Handout 11: Final Project

EXPECTATIONS AND GRADING FOR YOUR WORK ON PROPENCITY
Course Project (ProPenCity) is Due December 6
In addition to submitting your Dreamweaver File to the Implementation Team, you must submit to me a print copy of your review article and the Teamwork Analysis statement. Read details below.

General information
Half of your grade for this project (part I) will correspond to team work and the other half (part II) to my assessment of your review as a stand-alone piece of writing. Credit for the contract and for handing in drafts on time will be folded into your "meeting deadlines" grade.

Part I: Teamwork
Teamwork accounts for 50 percent of the allotted credit or about 13.5 percent of your course project grade.

The ability to work as a contributing member of a writing team not of your own design is crucial to your success in the professional writing field. Working together to produce a new edition of ProPenCity will give you some sense of the complexity of team writing, of the importance of meeting deadlines, and of the balancing acts that combine personal initiative with collaboration in complex writing environments. The product you produce (a website) is a resume item that will enable you to claim experience in team writing and in web development.

I'll use my own observations, your progress reports, your contract information, and your own report (see number 4 below) to determine the richness and success of your team contribution. It goes without saying that successful completion of this part of the project assumes that you meet the editors' and manager's deadlines, that you complete your review to the editors' satisfaction, and that you hand in your completed and proofread article, saved in the appropriate Dreamweaver file, to the implementers by the designated date.

I'll determine your teamwork grade in three ways:
1) my personal observations
2) your weekly progress reports
3) successful completion of contract items
4) your written analysis of the complex writing environment you've experienced and of your two team roles: team member and content provider (article writer).

Guidelines for completing number (4) above successfully:

• You may write about the differences between your initial conception of your team's role and your revised conception, after the fact.
  
• You may describe your team's goals and the processes you devised together to achieve these goals.
  
• You may offer some critique of these processes, naming the difficulties you encountered, whether these matters fell within your control or were beyond remedy.
  
• You MUST provide analyses of team interactions, both those that worked well and those that proved problematic. What were the conditions and mechanisms that allowed you to interface with other teams and with each other well? Poorly?
  
• You should give credit to classmates, including yourself, who facilitated good team work. What did you do personally to assure the success of others? Who took leadership? At what point in the process?
  
• You should certainly discuss how you would revise your team processes were you to work on such a project again. What will you do differently the next time you work on a group web project? Can you think of different team models that might work better for similar work?
  
• You should argue for your own contribution to team and project well being, bringing to light any work that may have gone unnoticed as well as that work appreciated by all.
• You MUST consider this part of the assignment an analysis: how did the parts fit together? How did this fit work? Why?
• You would be wise to document your contribution to the project as you see fit.

Part II: Review
My assessment of the quality of your review article is worth 50 percent or 13.5 percent of your course project grade.

Your individual grade for the review will reflect my best judgment of how successfully you've handled the standard "moves" that review writers make: shared context, overview, summary, details, and evaluation. You'll find discussion of these moves on the web (Handout 10), and we've gone over them in class. You have in hand two sample reviews for your perusal. Recall that these are not models of excellence for you to emulate but rather samples of how two reviewers have implemented these moves. You have all received substantive feedback from me regarding the strengths and weaknesses of your first draft, and I have been and will be available during office hours and by appointment for further consultation.