FIRST-YEAR SEMINAR

format

Luckily, web page editors are now much easier to use than formerly; if you develop your site with an HTML editor such as Netscape Composer or Microsoft Front Page, you should find that the project progresses (mostly) pretty smoothly.  Please begin work right away and let me know if you have problems.  Here is a link to a page I wrote for a different class giving solutions to a number of problems students in that class experienced (I assumed they were using Composer but Front Page is pretty similar).

As this project will involve a number of pages, you will probably want to devote a folder to the project's web pages and make this folder a subfolder of your html folder (if you are publishing the project on the web).  The main page for the project could then be the default.htm file for the project folder.  Use relative links for links from one part of the project to another so that they will continue to work if you move the folder, or give me a copy of it, etc.
 

contents

1. an annotated "webliography" of resources related to your project on the web.  The annotations should include (a) a brief summary of the main points of the site, and (b) an evaluation of the site.  The evaluation should not be in terms of the attractiveness of the site, but rather an estimate of its reliability, objectivity, and usefulness as a source of information.  Consider factors such as the qualifications of the author (if you can determine this), potential biases based on the author's affiliations or the organization sponsoring the site, the extent to which sources are given for factual claims, and how valuable you found the contents of the site.  The webliography should include hyperlinks to the sites you list.
2. a conventional bibliography of print materials related to your project.  This should also be annotated with a brief summary and an evaluation in terms of the above criteria.
3. a brief comparison of the print and online materials.  Are there some kinds of materials you were able to find in one place but not the other?  Are there differences in the reliability or usefulness of the print and online materials?  Did you find materials of one kind or the other more useful for certain purposes?
4. an online "paper".  The paper component of the project should satisfy the same criteria as the short papers:  it needs to have a thesis; to defend this thesis by means of arguments; to be clearly written; and to make some use of the reading materials for the class.  In addition, I will evaluate the project in part on the use you make of the possibilities of the web-based format.  You could simply write a conventional paper, save it as an HTML document, and link it from the project homepage.  But that would be pretty dull!  I hope that you will make use of the chance to include hyperlinks and images (and other materials such as sounds or movies if you wish).  And I hope that you will experiment with inventive ways of presenting the material.  For example, you could do something like this:  include a page with a one-paragraph summary of your project, describing your thesis and your arguments in support of the thesis.  Then different chunks of text in the summary could  be hyperlinked to more detailed presentations:  the thesis statement could be hyperlinked to a page defining your terms; the statement of your first argument could be linked to a page developing the argument in detail (and this page in turn might have links to further pages giving objections to your argument and your own replies to these objections); and so on.  Alternatively, you might have a detailed outline of your project, with items in the outline linked to the relevant portion of the project.