CHICAGO ROCKS! Geology in the City
ESCI 109, Section 03
Fall 2008
Dr. Sanders
Individual Geologic Research (Sign up for
delicious.com by Nov. 25; assignment due
at class time, Dec. 4, 2008.)
OBJECTIVE: For your Individual Geologic Research project, you will produce a set of web
resources that deal with and collectively explain the geologic of an assigned
aspect of Chicago geology. (Specific topics will be assigned in class.)
We will use the "social bookmarking" software at
delicious.com . You will need to
sign up for this free service by class time, Tuesday,
November 25, 2008.
FIND RESOURCES: Your first task is to explore the web to find resources
on your topic. Collect all the URLs (web addresses) somewhere where you
can find them again! Collect only reputable, useful sources.
ANNOTATE: Once you have found web resources, you will need to study each
one and write an annotation. An annotation is a short description that
presents the important aspects of the resource. What does the resource
say, or show? What does it do that other resources don't do? Does it
take a unique position, something that a researcher in the area might find
particularly unusual or compelling? Why would someone want to click on
this link that you have selected for them?
ADD TAGS: You also will "tag" your entries in a way that will make them
accessible to others who might wish to study Chicago geology. A "tag" is a
one-word descriptor, or keyword, that other researchers might enter in a search
engine when they are looking for web resources. Choosing the right tags is
important to making your research available to others.
For this assignment, every student in the class must use as their first tag for
every entry, Chicago+geology. That will allow all the rest of us to find
everyone's entries all at once. In addition to that tag, you must assign
other tags that would help other researchers find your work.
QUALITY: Our work will be public--available to everyone on the web--so it
must be high quality!
EVALUATION: Your work will be evaluated on the degree to which it
shows that you have researched the topic thoroughly, critically evaluated each
of the sources, annotated them usefully, and appropriately tagged them.
Your annotations must be clearly organized, grammatically correct, and free of
spelling errors. Points also will be awarded for the overall usefulness of
the resource you have put together to other researchers in the field.
© 2008 Laura L. Sanders. Last updated November
20,
2008.