Group Multimedia Project - Project 4

Traditional writing still dominates the university, but times are changing! As you go through your undergraduate years and beyond, you will sometimes be required to combine your writing with other media—images, video, sounds, hypertext, fonts, colors, layout and style choices—to create multimedia texts. For this assignment, you will take a break from traditional language-only texts and working by yourself, and collaborate with a group to create a page on a wiki for the Group Multimedia Project.

The Basics
The very first step will be to create accounts for yourselves. Only registered users will be allowed to create and edit pages on this wiki. This will have already been done on April 7, 2017.

After doing that, your group of four students each will choose one familiar, significant, and complex cultural topic and explore it in detail for American readers, by defining and describing all of its important characteristics. This topic must be something that American readers cannot find from another source in any language. In other words, your wiki pages will be the first real information that most Americans can get in just one place!

All of your writing will be oriented toward this wiki. Each student in the group will be responsible for writing about one aspect of the topic. On the wiki, all group members will give comments to one another, and suggest revisions for one another. Each group member is expected to write the equivalent of at least three to four double-spaced and properly formatted pages for the written part.

Even though this is a departure from traditional writing, you should use many of the same strategies you’ve used in your papers: ask complex questions, use relevant sources, and reflect multiple points of view wherever possible. In addition to this, you must include non-written components, definitely images but possibly videos and/or audio as well. Use your imagination!

When each draft is finished, you will provide two copies of your work: 1) a Word document uploaded to Assignments on Canvas and 2) your individual article page on this wiki. You are required to do both; if you do only one, it won't be counted.

The Project and Its Relationship to Other Wikis
During this project, we will closely examine the most famous example of a wiki, Wikipedia, and discuss some of the features of wikis. There are many other specialized wikis on the Web that might interest you. However, as you write, you must make sure to use your own original language—do not copy language from Wikipedia in English or in any other language, or from any other source. If your topic is already on Wikipedia, you will need to make sure that your writing is substantially different from that article. In other words, focus on a different audience and their needs.

Forming and Working in Groups
You will form your own group, but you are strongly encouraged to find new partners—don’t just pick your friends. Since this is a group project, you will have to make sure that you share the workload equally, even though you will all have different responsibilities overall. Toward the end of the project, I will ask everyone to make a brief report on the contributions of group members to the project. This will partially determine your individual grade.

Topics of Vital Interest

 * Technology
 * How to Add Content to a Wiki Article
 * What do wikis look like?
 * How to use talk pages
 * Understanding page history
 * How to Add References to a Wiki Page (source code only)