By this point you should have completed all your field research and be ready to begin bringing it all together for display in your online Research Portfolio and to develop your final ethnographic essay. This week we will focus on your Research Portfolios (with annotated bibliography) and writing up your final ethnographic essay (whatever form that will take).
1. How can I tell that you’ve not done enough research to develop a solid project? Let me count the ways . . . others can tell too. Don’t rely on one short interview to develop your project. Don’t depend on one set of field notes collected in a single visit. Don’t expect for it to work well with even just a little bit more. You need many, many hours of field research to work with. You know you’ve reached “saturation point” when your field work begins producing similar findings but if that happens after just an hour or two in the field then you have not selected an appropriate research question. That should not happen until you’ve spent many, many hours in the field.
2. When working on writing up your findings, don’t forget to make use of the scholarship in literacy studies. We’ll talk more about how to make this happen. First, let’s check out a couple of WA4s.
3. Research Portfolios (online)–draft due 12/4 (Friday) by noon
4. WA5 (annotated bibliography)–due 12/4 (Friday) by noon
5. Studio time on Thursday. Be ready to finish up your Research Portfolio and WA5 (which will serve as the table of contents for your research portfolio).
Plans for presentations, both at the Celebration of Student Writing and the Commerce Writes Symposium? http://sunski17.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/research-journal-23/
Hello,
Just some questions as I’ve been going over WA5, some discrepancies…
1) You ask us to post our annotated table of contents, which is WA5, and then on another page you ask us to put up all 5 WAs, which I found really repetitive and unnecessary. Do we still need to do that?
2) For page 4, you ask us to post our research tools, but what if those tools are being used in our annotated bibliography? It seems repetitive to me, but I also understand if you want to actually SEE our physical tools online.
I guess I just feel unclear on these issues.
Thanks for the questions, Caroline.
Responses below:
1. No. You are right. Just WA1-4 on that page, with WA5 as entry point for visitors.
2. I do want to see your Research Tools in that section, but (as I believe I noted on one of the handouts) you can certainly copy the annotation from the annotated bib and repeat it in that section. You are likely to be using your tools in that section anyway.
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