Due Dates

 

SPRING 2008 - archived course materials

Assignments and Grading

Class Participation (10%)

as this course will involve a significant amount of in classroom discussion and several workshop activities, your participation will matter towards your final grade.

Assignment 1 (15%) - Due 2/21/08

Field Notes. For the first half of the term we will be collaborating as a class on a study of how people interact with ‘technology’ in public places. You’ll be keeping a field notebook. For this assignment, you will submit your compiled and coded fieldnotes along with a one page analysis. The analysis should highlight a couple of main insights you gained from your observations and should also refer, in some form, to the methodological issues raised in lectures and readings in the first part of the course. I will be evaluating the notes themselves for how rich and extensive they are and how you’ve managed to generate (and distinguish between) descriptive and interpretive material.

Assignment 2 (20%) – Due 4/3/08

Interviews. You will conduct 2 interviews. Each should be at least 30 minutes in length and on a topic of your choosing. A 30 minute section of each interview needs to be transcribed. In the transcripts I’ll be looking for the fluidity of your interview style is (i.e. the logic of how one question follows from another) and how responsive you are to your interviewees prompts. I’ll also be looking to see how well you made use of probes where appropriate. Along with the transcripts please submit a one-page analysis that includes a couple of main insights you gained and (as with the fieldnotes exercise) should refer, in some form, to the methodological issues raised in this course. I’ll also be looking to see how carefully you’ve attended to the distinct language used and concepts generated by your interviewees. You’ll receive bonus points if you interview someone who: 1) you did not already know 2) is not affiliated with the UC Berkeley campus 3) is not of your ethnicity or nationality 4) is outside of your socio-economic class (I’ll depend on you to be honest about this).

Final Project (55%) - Due 5/15/08

Your final project will be an independent research project. You may choose to build on the work we started at the beginning of the term on how people interact with technology in public places. If so, I’ll be looking for how you incorporate the findings generated by the class up to this point to move forward with additional data collection and analysis. If you choose to do a series of interviews I’ll expect to see 4 total and can include the two interviews you conducted for assignment 2. If you choose to take on a new topic (which I encourage), please discuss this with me in advance. For PhD students, you can use this as an opportunity to do some preliminary (or not so preliminary) fieldwork. Your write up should include an introduction of not more than 500 words, including a brief discussion of any logistical and ethical issues and how you addressed them. The bulk of your analysis (up to 2000 words) should be an evaluation of the data you’ve collected. Both the introduction and the evaluation should be written with reference to some relevant literature. I’ll be looking to see how well you’ve integrated the various concepts introduced in this course and for the appropriateness and innovativeness of the decisions you’ve made about data collection and analysis.