Brief Project Descriptions for COM580: Open Source in Technical Communication

Ongoing Projects

• Reading responses: Everyone must post a response to the reading each week before class meets. Responses should be substantive, and about 500 words long. Keep all of your responses on a single wiki page that uses your wikiname, e.g., JoeS would keep his at JoeSReadingResponses.

• Delicious bookmarking: bookmark items of interest from the Web to your Delicious or other social bookmarking account. You should use the shared tag open-source, plus any other relevant tags that describe the item. Especially good items that you think would be of enduring value to the course should be added to the Course Bibliography.

Both the Delicious bookmarking and reading responses figure in your course participation grade.

• Tracking an open-source project community. Keeping a log over the course of the semester, tracking how an active project develops and morphs; thinking about how its openness plays in its development. Ideally, this project community should develop something that you use, like a piece of software or cultural objects. (By active project, I mean one that has evidence of mailing list and/or blog or wiki posts occurring at least every few days).

Major Project

• State of the Art. Each week, one student (or two collaboratively, if there are more students than weeks, or students with similar interests) will present on an open source project or open-source-like aspect of an area of his/her choosing. Prior to the week the student is to present, a reading with three discussion questions will be distributed to all members of the class via the course calendar. The student will then be responsible for an hour's worth of presentation and leading classroom discussion on his/her topic.
• Email your idea to KarlS before 9/9/08.

Final Project (Choose One of the Following)

• Developing an open-source plan. Finding a work or academic practice that could benefit from an open model, and developing and specifying what that open model might be. If related to your "State of the Art" presentation, it must demonstrate significant additional work beyond the initial presentation assignment.

• Contributing to the Open Source Software Project. A significant contribution to the Open Source Software Project Dr. Stolley is launching at IIT.

• Create your own project. It's an open source seminar with an open source calendar, so let's make the final project open, too. The only rule is that you have to write the guidelines of your project, and share it on the wiki--in case others wish to attempt it (and perhaps modify it). List your project below, with a short description and link to the full description.

Author:

Karl Stolley