Requirements and Grades

There are four main requirements for this course:

1. Active participation in class discussions, both on-line and in class.
2. A "Web Journal" in which you will record your reactions to readings and carry out other assignments. (You will lose credit for unexcused, late entries.)
3. A Web review essay in which you will assess the coverage of a particular historical topic in digital forms.
4. A Digital History Project Proposal: You will make a proposal for a digital history project and also develop a home page for it.

These major requirements will make up your final grade with the different items roughly weighed as follows: participation (15%); web journal (20%); review essay (30%); project proposal (35%).

Group Work: Digital work is much more likely to be collaborative than traditional historical scholarship, and it might be logical for us to do all of our work in this class collaboratively. But it is often problematic to insist that students work in groups in a class setting. So, I am making this an option. You can do the Web review essay and the digital history proposal in a group of two or three people. But there are two conditions. First, your project needs to be of two or three times the scale of individual projects. Second, your grade will either be a joint one (everyone in the group gets the same grade) or the group will decide how they want to allocate credit. (For example, two people could decide that one did 55 percent of the work and the other did 45 percent; if the group got a B+, then one person would get "roughly" an A- and the other would get a B.)

There will be an online component to class participation as well. The point of that is to extend class discussion beyond the limited two hour and forty minute slot that we meet once a week. Equally important, it is meant to foster discussion on your projects among members of the class. One of the key points of a seminar /workshop like this is for it to be a group experience. Unlike a conventional class where almost all the advice and assistance comes from the instructor, in a seminar everyone will take a hand in shaping our discussions and helping fellow class members. Much of this will happen in class, but we will also try to do some of this on-line. Everyone is strongly encouraged to post reflections on the class discussions, readings, and projects to our class email list as well as to actively maintain their web journal. You might, for example, comment on a reading that particularly intrigued or annoyed you. Or, you might comment on problems that you have been confronting in carrying out your projects or getting your web site to work. Or, you might have come across a terrific history Web site that you think other members of the class should examine. As a general guideline, you should initiate online discussion at least twice and respond to topics raised by others at least twice. But I hope you will take a more active role than that.

We will communicate with each other via our class listserv: HIST696-001-L@listserv.gmu.edu Remember that when you write to that address, it goes to everyone in the class. So you only want to post things that you want everyone to see.

How to subscribe and use class mailing list:

1. Write an e-mail message TO: listserv@listserv.gmu.edu

2. Type the following line as the message text:

subscribe Hist696-001-L Your Name

3. Send the mail message.

4. To send an e-mail message to all subscribers of the list, send the message TO: HIST696-001-L@listserv.gmu.edu