Project Summary 2009

By samooresamoore (1261671010|%a, %b %e at %I:%M%p, last edited at 1262099018|%a, %b %e at %I:%M%p)

I will be posting your course grades sometime late Thursday. I have finished recording your assignment grades on the Web site.

How I arrived at your project grades

Discussion

  1. I have a grading rubric (basics, sources, resource evaluation, appropriate background content, appropriate current events content, information specialist tutorial, general organization, extras) that I used to guide my grading. I have a separate page (with comments) for each of you that I filled out. I will make copies of these pages and leave them with my secretary in room R5492; you can pick them up (to take and keep for yourself) any time in January; after the end of January she will throw them out.
  2. The actual number grade that shows on your grade sheet will be different than the grade you have recorded. I gave everyone 30 out of 30 for the first parts of the project. The grade you have on your grade sheet is the percent of the remaining 70 points that you received. For example, suppose your grade sheet shows that you received an 80. Then your recorded grade on the project would be 30 + 80% * 70 = 86.
  3. Before you ask me specific questions about your grade, be sure to read all of the information below; concentrate especially on the great projects just below and the “Fantastic examples” farther down; these provide very clear examples of just what I was looking for, and of what your classmates were able to produce.
  4. My general reaction to these sites is that some of you did a lot of work and apparently enjoyed working on your sites. It showed. I learned a lot from many of your sites.

Grade distribution

Here's information about the distribution of grades on the final project, including a stem-and-leaf table and summary statistics.

10|00000
 9|0000222244678
 8|055788
 7|2368
 6|229
 5|7
  • Average: 86.5
  • Median: 90
  • StDev: 12.2

Points of mis-understanding

  1. Vital information missing from reports
    • Common effective searches on Web search engines related to the topic
    • Real time search
    • Video search
    • "Info for professor" should be one sub-item in a menu; no need to otherwise feature it on the home page
    • If you list your current events in some table, be sure to have a link nearby that link to all the current events, not just a subset of them
  2. Resource evaluation
    • Many people simply did not include many of the resource types that we learned about this semester. The project was your opportunity to show me that you mastered these tools.
  3. Background information
    • Don't use only company-sourced information. First, anyone can find it. Second, it's not exactly an unbiased source of information.
  4. Custom search engine
    • One of the most important parts of anyone trusting your CSE is knowing from what sites and pages it is pulling information. You needed to document this within your site.
  5. Interface decisions
    • Almost without fail, you all created attractive, easy-to-read sites.
    • I would encourage more of you to learn to scale down your graphics, justify them to one side or the other, and wrap the text around the graphic. This makes it easier to read your text.
  6. Current events
    • It was good to set up a page of your "shared" RSS feed items. But this wasn't enough.
    • It was better to have news items that you provided short (1 or 2 sentences) commentary on.
    • It was best to have either news items throughout the semester that you provided insightful analysis of or had analysis of multiple news items per week.
  7. Information specialist tutorial
    • A minimal tutorial is one in which you simply explained the menu choices on your site with a little commentary.
    • A FAQ-style tutorial was a bit better.
    • The best is when you provide commentary on what needs to be done in order to master the topic at hand.

Fantastic examples

In the following I list example pages within project wikis that really stood out as great examples of what I was hoping to see.

  1. The whole site
  2. Home page
  3. Resource evaluation
  4. Background information
  5. Tutorial
  6. Blogroll and RSS Feed reviews
  7. Current Events
page_revision: 3, last_edited: 1262099018|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z (%O ago)
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