About the Background Research Assignment

The Background Research Assignment has four primary goals:

1. to help students prepare to be able to complete their project
2. to help students expand their understanding of their chosen genre and deliverables
3. to help students expand their theoretical understanding of their chosen genre and deliverables
4. to help students expand their technical and material understanding of the chosen genre and deliverables

The assignment is informed by three Course Learning Objectives:

Objective 2. Ethics and Accessibility
Students will apply professional ethics, accessibility, and communication skills and practices in the preparation, realization, and publication of your individual project.

Objective 4. Research
Students will conduct and apply the fruits of research to support and enhance individual project goals, preparation, realization, and publication.

Objective 5: Reflection
Students will build on their understanding of the important role of reflection during the preparation, realization, and publication of their project.

Assignment Specifics

To complete this assignment, students will complete a kind of annotated bibliography.

Your annotated bibliography should contain at least 8 entries relating to your semester project with 3 entries being scholarly sources, and 3 being journalistic sources or popular sources, and 2 being exemplars.

3 Scholarly and Technical Sources

• These sources must be scholarly journal articles, scholarly books, or technical/financial reports that provide studies and/or a theoretical understanding of the genres you are creating [update: and/or the social issues that may be connected to your project].
• At least 1 must be scholarly, which means that you could have 2 technical reports published by the organization that created them (that is, not blog posts or articles about the reports).

3 Journalistic or Popular Sources

• These sources include news shows, magazines, newspapers, blogs, podcasts, videos, and other sources that don’t fit as journalism or scholarship. They should help you better understand your chosen genre and/or deliverables [update: and/or social issues that may be connected to your project].
• These can include sources writing about technical and/or financial reports, but they should not cover the same reports used in the Scholarly section.

2 Exemplars

• The sources should be particularly wonderful examples of your deliverables that will help inform your own work. These should not be examples you have used in your Pitch or Proposal posts.

Creating the Bibliography

Part 1: Description of Your Project
Before adding your entries, compose a 100 description of what you are thinking will be your approach to your podcast. By now you should see that there are many ways you can go, so try to narrow it down.

Part 2: The Bibliography with Annotations
The entries in your bibliography can be chosen to help you with the background/prep work we discussed during your individual conference last week.

When creating your bibliography, group your sources by the above 3 categories.

I do not care which citation method you use, just as long as you are consistent and that your citations include the following:

• author(s) first and last name
• date
• publication title
• URL

Below each citation, compose a 100 – 150 word annotation using two paragraphs:

• paragraph 1: 75 – 100 words that summarizes the source
• Paragraph 2: 50 – 75 words that describes how and why you might use what you have learned in the creation of your own project

These word counts are hard limits. Do not go above or below them. 

The Do-Nots

Please do not list Wikipedia as a source. You may, however, look to the citations on a Wikipedia page if those are useful.

Due Date and Submission Info

2/25: Share a GoogleDoc with Bill to his SJU email address by 11:00pm