Sample Assignment: single file upload
[Context: Students are asked to post their responses to each week's readings and to select the strongest posts at the end. Since only their selected posts are graded, they can write more freely during the course, and take the time to revise their posts at the end if they so choose.]
Participation Portfolio Assignment
Your participation portfolio is an opportunity for you to assess your own contributions in this course. It is worth 30% of your final grade, and will consist of the following:
1. Section A: Five best forum posts. Please review your forum postings in this course and select the five posts that best demonstrate your exploration of the course readings and concepts. Copy and paste these five postings into a .rtf file. If you want to revise these posts, please do so. This is a good chance to clean up the grammar, spelling, etc, and to further develop or refine your ideas if you want. The forum posts you select will hopefully address the discussion questions on the course website and raise concerns that you consider relevant to your own lives. I encourage you to integrate the theories you encounter in this course into your ongoing development as an artist/cultural worker/designer/theorist. This is worth 20% of your final grade.
2. Section B: Self-Reflection and Review - This is a two-page (approximately 500 words) critique that summarizes and examines your process over the course of this term. What questions do you raise about the week’s' topics, and what insights or ideas do you offer to your peers? This self-reflection should follow your forum postings, and draw on examples from your postings. Please identify which of your postings you think are your strongest ones, and explain why. For this part of the assignment, you may want to try to identify your own cultural ideologies and belief systems; how have these been challenged or been made more clear through reading a range of theories and approaches? Consider your ideological "repertoire" (how religion, upbringing, education, geography, age, ability, gender, race, class, etc affect how you know and interpret the world around you), and be willing to explore contradictions and ambivalences. Try to identify or acknowledge both challenges and privileges that have affected your own processes of interpretation. This is worth 10% of your final grade.
The participation portfolio is due at 7 pm on April 17. Please upload the compilation of five forum postings (edited or revised as you like) with the self-reflection exercise IN ONE FILE, formatted as a .rtf file. Thanks!