beginning with #);
- ordered and unordered lists;
- inline .gif pictures
- a variety of type styles, such as bold or italic (use very judiciously);
- different levels of heading;
- a descriptive and helpful title (would a search engine that just
looked at words in the title find your document when it should?).
Appropriate breadth of topic
Your topic should not be too broad or too narrow. If it's too broad,
it may end up merely being a survey of a subject area. If it's too
narrow, you may have trouble finding enough references and enough things
to say. Try to minimize the survey and overview part of your document
(although a few paragraphs may well be appropriate) and emphasize
the analysis and critique part of the document.
Interesting and thoughtful content
Many of us have had the pleasant
experience of coming across a "mother-lode" document, one which provides
a useful overview of a subject area, expresses opinions arising from
a distinct and well thought out point of view, and is chock full of
links to related documents. You should aim to produce a document of
this nature.
Your document should go far beyond being a
hotlist of URLs you have run across.
Although the format of this assignment is not question and answer,
it may be useful to formulate several questions about your topic and
write your document so that those questions are answered.
You may want to answer some of the following questions (I offer these
only to provoke your thoughts; there is no requirement to ask or answer
these specific questions):
- How has your subject matter been affected by WWW?
- What will be the relationship between WWW and your subject
matter in 2 years?
- What types of people are interested in both WWW and your
subject matter? Professionals? Academics? Students? Home
computer users?
- How can some of the elements of your topic (you have to figure
out what this means) be arranged along a spectrum? How can
they be compared to each other?
- How can the URLs you have found be categorized?
- What are the main controversies on this topic? What is your
stance on these controversies?
Interesting links
As far as possible, your links should be to
documents which are themselves interesting. Prefer primary sources
over secondary ones (e.g., if you were writing on WWW search engines,
it would be better to link to Lycos and The Harvest Project than to
December's New Spiders article).
If you are not writing about search engines, then
don't mention them; this document is not about how you found the
URLs you link to. (Of course, there could be an exception to this
rule, if the path to the link was germane to your topic.)
The five URLs you submitted with
your proposal should just be a starting point -- ideally you'll have
many more, not all directly related to your topic (see the December
and Franklin documents for examples).
Reasonable length
A document written by one person
should be between 1000 and 2000
words -- about 4 to 6 screenfuls. Documents with more than one author
should be longer, of course.
More than one author
Generally, if there are multiple authors we will expect a longer
and higher quality paper. The norm will be that all authors will
receive the same score.
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MOST IMPORTANT REQUIREMENT OF ALL:
Normal considerations of academic honesty are in effect for this
research project. All words and ideas which are not your own must be
properly attributed, just as in every other research paper you have
ever written or will ever write.
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Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions!
--Dan