Final Assignment:

Purpose:  Over the past few days, you've had an intensive exposure to some of the basic concepts you will be studying for the next two years.  Your first assignment will give you a chance to reflect on these concepts and apply them to a situation you are directly involved in through a group and individual class project.

Directions:  This is a two part assignment, one based on work your team will complete and one based on your individual effort.

Part 1:  On the third day of the class, you were introduced to a resource you are likely to be using a great deal during your two years here at the iSchool—SharePoint Portal Server.  As part of that introduction, you saw a template demonstrated for a group project site, which provides a starting point for you to set up a team site (https://portal.ischool.washington.edu/Pages/default.aspx).     

Your task for this first part of your assignment is to choose a topic that interests your group in the field of information management, and develop a class site for your team that you can use to collect information on this topic, discuss it among yourselves, manage tasks you set up around your project, and any other activities that might come up during the assignment.  You can start with the template already there, you can build your own, or you can use an alternative to SharePoint if you have a strong desire and the time to do so. 

Topics that you might consider include (but are not limited to):

• Information management professions
• Information ethics
• The information management framework in a particular domain (eCommerce, manufacturing, finance, etc.)
• The role of technology in information management
• Project information management
• Anything else you come up with

Some ideas of things you might need to include on your site:

• A way to provide communication between your group members and document discussions
• A method of tracking responsibilities and tasks within your group
• A collection of shared resources that might be useful to you in accomplishing the second part of this assignment
• Perhaps your draft papers (Part 2 of the assignment) for review and comment by others
• A space to keep meeting minutes or agendas
• Anything else you come up with

Your site will be evaluated based upon evidence of:

• A completed team work site
• A well-organized set of information
• The quality of the information collected
• Team interaction on the site (commented documents, discussions, etc.)
• Collaborative efforts to build a useful team work environment (shared resources from all team members, evidence of individual contribution from all team members)

The site should be complete by Sunday, October 19^th, the same deadline as Part 2, and you should include the URL of the site in the paper you write for Part 2 of this assignment. 

Part 2:  While developing your team portal, you will be involved in all stages of the information management lifecycle.  For your individual assignment, you will write a paper discussing the implications of your collaborative project in terms of some of the concepts we have explored in the class.  You should include comments on at least the following:

• How you went about defining your information needs
• How the dynamics of the team and the larger class affected your approach to gathering and using information for your project
• Ways your group interaction and individual differences affected the information being presented on the site
• How you managed the lifecycle of the information itself, from acquisition to organization to distribution
• Ways you found to organize the information to better mesh with your information seeking behaviors and needs
• Methods and processes you used to distribute information among your team
• How the technology helped (or didn't help) to meet your information needs
• How your solution impacted (or was impacted by) the team and the larger context of the course itself
• Any ethical, moral, or legal issues that you ran across in your work

You should support your discussion through citations to the readings and lectures you've had over the past days, and at least one other new resource you've found through the use of the UW library online services.  You can use the report template as a guide for your paper.  Part 2 should be no more than five double spaced pages, and is due by midnight Sunday, October 19^th, through the Collect It link on the course website.  You will need to reference the URL for your team site in your individual papers so both can be evaluated together.

Your paper will be evaluated on the basis of how well it meets the following criteria:

• Addresses the questions in Part 2
• Shows clear integration of big ideas from the class discussions and readings
• Demonstrates the ability to critically analyze a problem
• Is clearly written and logically organized
• Follows assignment criteria for content and length
• Shows good use of references to class discussion and readings
• Provides evidence that student knows how to use the UW Library resources through properly formatted citations and inclusion of references from peer-reviewed journals available through the library services

Evaluation of Student Work

You may expect to receive comments on and evaluations of assignments and submitted work in a timely fashion.  All work from the course will be returned, with comments, within two weeks of the last class of the quarter.

Grading

This is a credit/no-credit course, meaning that you must receive a minimum grade of 2.7 to pass the class.  All work will be graded based on the criteria listed above under Parts 1 and 2, in accordance with the iSchool grade guidelines available on the iSchool web site at http://www.ischool.washington.edu/resources/academic/grading.aspx. 

General grading information for the University of Washington is available at:  http://www.washington.edu/students/gencat/front/Grading_Sys.html.