Assignment-BASH Reno (13.1)

Proposal

You will be writing a proposal for a collaborative project, which usually describes students’ digital projects, as well. The project must include substantive nonfiction writing. The project must involve more than one person. The project should result in a substantive final product. Everyone must be a part of a collaborative project.

This proposal should be pretty straightforward. The documents themselves are usually 3 pages or so. Everyone will workshop their proposals in class on 10/6 and 10/18 and turn them in by 11/4. Then, we will have all of the proposal presentations in class that following week. I will post the collected proposals in WebCampus for review. 

Beyond that, everyone will have a couple of minutes to present/discuss their proposal in class on 11/8 (and overflow on 11/10). The idea is to attract your classmates as collaborators on your project AND to write applications to other projects, as well, so you have options if your proposal doesn’t fly. Only about 25-33% of proposals are actually done. The best-case scenario is that you have folks interested in collaborating with you on your proposal and others welcoming you to work on their projects, too.

The proposal should include:

  • Clearly articulate the problem
  • Clearly describe how that problem will be addressed
  • Describe the final product of the team’s work
  • Specify how many team members are sought (no fewer than two and no more than four to a team)
  • Describe what roles the proposer will fill and which roles will likely need to be filled by others
  • Include any other information classmates will need to make an informed decision about the project

Successful proposals like these are usually 2 pages or so (or the equivalent) and their presentations about 3 minutes. 

Collaborative project

The collaborative project provides you with the opportunity to build a team and do something together that you couldn’t do alone, something that you see as significant and worth the time/effort. Each team member should have a substantive role to play that’s recognizable, significant, and includes comparable responsibilities. Think of these projects as your final projects, and give them the commensurate time, care, and energy that suggests. It is difficult to specify what these collaborative projects should/not be because so many different projects are possible and each team member will be doing something different. This is why it is strategic to confer with Bill at several points during the process to make sure that what you are doing is neither too much nor too little. Bill has a lot of experience with these kinds of projects and can be very helpful in keeping things reasonable, manageable, and humane for you and the team members. The non-negotiables here are:

  • Start with what you want to do, and then discuss the project with Bill to make it doable and manageable.
  • There must be at least two people involved.
  • There can be no more than four people on a team.
  • The final project must be available for the class to see at our final exam period.
  • The project should clearly demonstrate the necessity for the number of people involved.

Guidelines for Digital projects

  1. All digital projects should be self-contained, meaning that they should be designed for a remote audience with whom you will not be able to communicate directly. EX: In a normal class, a PowerPoint to accompany your spoken presentation would be fine. In this class, your digital projects must assume that you won’t be there when people look at that digital composition.
  2. Try some things that you might not have done before, but be reasonable in terms of the learning curve for new tools. 
  3. Make the most of the medium you choose—visually, audibly, textually—and think of your audience, which is primarily your classmates and community partners.
  4. These digital compositions are seldom over 8-10 minutes, depending on the subject matter and the number of people involved.
  5. Take a look at projects in the Journal for Undergraduate Multimedia Projects (JUMP+) for examples of projects that other students have made: https://jumpplus.net/. I can share projects from past classes, too, if you’d like.