Another Dr. B: Blog #13

Unit 3 Group Proposal: Taking the Lead
1. Various planning documents the first three weeks of the unit; you earn your 15 online points this way.
2. Presentations 10 minutes: April 17th.
3. Video. April 17th (if possible), but and April 24th for sure.
4. Proposal: 8-12 “pages” online: due April 24th
5. Grade your group: also due on April 24th.
6. Revisable: The group or individual group members can revise the project for inclusion in the final portfolio. Presentation materials (PPT slides, brochures, videos) etc. can be revised and included in the portfolio too. Most of you will need to include your final project in your portfolio in order to meet the portfolio page expectations.

This assignment asks you to work in small groups (3-5) to “take the lead” on a campus, local, or even national issue—although I strongly recommend campus and local issues. Your group will produce
• A formal written proposal, although this document will be online, rather than printed off.
• A video to sell your cause, to pitch your message.
• An oral presentation, supported by PPT.

Group work generally, and this assignment specifically, often leads to a mix of very good projects and very bad projects. When groups work well together, the final product is usually better than what the individuals could produce. When groups don’t work well together, the process becomes difficult and the product suffers. I hope that by making the process of group work clear, and by offering strategies for success, all groups will produce very good, even excellent work.

Possible topics include:
• Write a proposal to integrate more multi-media assignments into English 120, offer (or require) courses on diversity or leadership, start a new student organization on campus, revive or improve an existing organization.
• Write a proposal to improve the campus climate for diversity, reduce binge drinking, increase healthy food options, reduce the problems with overcrowding, or keep educational costs under control.
• Write a proposal to address local and regional issues like stopping the export of young people from the upper Great Plains, encouraging economic development in the region, improving the national reputation and image of the place, moving the start of school to after Labor Day.
• Write a proposal about national or international issues related to your major or an area of personal interest, like a specific health issue, an engineering problem, welfare reform, or civil rights issues.

Past examples: groups of nursing students wrote proposals to the Nursing department at NSDU that suggested ways to increase admission in order to address the national nursing shortage, one group wrote a proposal to ITS asking ITS to adopt the web-based version of Microsoft’s Outlook email program, one group wrote a proposal to ND citizens, suggesting that they supported the North Dakota plan to lower the water level at Devil’s Lake. I have placed the email proposal and one of the nursing proposals in Blackboard so you will have two student-produced examples to work from.

I am open to your suggestions and requests to design this collaborative project to fit your interests and educational goals. That said, I do have specific goals for this unit.

What you should learn/gain
• Knowledge of and experience with collaboration, its challenges and benefits (how to communicate, negotiate, divide and accomplish work equitably, etc.)
• Experience identifying problems worthy of response, attention, and action. Practice controlling the scope of research.
• Experience working with the same material to produce three different kinds of products: a formal proposal, a visually engaging support document, and a midlevel or less formal public presentation.
• Knowledge of the complex issues surrounding your chosen problem, and general awareness of the complexity of most educational and social problems citizens and institutions take on.
• Insight into others’ perspectives on your chosen issue (your partners’ views as well as other interested parties’ ideas), determined through collecting sources and conducting field research.
• Experience and understanding of how complex tasks can be broken down and completed (project management).
• Application and synthesis of many of the skills we covered in the class so far: research skills, working with generic conventions, working with visual design elements, working with formal and midlevel writing styles, peer review extended to full-scale collaboration, etc.

Procedures
1. Form a group of 3-5 people, making sure your schedules mesh well enough to do some work outside class and that you share similar interests.
2. Brainstorm a full list of issues that you could “take the lead on.” Taking the lead might mean determining a course of action that might lead to a solution, offering a solution to a problem, or moving right past the proposal stage and taking action on an issue that matters to you and your group.
3. Work with the project management materials distributed in class in order to settle on a project, determine your project objective, necessary steps and tasks, and roles that group members will play.
4. Gather sources that will help you to understand the problem better; these sources should be incorporated into your formal document. Significant research (surface web, deep web, library, and field research) will be necessary to complete the assignment successfully. If your project doesn’t seem to require research, switch topics immediately.
5. Make sure each member of the group is clear which tasks he/she needs to accomplish and by when. Keep in good contact with one another, use class time productively, and meet outside of class if necessary.
6. Go through the processes of planning, idea generation, organization, drafting, and revision together with your group, and treat the whole group process as an opportunity to learn how to collaborate.

Final products: Proposal, Ad, Presentation
The formal proposal should be written and developed on WikiSpaces.com. It should be approximately the equivalent of 8-12 pages (double spaced, 1” margins, 12pt Times) in length for the kind of projects I am asking you to take on. Each individual should have to work as hard or harder than he/she did on the individual assignments.

A short video (no less than 30 seconds, no more than 2 minutes) that can be incorporated into your WikiSpaces proposal. Post your video to YouTube and then insert it on a wikispaces page. Increasingly, proposals need to be accompanied with a short, powerful, visual / audio message.

Presentations in class should be only 10 minutes, with each group member having a speaking role. Presentations should not simply read the formal proposal, but instead should emphasize the key points of the proposal in an engaging and visually interesting way. While there is no separate grade given for the oral presentation, I will take the quality of the presentation into account as part of this project grade (see rubric) and a well-prepared, nicely executed presentation will reflect a strong work ethic. The presentation should be a good learning experience and will give you a chance to apply your Speech Communication skills to this class. You can revise your PPT slides after your presentation—learning how to write good slides is an important communication skill.

Post your PPT file to Slideshare.net and then embed your files in your wiki; use the same technique to embed as you would with your video.

Grading
Collaborative projects are given one grade, and the grading rubric below will be used to guide my assessment of your work. There is no separate grade for collaborating, but you will be asked as individuals to self-assess the work you and your teammates contributed. That will be the time to identify particularly strong team players, as well as any weak links. Please don’t be a weak link! I will use that self-assessment to adjust grades, where necessary.

Qualities and features in the project.
Comments / feedback
The proposal
Is it clear who the intended audience is, and if so, is the purpose also clear?

Is the scope or research and scope of proposal appropriate? Have you focused on a small enough piece of a larger issue?

Are the conventions of a proposal appropriately used? Was the presentation appropriately designed and delivered?

Is the project appropriately researched: web, library, field research used effectively? Does the project show a sophisticated understanding of the issue?

Is the tone and style appropriate for the chosen audience, and appropriate for print and oral presentations? If individuals write different aspects of the proposal, are the tone and style sufficiently consistent?

Is the final document carefully edited and professionally presented? Are sources appropriately identified and documented, according to generic conventions?

The Video
Does video show awareness of visual composition strategies—camera shots and angles?
Does the video complement the proposal—send a consistent message?
Does the video make a significant impact? Is it attention getting and memorable?

The presentation
Are the slides well-designed: visually and textually?
Is every section of the presentation appropriately supported by slides?

Definitions of letter grades.
A = excellent work in all aspects—some slight room for improvement.
B = good; some aspects of the project might be excellent, others will be good.
C = acceptable completion of the assignment. No major problems, but room for improvement in most areas of the assignment.
D = a major aspect of the project has not been completed. Elements of the assignment might be quite good, but with unsatisfactory completion of certain elements, the assignment will remain a D.
F = incomplete assignment because page length was not met, proper research was not completed, proper documentation conventions not followed, genre conventions not adhered to, etc.