#caps22 semester-long individual project assignment

About the Individual Project Assignment

The Semester-Long Individual Assignment has five primary goals:

  • to showcase a mastery of the theories, discourses, practices, technologies, and skills necessary to create professional-level media
  • to showcase an ability to learn, experiment, and apply the fruits of research
  • to make connections among your learning experiences Communication Studies and other department courses and so they inform your chosen project
  • to adopt professional-level approaches to all your work, processes, and collaborations
  • to adhere to accepted accessibility practices and ethics standards
  • to create something you are proud of and can showcase in your portfolio

The assignment is informed by six Course Learning Objectives:

Objective 1. Effective Communication
Students will demonstrate a mastery of effective communication strategies in crafting an individual project and presentation for public audiences using appropriate technologies and techniques to plan, organize, and manage a semester-long project.

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 3. Professionalization
Through the process of making connections among your learning experiences at Saint Joseph’s University in Communication Studies and other department courses, students will define and develop an area of professional or creative interest within the broader field of Communication Studies. Engage in professional workplace practices, including but not limited to: creating and adhering to deadlines; employing meaningful workflow, file naming, and file organization practices; adopting proper terminology and vocabulary associated with your chosen media; meaningful collaboration; and taking care and having pride in the presentation and formatting of all work completed.

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.

Objective 6: Experimentation
Students will know what it feels like to experiment with their approaches to and understanding of creating a semester-long project.

The project will be completed in 7 stages:

  1. Project Pitches (three short pitches), due 1/24
  2. Meeting with a Consultant
  3. Formal Proposal
  4. Project Consideration Blog Posts (3)
  5. Annotated Bibliography
  6. Progress Reports at midterm, final, and weekly from week 9
  7. Project Drafts
  8. Case Study
  9. Public Presentation (8-10 3:50 – 4:00 minutes)

Individual Project Assignment Specifics

The project you ultimately create should showcase a mastery of the theories, discourses, practices, technologies, and skills necessary to create professional-level media. Because we are looking for mastery, you must have prior experience with the technologies and genres associated with your chosen project. (This is not the time to try something new because you’ve always wanted to try it.) However, mastery does not just mean technical or aesthetic proficiency. Rather, it also means having a comfort level that allows you to strive to do something new so you are not merely replicating the same work you completed in the past—the same kind of or approaches to a podcast, graphic design, social media campaign, videos, etc. In other words, mastery implies learning, experimentation, and application.

Whatever you choose for your project, it will:

  • be informed by associated theories
  • consider necessary diversity and inclusion
  • meet accepted ethics standards
  • employ accepted accessibility practices

Your project may:

  • reflect future interests
  • expand significantly on a previous project
  • add to an area of your portfolio that you feel is lacking

Your project must keep your interest for the entire semester. It must contain a high level of sophistication in its approach, scope, application, and presentation expected of a senior Communication Studies student about to leave college. In other words, this project should challenge you in ways you have yet to be challenged in your prior courses. If you find yourself just doing what you always have done, you are not approaching this properly.

To help ensure your project reaches an expected level of approach and scope, each student will have a short meeting with an outside consultant with expertise in the area of your project. These consultants can be within the Communication Studies department, a professional in the field, or another expert. Bill will approve both who you choose as a consultant and your final project’s overall approach and scope. Because each project is unique, each project’s ultimate deliverable numbers (total photos in a photo essay, total podcast episodes, etc.) will be unique.

Examples of potential projects include (but are not limited to):

  • a podcast series 
  • a web video series
  • a social media campaign
  • a brand book (aka, brand kit or brand style guide) 
  • a coherent collection of graphics for a particular campaign or client, such as data visualizations, infographics, web site images, stickers, graphics for gear, etc.
  • a magazine editorial with original illustrations, photographs, and/or layout design
  • a promotional / advocacy campaign for a company, organization, or cause
  • a hand-coded website or theme-based WordPress.org site with significantly customized code
  • a photo essay 
  • a zine series that intentionally employs design theories and techniques
  • a project in public scholarship: a multimedia essay, white paper, blog post
    research, writing, working with series, or other genre relevant to communication studies that makes an argument based on research

Creative projects typically classified as “fine arts” (such as zines, photo exhibitions, works of creative expression such as a digital memoir) must include an artist’s statement that adds theoretical grounding for the project and discusses how the
student has developed their project in the relation to the work and ideas of other relevant artists, etc. The artist’s statement should be listed as a project deliverable in your formal proposal. It is not a replacement for the case study which all students must complete.

Deadlines and Final Presentation

Your project will be completed in stages and will adhere to the following deadlines:

  • Project Topic Finalized: During Week Four
  • 50% Complete: By Week 9
  • 60% Complete: By Week 11
  • 75% Complete: By Week 13
  • 95+% Complete: Week 15
  • Final Completed Project Due: TBD during Finals Week

These are hard deadlines and except for truly exceptional reasons will not be extended.

Final Project Presentations will be Wednesday, May 4, between 4:00pm and 8:00pm. If you have a known conflict, clear your calendar immediately as there will be no make-up times.

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Project Pitches Post, due 1/24 by Start of Class

Each student is to compose ONE blog post on the Cap Stones course blog in which they pitch THREE possible semester-long topic ideas from these four potential topic areas:

  • one that re-envisions in significant ways a previous COM or COM-adjacent class project
  • one that looks toward your possible future career and/or graduate educational journey that will showcase skills and approaches necessary for a job or graduate school admissions
  • one that engages your personal/creative life in some way
  • one that is just so out there that you could never imagine that it would be approved in any possible way but who cares you’re only in school for a few more months and this would just be so much fun I want to propose it anyway so I’m gonna go for it and see what happens

Each individual pitch must adhere to the following guidelines:

  • no more than 250 words
  • explains the project, why you’d be interested in completing it, and how it would challenge you in new ways
  • mentions which hardware and/or software you’d need to complete it
  • quantifies the scope — that is, how many podcast episodes for how many minutes, how many photos, length of videos, etc.
  • embeds or links to an example that is similar to the kind of thing you are thinking about

For your blog post:

  • Choose a meaningful title
  • Check the Pitches category
  • Add some related tags

Remember, you must have prior experience with the technologies and genres associated with your chosen project.

Assessment

Your pitch post will be assessed in this manner:

  • Content: 70%
    • adheres to the above guidelines
    • how well composed, thought-out, creative, and interesting the pitches are
  • Formatting: 30%
    • the presentation and care in all visual components of the post, from spelling to spacing to the use of headings to linked or embedded media; that is, make it a nice looking blog post that feels like blog post

Due: Monday, 1/24 on the Cap Stones course blog by the start of class.

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Meeting with a Consultant

Each student is required to meet with a Consultant — an expert familiar with the primary genre you will be using in your project. The subject-matter of the project doesn’t matter here; the genre is of primary importance. The goal for the consultations is to present and discuss ONE possible project idea. That ONE possible project idea should be narrowed down from your 3 pitches and our conversation in class about them. During your meetings, you should:

  • get feedback on the scope of your project (that is, are you proposing to complete the right amount of deliverables, too little, or too much?)
  • get feedback on your approach to your project
  • raise any questions or concerns you have about completing the project

The consultation meetings should be no more than 15 minutes, so you are going to need to:

  • compose a detailed email requesting the meeting
  • be prepared for the meeting, including
    • having prepared a summary of your project and deliverables in terms of quantity (how many photos, how many podcast episodes, etc.)
    • having a list of questions or concerns you have

The meetings must be held between Monday, January 31 and the end of the day on Friday, Feb 4. As soon as it is scheduled, email Bill who you’ll be meeting with and when.

When considering your consultant, start with university faculty, including Communication and Media Studies faculty and faculty outside of the COM department. You can also ask people in the field associated with your project, such as a former intern director or field placement supervisor. The key is that they can speak to scope. If you are weighing who to ask, feel free to email Bill to see what he thinks.

During your meeting, you should take detailed notes on the discussion because their feedback will be incorporated into your Formal Project Proposal.

Consultants will also complete a Feedback Form.
Include this link to the form in your email: https://forms.gle/SKVh67fLvyBfnkUM9.

Bill will share with you the feedback your consultant’s feedback.

Composing the Email

Send a professional email to a potential consultant requesting a meeting. A professional email of this type should include the following:

  • Meaningful subject line
  • Professional greeting
  • Statement describing the purpose of the email
  • 2 sentence summary of your proposed project
  • Polite request to meet, including at least 3 times during the week you are free to meet (via Zoom or in person)
  • Link to the feedback form (https://forms.gle/SKVh67fLvyBfnkUM9)
  • Polite thanks and signature

The email should be sent by Noon on Monday, January 31. CC Bill on the email.

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Formal Proposal

Your formal proposal will be for ONE topic that was narrowed down from your three pitches and informed by your conversation with a your Consultant. It is due Monday, 2/7 on the Cap Stones course blog by noon.

It should be written for a global audience. That is, I do not want to read something that appears to be written in response to a course assignment. Do not assume anything about the reader other than that they are interested in reading your work. Do not assume they know about this class, about any of the issues you are discussing, or any of the technologies you mention. In other words, elaborate and illuminate.

Your proposal should include the below topics, addressed in an order you feel appropriate for your proposed project. You don’t need to address the items in the order listed below, and your proposal shouldn’t read like a bulleted list. Rather, the ideas and topics should appear seamlessly in your discussion. Compose well thought-out sentences and paragraphs that lead a reader through your discussion. Use headings and bolded text as appropriate.

The proposal should also include discussions about the feedback you received from your consultant. Because I imagine the consultant discussions covered a range of topics, be sure to include those discussions in the relevant sections.

Topic: What is the specific question/issue/area you are focusing on? What is the context? Why does this subject matter? Is there a demand? Why is it interesting to you? Does this project connect with your professional goals and interests? If so, how? If not, why are you pursuing it?

Form: What form will your project take and why? What is the scope? Provide details. As you envision the project right now, what will a reader/viewer/user hear, see, experience through your project? Link to and/or embed examples of the form your project will take and discuss how yours will be similar and different.

Audience and Impact: Who are the primary and secondary audiences for this project? Why will they be interested in it and what what impact do you think it will have on them? In other words, why does this project matter? Is it needed at all?

Prior Experience: What prior experience with the form of the project do you have? Be honest and specific. Link to and/or embed your prior work as evidence and discuss how your current project will be similar and different. How will the current project challenge you in new ways?

Educational Experience: How does this project help reflect your educational experience in the COM department and the university? How will you incorporate prior coursework into the project? Be specific and include not only software and hardware you’ve used, but ideas discussed, methods introduced, readings read, etc.

Research: What research do you think you will need to do in order to complete your project–interviews, surveys, historical research, user testing, learning new camera functions, etc.? What experience do you have doing that kind of research? Provide links to or embed evidence of that research.

Obstacles and Resources: Identify potential obstacles that you foresee in completing the project and any resources you will need (gear, software, analog technology, etc.).

Timeline: Create a timeline that accounts for each week of the semester and what you hope to work on when. This is where you lay out your workflow. What will you work on first? Then what? And so on. This can be general for now.

For your blog post:

  • Choose a meaningful title
  • Check the Proposal category
  • Add some related tags

Assessment

Your pitch post will be assessed in this manner:

  • Content: 70%
    • covers the above topic areas
    • how well composed, thought-out, thorough, nuanced, interesting the proposal is
    • includes evidence and examples where needed
  • Formatting: 30%
    • the presentation and care in all visual components of the post, from spelling to spacing to the use of headings to linked or embedded media; that is, make it a nice looking blog post that feels like blog post
      • Important note: None of the pitch posts met the expectations for effective formating of the blog post and were certainly not reflective of a senior COM student who has been working in and on digital media for 3 years. Images were too small to see and were often just plopped in; headers were missing; links were not incorporated well into sentences; other content that should have been linked didn’t have links; the titles were not very meaningful; tags were missing; the correct category wasn’t checked; and so on. Your proposals MUST be better.

Due: Monday, 2/7 on the Cap Stones course blog by noon.

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Project Consideration Blog Posts

The goal of the Consideration posts are to help you consider important social, technical, and access issues relating to your chosen semester-long project. These posts will directly inform the work you so, so by putting in time and extended thought now, you will be helping yourself when you get to creating your work. You will share your Considerations on the Cap Stones web site.

Each student will be responsible for individually composing and posting THREE listening posts during the semester.

Each listening post will be in response to a set prompt, which will be provided beforehand, and will connect with the theme for the week they are due.

Each post should:

  • be informed, insightful, curious, authoritative, and in-depth, and very well written;
  • be at least 450 words long;
  • have at least 5 meaningful tags and placed in the proper category (First Consideration, Second Consideration, etc.)
  • features that are important to blogs and blog readers: links whenever having one would make a meaningful connection, images, embedded video and/or audio, and so on;

Use care when composing your posts; make sure to check your spelling and grammar. Use paragraphs. Use author’s names when appropriate and make sure to refer to the author with the correct pronoun.

due dates

Each student is required to complete THREE listening posts. They are due by 11:00pm on the following days (click on the links below for the prompts):

Please see the Course Calendar for any changes to these due dates.

Assessment

Your consideration posts will be assessed in this manner:

  • Content: 70%
    • adheres to the above guidelines
    • how well composed, thought-out, reflective, and interesting the posts are
  • Formatting: 30%
    • the presentation and care in all visual components of the post, from spelling to spacing to the use of headings to linked or embedded media; that is, make it a nice looking blog post that feels like blog post
      • Proposals were MUCH better than your Pitches, so keep working with those formatting approaches.

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Case Study Rough and Final Drafts

Case Studies tell the story of a design or creation process. Case study authors employ meaningful headings, concise text, and deliberately selected media (images or other embedded media, such as audio and video) with the goal of revealing significant moments in that process—moments that are more often than not hidden from view and most certainly unknown to those who are just seeing the final product or deliverables.

Your case study is going to tell the story of your unique capstone design and creation process. Your audiences are COM faculty, current and future students, future employers who may be interested in your creation process, and others who for one reason or another may be interested in what COM students are doing. As a result, your case studies should embody professionalism and intentional design choices as you weave the reader through your process. Use the two examples we looked at it in class as exemplars:

Your case studies will contain the following headings and any subheadings you think will help your narrative:

  • Project Overview: A summary of your project, intended audience, highlighting your goals and reasons for creating it
  • Prior Experience Related to the Project: A discussion of what work you have completed and skills you have acquired in other courses that prepared you to be able to complete your capstone project
  • Challenge of the Project: A discussion of how the project was going to (and/or has proven to) challenge you, the obstacles you anticipated or confronted.
  • Prep Work and Background Research: This will be different for each of you, so create subheadings as appropriate.
  • Primary Technologies and/or Software: Only highlight those that were pivotal to the success of your project.
  • Project Considerations: A discussion of the decisions you made and practices you integrated regarding Ethics, Diversity, and Inclusive Design.
  • Creation Process: A discussion that reveals the multiple stages of the creating/design process; use subheadings as appropriate
  • Final Deliverables: A summary of final deliverables
  • What I’d Do Differently: Considering all you achieved, what might you do different if you had the opportunity.

Please adhere to the following requirements:

  • No more than 100 words of alphabetic text per heading/subheading (be concise!)
  • No more than 1000 words for the entire case study
  • Use pull quotes as appropriate and desired to highlight ideas
  • Position your included/embedded media in various ways so as to vary the page layout (as in the exemplars)
  • All images and media must be original and made by you

Case Study Rough Draft: Due 4/22 by the start of class

Your rough draft will be posted to the Cap Stones course web site. Select the “Case Study Draft” category before posting. Add appropriate tags and meaningful title.

The draft should include the following sections, complete with text, pull quotes, images, and/or other embedded media:

  • Project Overview
  • Prior Experience Related to the Project
  • Challenge of the Project
  • Prep Work and Background Research
  • Primary Technologies and/or Software
  • Project Considerations
  • Creation Process: Include approx 25% of what your design process for this draft

Case Study Final Draft: DueThursday, May 12 by 11:00pm

Your Final Case Studies will be posted to the Senior Capstone Case Studies web site and should contain the following headings and any subheadings you think will help your narrative:

  • Project Overview: A summary of your project, intended audience, highlighting your goals and reasons for creating it
  • Prior Experience Related to the Project: A discussion of what work you have completed and skills you have acquired in other courses that prepared you to be able to complete your capstone project
  • Challenge of the Project: A discussion of how the project was going to (and/or has proven to) challenge you, the obstacles you anticipated or confronted.
  • Prep Work and Background Research: This will be different for each of you, so create subheadings as appropriate.
  • Primary Technologies and/or Software: Only highlight those that were pivotal to the success of your project.
  • Project Considerations: A discussion of the decisions you made and practices you integrated regarding Ethics, Diversity, and Inclusive Design.
  • Creation Process: A discussion that reveals the multiple stages of the creating/design process; use subheadings as appropriate
  • Final Deliverables: A summary of final deliverables
  • What I’d Do Differently: Considering all you achieved, what might you do different if you had the opportunity.

For your Final Case Studies, you must:

  • link to all online spaces that include online deliverables
  • create a meaningful title
  • select the “Bill Wolff” and “Case Study” categories, as well as all categories for the genres your project embodies
  • related and appropriate tags

Do not look to Case Studies from other sections for inspiration; rather, use the models we looked at in class:

Please adhere to the following requirements:

  • No more than 100 words of alphabetic text per heading/subheading (be concise!)
  • No more than 1000 words for the entire case study
  • Use pull quotes as appropriate and desired to highlight ideas
  • Position your included/embedded media in various ways so as to vary the page layout (as in the exemplars)
  • All images and media must be original and made by you

Be sure to see the Tutorials page of the course web site for case Study-related tutorials.

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Public Presentation on May 4

Each student will present a 3:30 – 3:45 minute public presentation on May 4 in Doyle South in Campion.

Rough drafts are due in class on Friday, April 29, so we can start practice presentations.

The goal of the presentations is for each student to share the journey of their Capstone project, from initial ideas through through final edits, revealing along the way the complex, nuanced, and importance decisions you have made along the way–including pitfalls, hiccups, and challenges along with your successes (no design process is ever free of problems). These work best when they provide insight into your process that we won’t see looking at your final deliverables.

In that regard, the presentations are very much like your Case Studies in that they should tell a story and therefore be presented in narrative form. And similar to your Case Studies, your presentations should cover:

  • Introduction to yourself and your personal goals as way to lead into your project
  • Project Overview, including thanking anyone who was especially helpful or valuable to your success along the way
    • be sure to mention your primary and secondary audiences
  • Prior Experience Related to the Project
  • Prep Work and Background Research
  • Primary Technologies and/or Software and what they afforded you
  • Project Considerations
    • A discussion of the decisions you made and practices you integrated regarding Ethics, Diversity, and Inclusive Design — you may only have time to discuss one of these, which is fine
  • Creation Process
  • Final Deliverables, including
    • online posting location(s)
    • any distribution plans, if you have any

Too often presentations are stale and dry events where people read bullet points that are on the screen. We’re not doing that. We’re going to borrow from model of presentation that encourages storytelling and the narrative form: a modified version of a Pecha Kucha (pronunciation). On the Pecha Kucha website you can watch sample presentations, including an excellent one by Emma Carlow describing the process behind one of her designs.

A Pecha Kucha is comprised of two parts:

  1. a narrative, which is read aloud
  2. Google slides or PowerPoint presentation, which advances while the narrative is read

Your narrative should be 3:30 or 3:45 in length when read aloud and be informed by all the work you have completed in class and your own design process.

Each presentation will have:

  • 14 or 15 slides
  • slides that last 15 seconds
    • 14 slides at 15 seconds is 3:30
    • 15 slides at 15 seconds is 3:45
  • slides containing only images, video, and/or audo (including images that have text on them, such as screenshots) but no bullet points, titles, or other written content
    • if including video or audio, make sure the clip is edited to fit the 15 second time frame and will play when clicked on it or automatically
    • these should be unique clips, not part of the larger video or audio piece that forces you to have to find the exact spot

To prepare your narrative, I strongly suggest you write out exactly what you are going to say, so you can read it aloud. (A 4 minute presentation is about 2 double-spaced pages read aloud.) I do not recommend presenting this off the cuff. The challenge will be for you to time your narrative so topics change in synch with the slides.

Here’s a short video on how to set your slides to advance automatically:

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