Course Project: Online Technology Conference

The final project is a presentation for an imaginary technology conference called in order to evaluate the impact of technology on culture. Students will pose questions of cultural concern in regard to new or emerging technologies and answer these questions in a multimedia presentation that uses scholarly research. The project will be completed in stages throughout the course and shared with the class in the final week. Students choose a new or emerging technology and ask the following questions about it (from Neil Postman, Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century):

1. What is the problem for which this technology is the solution?

2. Whose problem is it?

3. Which people and what institutions might be most seriously harmed by a technological solution?

4. What new problems might be created because we have solved this problem?

5. What sort of people and institutions might acquire special economic and political power because of technological change?

6. What changes in language are being enforced by new technologies, and what is being gained and lost by such changes?

Students answer these questions by doing research in the UMUC library. At least six scholarly sources must be employed to answer the questions.

At the end of the session, you turn in a final presentation based on 5 earlier assignments. It will be a multimedia presentation on a particular technology and its relationship to culture.

Part 2: Project Resources

This is Part Two of your six-part project. It builds upon the work you did in Part One, and will be continued in the upcoming weeks of this session.

Create an analytical annotated bibliography of resources you will use for your project. These must include at least six resources. Each annotation should be at least 150 words. These resources may be added to or subtracted from in your final paper.
Annotations should be descriptive and evaluative. This means they describe what the source is about, including the source's argument/main points and a brief overview and description of what is covered in the source. The evaluative part is where you tell your reader how the source relates to your subject, and explain how it is (or is not) useful to you.

Your bibliography should be researched through the UMUC Library. It may include books, encyclopedias, scholarly articles, as well as articles from popular journals or newspapers, MA theses or Ph.D. dissertations, websites, and other sources (feel free to contact your professor if you are uncertain about using a source). Sources should be reputable, meaning they have notes and a bibliography or talk about the source of their information so they may be fact checked.

Wikipedia is not an acceptable source since it is crowd sourced, and not fact checked. However, you may use their bibliographies as a starting point.

General assistance with annotated bibliographies and MLA citations can be found on the UMUC website at the below links.

1. How to Write an Annotated Bibliography

2. MLA Citation Examples

3. The Purdue Online Writing Lab (Purdue OWL) also has good resources on writing Annotated Bibliographies, including how to summarize, assess, and reflect:

• Overview

• Sample MLA Annotated Bibliography

4. Additional assistance with MLA formatting can be found at Research and Documentation Online, 5th edition.