Comp101

[This is more or less a rewritten version of a Unit project posted on Blackboard. However, I may end up doing the Wikipedia project in the end.]

Unit Three: Professional Communities

Feeder 3.1: For this unit, you will investigate the academic discourse of your chosen (or proposed) major. Groups will agree on a shared problem or topic to research from the viewpoint of their individual disciplines. You may wish to broaden your chosen field depending on the topic agreed upon in your group. For example, if your interest is physics or chemistry, broadening your field to include the biological sciences or medicine may be more fruitful if your group chooses to investigate the impact of HIV/AIDS (the group topic could also be broadened to cover “disease,” if desired). Group topics should be chosen after some brief preliminary research: group members should browse journal articles, department websites, etc. to get a sense of what topics have been problematized in their chosen fields and to come to a group consensus. Next, you will each research the topic within your individual fields, compiling an annotated bibliography of 5-6 journal articles. These articles should be published recently (within the last 10 years) in reliable or major journals. Citations should be given in the format used within your discipline (this may not necessarily be MLA style), followed by a one paragraph summary (5-7 sentences) of the article’s main argument. Summaries must be in your own words, from your own reading. Lifting from journal abstracts is not permitted. Avoid direct quotations.

Feeder 3.2: Using one of the articles included in your annotated bibliography, write a 500-word review of the article summarizing its arguments and/or research and evaluating the effectiveness of the author’s claims and reasoning. Your argument stating the effectiveness or weakness of the article must be backed up by evidence within the article. You are not required to go to other sources for this evidence (though annotated bibliographies may come in handy here); in other words, you are not building an argument or counter-argument of your own. Rather, examine the effectiveness of the given evidence (or the absence of needed evidence), the logic and flow of the argument, and the credibility of the conclusions drawn from this evidence.

Unit 3 Project: You and your group members will now compose short journal articles of your own, compiling them into an interdisciplinary journal on your shared topic. Your individual article will be an overview and evaluation of the different approaches to your group’s problem taken by members of your chosen discourse community. These perspectives should be gathered from the articles cited in your annotated bibliography or by additional research. Similarly to the Feeder 2 assignment, you will evaluate the arguments and evidence given in these articles while building your own argument as to which approach is most effective for the topic at hand. Your audience is the scholarly community who reads and contributes to the journals you have researched. 1200-1500 words, double-spaced.