I don’t know what you all are doing this week, but what I’m doing is grading, and hoping the semester ends soon!

I hope to have any/all work that’s currently in the grading slushpile turned around and sent back by Tuesday evening. Also, just a reminder, while we were originally slated to complete 10 quizzes and 10 exercises this semester, that pace was killing us. Those of  you who are playing along at home will notice that we’re not going to get to 10. I’ll try to find a way to hide the “empties” that are cluttering up your gradebooks and freaking some of you out.

Here’s the skinny on this week.

Course Evaluations Available Now

The online course evaluations for this class are available now. Please, please, please fill them out and include comments. (You might want to wait until after you’re done with the group projects, in case you have a major epiphany and completely change your mind about the course.)

As you know this is the first time we’ve offered this course online with this new textbook and these particular projects. If there were projects you liked/felt like you learned from, projects that made your life miserable, opinions on the textbook, etc. let me know. I’m particularly interested in any suggestions you have regarding the group project. We have to do something “group” to meet the learning objectives for technical writing, but I know that online groups are about 1000 times harder than regular groups.

Report Drafts

Here’s what you should be doing this week: Drafting those final Usability Recommendation Reports (see materials distributed last week).

If your team is close to having a first draft together and you’d like some feedback, send me your draft via WebCampus mail by midweek. If you can get it to me by Wednesday, I can get it back to you by Friday.

If your team isn’t quite at the draft review stage yet, feel free to pick my brain re: “how do we pull this thing together? distribute work? etc.” Comments here are always good, but you can also send email via WebCampus.

Wrapping up the Project with a PAM

One quick reminder, next week you’ll have to write a Project Assessment Memo and fill out a collaborative project evaluation form after you turn in your final report. Very important — You have two options:

  1. Collectively, turn in one Project Assessment Memo for your entire group, along with a collaborative project evaluation form for each member of your group. (Send everything through WebCampus email.)
  2. Individually, turn in one Project Assessment Memo from each person in your group, along with an individual collaborative project evaluation form. Again, send through WebCampus email.

Woe to you if your group has decided to turn in a group PAM and you submit an individual PAM. First, you won’t get credit for doing it. Second, past experience has taught me that the individual submitting the solo PAM when the group opted for the group option is frequently the individual who ha contributed the very least to the group effort. (One semester, a guy submitted an individual PAM about his hard work on his team’s report about Greece. Sadly, his team’s report was about Ireland.)

That’s it for today!

Dr. S.