Group Research Project, Spring 2005

What It Is

Each section will produce at least four elaborated author web pages as part of what will become by the end of the semester the Science Fiction @ SUNY Fredonia web site. Students will join working groups at the beginning of the semester, complete an activities journal during the semester, and write a learning analysis (roughly 5-7 pages) at the end of the semester. Students can be researchers; literary critics; historical critics; cultural critics; interdisciplinary critics; editors/liaisons; or web masters/liaisons. Students who wish to switch working groups must find someone to trade with in their section. Each section will work independently, although working groups are encouraged to collaborate and exchange useful information within and across sections. By the end of the semester, we will have produced web pages for every author in the course and designed them in such a way that they come together as a unified Science Fiction @ SUNY Fredonia web site.

Section 1 will be doing pages on Heinlein, Bradbury, Asimov, and Delany; Section 2 will take Card, Butler, Gibson, and Simmons; and I get Haldeman, Robinson, McHugh, and Piercy. For the first unit at least, here are the working groups for each section. I'll announce any changes here and on the news page in the composition of these groups. Contact information will be posted on our ENGL 216 Blackboard site and can be exchanged during class (if it hasn't been already). Through the Blackboard site, you can get information on each of the working groups, discussion forums, electronic reserves, and other things I've put together with the library staff to make collaboration on this project easier and more efficient. There's a password for logging in that I'll distribute over email; please do not allow non-students to use your password, as I want your contact information to remain as private as possible.

• Editors: Michelle B., Angela Bullied, and Joe Picalila (Section 1); Tom Butler, Keri Hyde, Jen Meli, and Zachary Mohney (Section 2)
• Web Masters: Becky Adams, Josh Kopstein, and Chris Nichols (Section 1); Kate Ayotte, James Seibert, and Matt Skillings (Section 2)
• Literary Critics: Joe Angelo, Tammy Skora, and Kate Warner (Section 1); Martha Diaz, Milissa Mackey, and Megan McRae (Section 2)
• Historical Critics: Wyatt Brake, Adam English, and James Riley (Section 1); Josh Croxton, David Moran, and Seth Wallace (Section 2)
• Cultural Critics: Steve Galbo, Sara Lawrence, and Carla Siegrist (Section 1); Amber Cook, Dana Hollenbeck, and Jordan Van Durme (Section 2)
• Interdisciplinary Critics: Christine Kilpatrick, Kim Petersdorf, and Craig Thomas (Section 1); Ted Mulholland, Joseph Sweeney, and Matt Vercant (Section 2)
• Researchers: Katie Everdyke, Theresa Golden, Rachel Hoff, Brendan Keiser, George Kneibert, Steve Pacer, Jennifer Snyder, and Matthew Young (Section 1); Keri Annable, Dan Bach, Nathan Chesbro, Colin Herzog, Andrew McCunn, and Doron Taleporos (Section 2)

Duties

For the project to work well, the duties of each working group must be clear. Here's a starting point to what's going to be an ongoing effort to clarify working group duties.

Editors

• decide on a division of labor within your working group that allows for the most efficient and effective communication with each other, with other working groups in your section, with the other section's editorial and web master working groups, and with me--and adjust as necessary (for instance, assign specific roles--x is the liaison to the other section's editorial team, y to the other working groups, and z to me--and let everyone know who the correct contact people are);
• negotiate, in conjunction with your section's web master team, with the other section's editorial and web master working groups over which author in each unit your section will focus on, taking into account voting patterns in your section and the other section;
• work with the web masters in your section to come up with a design for the author pages that are your section's responsibility, and work with the other section's editorial and web master working groups to create an overall design for the site's index page and to coordinate efforts so that all author pages look like they belong to the same site--all the while taking into account suggestions from those in other working groups and seeking feedback on your ideas from them;
• work with your critics' and researchers' working groups to find out and consider their interests and priorities, compare them with your own, and decide on the actual research and writing assignments for each working group;
• pass along requests from one working group to another (all such requests must go through the editors, because they're the working group that has the best perspective on the overall shape of the project);
• set deadlines for responses to research inquiries and for drafts of components of an author web site;
• monitor the progress of web masters, critics, and researchers in meeting deadlines and troubleshoot problems that may arise;
• research other 'competing' sites for design and content ideas;
• begin the planning process for the second page before the first page is complete, for the third page before the second page is complete, and for the fourth page before the third page is complete;
• make final decisions (approve, reject, or require revisions) on all critics' contributions to the web site;
• send all approved essays to the web masters for incorporation into the appropriate author and other pages;
• quickly mediate any disputes that may arise in the process of creating the site and take any problems that you can't solve on your own to me in a timely manner;
• set deadlines for the web masters to get you the final draft for pages on the site;
• do a final proofread on every page on the site and submit it to me for uploading to the course web site and eventual grading.

Web Masters

• decide on a division of labor within your working group that allows for the most efficient and effective communication with each other, with other working groups in your section, with the other section's editorial and web master working groups, and with me--and adjust as necessary (for instance, assign specific roles--x is the liaison to the editors, y to the other section's web masters, and z to me--and let everyone know who the correct contact people are);
• negotiate, in conjunction with your section's editorial team, with the other section's editorial and web master working groups over which author in each unit your section will focus on, taking into account voting patterns in your section and the other section;
• work with the editors in your section to come up with a design for the author pages that are your section's responsibility, and work with the other section's editorial and web master working groups to create an overall design for the site's index page and to coordinate efforts so that all author pages look like they belong to the same site--all the while taking into account suggestions from those in other working groups;
• during this process, develop a variety of templates and models for the index page and author pages that people in all working groups can examine, consider, and give feedback to you on--and use that feedback to inform your work with the editors on overall site and individual page design;
• research other 'competing' sites for design and content ideas;
• pitch in to help researchers and critics when needed;
• help the editors with the planning process for future pages;
• send completed pages to editors for proofreading and delivery to me.

Literary, Historical, Cultural, and Interdisciplinary Critics

• decide on a division of labor within your working groups that allows for the most efficient and effective communication with each other, with other working groups in your section, with your counterpart in the other section, and with me--and adjust as necessary (for instance, assign specific roles--x is the liaison to the editors, y to your counterpart in the other section, and z to me--and let everyone know who the correct contact people are);
• develop, both individually and as a team, your priorities for your working group's main focus and subsidiary topics for each author's web page;
• communicate those priorities to the editors in a timely manner and negotiate with them over your actual writing assignments;
• develop a process for drafting and revising essays on your group's main and subsidiary assignments (for example, you can break the main topic down into smaller topics and have each member of the group contribute part of the main essay and then have everyone work to make the essay coherent, or you can assign responsibilities for the main essay to one person and give others subsidiary topics but share revising responsibilities, or...);
• communicate research requests to the editors, who will pass them along to the researchers and give their results back to you;
• submit your main and subsidiary essays in a timely manner to the editors and negotiate with them over final revisions until the essay has been accepted;
• juggle revising one author's essays while composing another author's essays;
• submit your final drafts to the editors for approval in a timely manner;
• research other 'competing' sites for design and content ideas when not focusing on your writing;
• pass along any advice on site design and other matters pertaining to the site as a whole to the editors in a proactive manner.

Researchers

• decide on a division of labor within your working group that allows for the most efficient and effective communication with each other, with other working groups in your section, with your counterpart in the other section, and with me--and adjust as necessary (for instance, assign specific roles--x is the liaison to the editors, y to your counterpart in the other section, and z to me--and let everyone know who the correct contact people are);
• develop, both individually and as a team, your priorities for your working group's main research focus and subsidiary research topics for each author's web page;
• communicate those priorities to the editors in a timely manner and negotiate with them over your actual research assignments;
• develop a process and division of labor for research on your group's main and subsidiary assignments (for instance, your working group may decide to pair researchers with individual writers to work closely together on a difficult project, or you might divvy up tasks based on research interests and experience--there are many ways of doing this);
• research additional research requests from the critics via the editors, and send your findings in a timely manner to the editors, who will pass them along to the critics;
• accurately and completely document every source you use (let's agree that we'll rely on MLA format for this)--developing a working annotated bibliography will not only help you keep track of what you've found, but may also provide critics with material they can include in their essays and your fellow researchers with leads they might want to pursue;
• begin the process of proposing and negotiating research topics for upcoming pages as early as possible;
• research other 'competing' sites for design and content ideas;
• pass along any advice on site design and other matters pertaining to the site as a whole to the editors in a proactive manner.

Responsibilities

For the project to work well, the responsibilities of each working group must be clear. Here's a starting point to what's going to be an ongoing effort to clarify working group responsibilities.

Editors

• The editors are ultimately responsible for all the big decisions having to do with the site--the overall site design and what elements must remain consistent across pages on it; which authors their section will focus on and create pages for; what the priorities and emphases of each page will be; setting deadlines for research and drafts from working groups; and deciding when a contribution from a critics' working group is ready to 'go live' on the site--so generally 'the buck stops here' in terms of a chain of command.

• Along with the decision-making/priority-setting responsibilities of leadership comes a need to cultivate other skills and recognize other responsibilities--such as the ability to delegate, the ability to seriously consider others' ideas (both within the editorial working group and from other working groups), the ability to modify a plan midstream by pinpointing which elements within it are problematic and improving on them, the ability to make others feel part of the decision-making/priority-setting process while still focusing on their own duties, and the ability to shift between planning, managerial, and editorial roles once teams are working on more than one page at a time.

Web Masters

• The web masters have the primary responsibility for developing, assessing, designing, and maintaining the site as a whole and every page on it. It is their job to offer strong design options to the editors and to participate in the process of setting goals and priorities for the site as a whole. While the editors have ultimate decision-making authority, web masters have technical and design knowledge, experience in web authoring, and an understanding of the challenges and difficulties in web design that editors will have to rely on in order to make the best decisions possible.

• Hence, the web masters' role is to keep the editorial team apprised of issues relating to feasibility, priority-setting, focus, and realism/pragmatism. Or to borrow from Casey Casem, it's the web masters' job to keep your feet on the ground while the editors are reaching for the stars.

• While doing this, of course, you'll need to be figuring out how to work effectively and efficiently with the other members of your working group. Your job is to vet each other's ideas and work together and separately to come up with a variety of design options. It might make sense to meet with the other section's web masters once you and they have identified your top design options, and see what elements from each you like best, before going together to the two editorial teams and pitching your ideas. Whatever your process, your job is to help the editors make good design choices and then have the designs ready so it is a relatively easy matter to plug in essays and other materials. You need to figure out how to handle internal disagreements and negotiations with each other and with three other working groups.

Literary, Historical, Cultural, and Interdisciplinary Critics

• It is important to recognize that your working groups are more than 'content providers'; rather, your job is to try to influence the editors and web masters as they set priorities for individual author pages and for the site as a whole, to contribute your own essay ideas and to consider carefully what audiences you are trying to reach and how you want them to interact with the site, and above all to try to figure out how to improve on existing author pages and science fiction sites on the web. Depending on what group you're in, you'll need to decide among yourselves what you believe to be the best literary approach to analyzing your author's novel for each unit (focusing on some aspect of form, genre, narrative strategy, characterization, representation, and so on), what would be the best cultural studies approach (focusing on the contemporary relevance and stakes of the work in question, its cultural politics or resonance today), the best historical approach (focusing on the influence on the author and work of the times and the way in which the author comments on or responds to the times through the work), and the best interdisciplinary approach (figuring out which issues and combination of disciplines best shed light on the work)--and, having done that, communicate it to your editorial working group in as persuasive a manner as possible, along with good ideas that didn't make it as your 'top' choice. The clearer you are about what you most want to focus on and what you want to write on in addition to that, the higher the odds that you'll get the kind of assignment from the editors that you will enjoy working on.

• To do that, you'll need to be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of--and gaps in--existing web pages that people interested in the novels you're writing on are most likely to go to. Rather than reinventing the wheel, your job is to improve on it or use it to go in different directions than those writing on your author have typically gone. The clearer you all are about what's missing or needed, the better position you'll be in to influence the editors' decisions, help the editorial and web master working groups to set priorities for the site, and to follow through with your own writing and criticism effectively. Fortunately, you can focus in on the specific varieties of criticism associated with your group's mode of criticism that most interest you, and within that range of possibilities, on the topics you are most interested in and think others should share your interest in. Unfortunately, it's likely that science fiction writers, critics, and fans as well as undergraduates, graduate students, and professors have taken an interest in your topic, so it's going to be a challenge to figure out how to build on the best of what they've done and do your own thing in a way your audiences will find valuable.

• Obviously, then, your primary responsibility is to write well for multiple audiences--in many ways, the success of the site rests on your shoulders, for it can have the best design and goals in the world, but will still fail if the essays are boring, uninformed, badly written, or irrelevant. But rather than worrying about what can go wrong with your writing, your job is to do something about it--to support each other and give feedback on each other's work, to regularly request information from the researchers via the editorial working group, to try to push your writing to match or exceed the best that's been done on the topics you're writing on, and to accept criticism from other writers and from the editors--whatever, in short, is necessary to make the pages of our site as good as is humanly possible.

Researchers

• In many ways, the researchers have the most difficult responsibilities of all--working outside the limelight, what you accomplish is the foundation of all other achievements of the other working groups and of the site as a whole. Without knowledge of the best of what's already been done on a given author or book or topic--from web and print sources, from books and magazines to journals and fan sites, from databases and dissertations and conference papers--it'll be difficult to build on it, outdo it, or even come close to matching it. Your task, then, is to try to be as comprehensive in your searches as you can and as selective as possible in what you pass along. You'll need to communicate what's interesting about what you've found and why, how you think it can be used and where, and what you think the crucial arguments and insights to be engaged are. You'll need to figure out how to search using google, bibliographical tools like WorldCat and the MLA Bibliography, and full-text databases like JStor and Lexis-Nexis--as well as the many science fiction and general research sites I've put on our links page and the books I've put on reserve at the circulation desk of Reed Library (not to mention the loads of sci fi criticism already in the stacks). You'll not only need to learn how to make interlibrary loan requests through the ILLiad system and but also how to manage your time and respond quickly to research assignments from the critics via the editors.

• In short, this working group requires just as much initiative and hard work as any of the others. You'll need to try to influence the editors and critics as to what needs to be researched before they've made their assignments and set their priorities, and you'll need to anticipate requests from writers based on the topics they've been assigned. You'll need to become comfortable researching topics outside your major (you'll learn the value of using book reviews to help you determine who are the major voices in a particular field or debate), figuring out which parts of longer works are most relevant to your research topic (you'll learn the value of indexes, tables of contents, and well-written introductions and introductory sections of chapters), and deciding when to call in the cavalry to help you break up a big research project into manageable chunks.

• But working in this group also requires an ability to sacrifice for the site and to manage your time wisely. If you do a little research each day and respond quickly to information requests while pursuing your own agenda on topics whose deadlines are not as pressing, you'll be a lot more successful than waiting till the weekend, or putting it off for another day.

Expectations

For the project to work well, my expectations for each working group must be clear. Here's a starting point to what's going to be an ongoing effort to clarify working group expectations.

Editors

• The basic expectation is that you'll set lofty goals and high standards and demand the best work of yourselves and others while always maintaining your composure, consideration, flexibility, and perspective. Since nobody's perfect, you won't always meet these expectations, but you should have the maturity to admit any mistakes you've made and to try to make up for them. You'll need to figure out how to balance competing roles as editors: between making decisions and delegating responsibilities, between considering others' ideas and staying true to your own, between pushing others to do better and giving them the freedom to figure out how to do it on their own, and between your planning, decision-making, delegating, collaborating, consulting, editing, and proofreading duties. And finally you'll need to figure out when I can be helpful and when it's better to work things out on your own and with your peers.

Web Masters

• The basic expectation is that you'll bring to bear your own experience, relative expertise, and best ideas in web design to the members of your working group and to the editors in your section and the other section, while being flexible enough to work effectively with all these different individuals and work groups. I'm expecting you all to come up with an effective way of organizing all the information that will eventually go on the site, and to always keep focused on the experience and interests of the people who will eventually visit the site, so that loading speed, navigability, and aesthetics are your priorities. Our site should not only look good, but be useful to the kinds of audiences we're trying to reach, so thinking about those audiences can help you give advice to editors and members of other groups.

Literary, Historical, Cultural, and Interdisciplinary Critics

• The basic expectation is that you'll take your writing seriously and try to put your own ideas, readings, and arguments in dialogue with the very best people who have taken on a similar topic as the one you have decided to focus on (after consultation with your team and the editorial team, of course). You'll also need to judge when it's more productive to do research on your own and when it's better to seek help from the research working group, as well as figure out how to give each other the freedom to develop your own writing/critical interests while collaborating with each other in making each other's writing/criticism better. So the core expectation is that you'll take a professional approach to the writing you're going to be doing and take pride in it.

Researchers

• The basic expectation is that you'll quickly get up to speed on what the best information sources for each kind of research topic you'll be working on are--you'll need to have a panoramic view of the research options and the ability to focus in on the right path (and to tell when the one you're on isn't as good as you thought it would be). Also, you'll need to make quality control decisions--you'll need to sift, sort, select, and otherwise identify the bad, the mediocre, the good, and the great on the topics you've been asked to research. And you'll need to do all this quickly and accurately--never losing basic citation information. So I'll expect you to be organized, punctual, inquisitive, creative, and maybe a little obsessive! In terms of working together as a group, I expect you to play to each other's research strengths, come up with a good division of labor and process for handling research requests quickly, and communicate effectively with writers and editors.

What It's For

Last fall and winter, while considering a culminating project for the course, a final exam or a final research paper didn't seem too attractive to me, because I've noticed that students tend to put off studying or researching till the last minute and usually fail to do their best work under the time and energy constraints of the last two weeks of the semester. Plus, knowing that I'd have many graduating seniors in the course (given the way Fredonia's course selection process favors seniority), I didn't want them to leave Fredonia with the same old final project options and hence to graduate without doing anything less than their best work in my course simply out of boredom or burnout.

So I started thinking--what ought I to do instead? How can I come up with a final project that fulfills many of the same purposes as an exam or a research paper, but that would be more interesting, fun, and rewarding to do and that would allow students to work on it consistently throughout the semester? One that would help them make the transition from being a Fredonia student to becoming whatever they would become after graduation, but that would still be valuable for the occasional underclassman (and -woman) who got into the course? One that would require them to put in consistent effort, to push themselves, to work with others and on their own, and to draw together everything they were learning in the course?

Well, over time, I began to realize that in my own planning to teach the course and process of course design, I was relying a lot on the web to get my hands on basic information in the field--background on major authors, works, movements, and themes, histories of the genre, and various examples of courses and criticism were a lot easier to get through google and the databases that Fredonia's library makes available to me (and to my future students) than trudging to the library in 10-degree weather and leaving my wife and 1-year-old daughter home alone. So as I designed the course web site, I made certain to give credit on our own links page to the science fiction sites that influenced me the most and that I found most useful and interesting on the web. That's when I realized: why not require my students to produce their own science fiction information and research web site for the course's final project? What better way to build on the enthusiasm that had students stopping me in the hallway last semester to find out which authors and works I would be teaching, that led to almost 90 people getting turned away from the first section during the course selection period, that had the Fredonia Science Fiction Fantasy Gamers' Guild giving me feedback during the late fall on possibilities I was considering, that gave me the impetus to open up another section, that filled it up within a week, and that had people emailing me during the winter break for the syllabus? Why not try to give back to those who had helped me without knowing it--and to others who might find themselves in my position down the road--by giving my students responsibility for planning, designing, implementing, and revising a Science Fiction @ SUNY Fredonia web site?

So in the end it was an easy decision. I knew I could count on my mostly upperclassmen (and -women) to be pretty prepared, mature, responsible, and motivated and to run with the responsibility I was putting in their hands: to represent, through the choices they make in designing and producing the SF@SF site, what a Fredonia education prepares students to do when they are given the task of collectively making something not just for themselves or for me, but potentially for anyone in the world with a web browser, an interest in science fiction, and the good taste to click on our site. If I could come up with a basic structure and goals for the site (articulated as best I can above), then I was sure my students would come through with flying colors.

I retain that confidence today. I know that my students in both sections will do their best to draw on their own readings and interpretations, our class discussions and group teaching presentations, our reflective essays and critical essays, and the skills and talents they've developed in their other courses and in their lives to produce a web site they can be proud of. Hopefully this project will simulate some possible 'real world' experiences they might soon be having in the working world--probably not directly in terms in science fiction or web authoring, but more generally in the types of research, writing, problem solving, critical thinking, leadership, teamwork, and collaborative skills valued by most employers today.

How To Do It

Given that the basic tenet of this project is putting responsibilities in students' hands, I don't want to limit your creativity, imagination, or autonomy in what follows. But I think there are some useful suggestions, information, and tools that can help you all make the collaborative process and collective web authoring project as successful as possible.

By the beginning of the second unit in the course, the editorial teams in each section should have proposed to their own section the priorities for the author site from the first unit they have decided on. After a sufficient period of negotiation with the editorial teams, the other working groups should make rapid enough progress on their assignments so that they are ready when the editorial team comes back (preferably before the second unit is over) with their new assignments for the author site for the second unit. The planning and implementation process will necessarily be slow for the first unit's author site, as everyone has to get used to working with each other, but should speed up for the second and the third, so that groups can get started on the fourth very early in that unit. Editors should nudge this process along by giving clear assignments and setting realistic deadlines; working groups should respect their assignments and deadlines, while letting them know when anything gets unclear or unrealistic. So long as you all show me you can handle the responsibility, you'll have as much freedom as I can give you. If, however, it seems to me that time management or other issues are arising, I'll step in.

Generally, though, you're on your own--of course, contact me if you want advice at any time on any topic, or if you see a developing problem I should troubleshoot. I'm available during office hours and by appointment, by email and telephone, so don't hesitate to let me know how I can help you.

Grading Criteria

Your grade for this segment of the course will be based on a combination of factors: the quality of the web pages to which you contributed research, writing, editorial or design work; my assessment of your ability to work with others effectively and contributions to the group dynamic; my overall assessment of your contribution to the SF@SF site, as evidenced by your activities log; your overall learning in the project, as evidenced by your learning analysis; and my assessment of your overall performance relative to the duties, responsibilities, and expectations laid out on this page.

ENGL 216: Science Fiction, Spring 2005
Created: 2/12/05 6:08 pm
Last Modified: 3/17/05 2:52 pm