EVALUATION:

1. Participation (20%)
2. Research question and bibliography (20%)
3. Community analysis: group project (30%)
4. Literature review (30%)

Grading rubrics for assignments in this course give examples of what's good enough to meet the standard (B), what exceeds the standard (B+ or A-) and what does not quite meet the standard (B- or below). Remember that B is the standard; to earn a B in a graduate course means that your performance would be acceptable on a professional level. If you get a B+ or an A-, you are not being marked down from an A, but marked up from a B. What you have to do to earn an A is not defined in this section, because to do it you first have to take full ownership and responsibility for the assignment. In the process, you'll probably change the assignment and make something new of it, and I'd hate to rule out rewards for any new kind of excellence you achieve by some premature definition that didn't take it into account! A grade of C indicates failure to perform at a level worthy of graduate credit. 

General requirements: Your formal assignments should be clearly and appropriately formatted and well proofread. 

Your work must be turned in when it is due. Work handed in late without an acceptable excuse will be downgraded. Work submitted as attachments to WebCT mail should be virus-free, and compatible with Windows software (alas); if you use non-Microsoft programs, try sending your work in rich text format. Give your attachment a filename that includes your own name (or an abbreviation thereof) and not just the assignment name. Too many files named "LSC557" or "paper" in my in-box can get confusing! Some reasonable file names:

Avoid blank spaces or "special characters" in the file name -- a "special character" here means just about anything other than a letter or a digit.

Important: Using citations: Remember to credit your sources for direct quotations, statistics, information and distinct ideas; to be consistent in your style of citation; and to give enough information so that a researcher could find your source. Pick a good style manual and use it consistently. Use footnotes, endnotes or parenthetical citations whenever you’re quoting verbatim, but also whenever you’re using specific facts (numbers, dates) or authoritative opinions for which you can trace a source. Make sure you 

(Hint: If you photocopy a journal article, write the volume number and date on your copy before reshelving the journal. If you get full text of an article from a database that doesn't give page numbers, find the page numbers. Giving the URL for the database where you accessed an article would not help a reader who did not have access to the same database.)

For instance, the first assignment is to outline a research question and an annotated bibliography of articles addressing the question. In your introduction, you are to give a rationale for the problem you choose. Say you decide to look for research on how middle-school teachers and students use the Internet for school-related questions. One rationale might be, "I hope to be a middle-school library media specialist, and this is something I ought to know about." That would be honest and it would be a rationale -- but it wouldn't be a professional rationale. Think about it from the point of view of those students and teachers. Why do they need their media specialist to be up on this stuff? What kind of support should the media program offer them? If you start there, you'll come up with a rationale that is professional, not just personal. It won't be any less true to your own goals and objectives, and it will make things explicit that are just taken for granted in the "Knowing that stuff will be my job" rationale. Once you make things explicit, you can question them. There's power in that.