| [ Assignment | Additional Tips | Criteria for Evaluation ] |
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In lieu of a final exam, please prepare and submit a portfolio that showcases your work for the class and summarizes what you have learned during the semester. All portfolios must be mounted on the web and each should begin with its own summary Web page which should be named "portfolio.html." (Remember to link your portfolio to your HONR 259J Homepage). Deadline for submitting portfolios is the end of the final exam period for HONR 259J, which is Monday, December 20th at 12:30 p.m. (Early submissions greatly appreciated. Please email me so I know!).
What should you include in your portfolio? At a minimum, your portfolio should include revised versions of Projects 1-3, and a summary essay synthesizing your take on American suburbia after having studied it for 14 weeks. It should also contain something more. I do not wish to be overly prescriptive about the content or form of the portfolio beyond these minimal requirements. But for those in need of ideas, here are some additional items to think about:
* review the class readings and viewings and develop ways to link their insights or issues to those you've focused on in your projects.
* rework or supplement one or all of your projects to include insights that you've gained since the original due dates or to highlight or introduce a unifying thread or issue running through your projects. For example, if you feel that media representations of urban and suburban scenes have strongly influenced how mainstream Americans think about city and suburb, you could select a set of images from 1999 and do a Kozol-type analysis of their meanings and influence.
* rework or make use of some of the class handouts to highlight issues or insights or perspectives that you think are key to understanding suburbia. For example, you might rank order a set of positives and negatives from our handouts, expand upon those key points, and use that means to develop your summary comments about the subject. You could then use hyperlinks to point out places in your projects (or others' projects) where you talk about those issues. Or you could go back to our initial list of framing questions and take up items that you feel the class did not adequately address.
* read the letters that class members have generated during the semester and write a summary letter of your own. Your letter can be addressed to the class, to Arthur and Mary, to Phillip Langdon or any other author whose work we've read, or to any other figure who might be an appropriate recipient of a thoughtful letter on American suburbia.
* create a defense of suburbia to counteract all the focus on negative aspects of suburban living and suburban values that we've talked about. Highlight the positives in a way that goes beyond facile comments like "suburbia is safe" and "suburbia is a good place for families."
* survey all the projects for one of the assignments and develop a summary analysis that delves into the cumulative effect of everyone's research. What broader conclusions can be drawn by considering everyone's projects together? Use hypertext links to highlight and expand upon your points.
* revise (and add) hyperlinks to relevant other sites or sources or images on the web.
* revise (and add) hyperlinks to the work of your fellow classmates and beef up your interaction with and response(s) to their ideas.
* prepare your portfolio in tandem with a fellow classmate (work together) with whom you disagree strongly on the importance of certain issues. Develop your portfolios as a "Point/Counterpoint" exercise, using hyperlinks to highlight your most important places of consensus or disagreement.
* reformat your pages, add images, change backgrounds, and experiment with hypertext in new ways to communicate your ideas more effectively or to craft a more interactive website.
* provide an analysis of one or more of the class webchats as a starting point for analyzing a specific issue or idea and making sense of the different points of view on it.
* supplement the work you've done for HONR 259J by introducing texts or insights you've gained from other courses or work experiences that are relevant to thinking about suburbia.
* rethink or redesign yours' or others' ideas about suburbia based on what YOU have identified as most problematic and most appealing in suburbia today.
* rethink your HONR259J website--how might you make it more useful and substantive to browsers searching for a better understanding of this ubiquitous cultural phenomenon that we call suburbia?
Remember that good critical thinking involves continuous monitoring and rethinking of your ideas as you gain new knowledge or different perspectives on a set of issues. Show us the best results of the critical thinking adventure you've participated in this semester in HONR259J. Embrace the opportunity in this summary project to develop your own special point of view or give your own learned perspective on American suburbia.
1. Care and precision with which you frame the issue(s) and substantive analysis of the issues you choose to focus on.
2. Quality of imagination and resourcefulness that you apply to this final presentation of ideas about American suburbia.
3. Quality of your synthesis of the semester's work and ideas.
4. Quality of your argumentation: have you improved on previous arguments, taken opposition points of view into consideration, and are your conclusions well reasoned and well supported?
5. Quality of your writing: have you improved your prose over the course of the semester? Have you polished your writing and the presentation of your ideas? At a minimum, you need to present thoroughly edited and proofread prose for this assignment. Are your ideas well-footnoted and are your bibliographies complete?
6. Quality of your hypertext links to other student projects. Do they comment on others' precise points and engage with the ideas of other student projects?
7. Quality of your html formatting; is your project well presented, and easy to navigate?