Week 9 Posting: Original Posting Due by 11:59pm on 10/27; Responses to peers by 11:59pm on 10/30

This posting has several parts, so be sure to follow the instructions carefully.

Find a community that you are going to observe for your final ethnography project. Use the double entry note taking strategy I showed you in class, and complete at least three pages of notes on your community. Remember, the left side of the ledger is for observable details, sights, sounds, diagrams, and so forth. The right side is for your thoughts about what you are saying- put any questions you raise, and inferences you make, and any subjective comments on the left side. Take pictures of the notes or scan the notes. Save the notes using cloud storage, and post a link to your notes at the top of your entry. If you are not a tech savvy person, I recommend you watch a YouTube video on how to use google docs and obtain a link for a file. It won't take long, and this skill will come in handy when you are putting your portfolios together.

Once your notes are taken, and the link is posted, I want you to develop a coherent posting that outlines the history of the community, its goals, values, and so forth. DO NOT start your piece by saying, "The community I chose to do my ethnography on is _______________." Instead, I want you to introduce the community and let the community take center stage. Here's an example opening: The Legal Writing Institute (LWI) is a community of legal professionals and legal writing faculty from across the United States. LWI serves law professors, legal writing scholars, attorneys, and judges to  develop pathways to improve writing in the legal field.

Notice there isn't any, "the community I chose...," or "I searched the web for fifteen minutes before finally finding X community." Your goal is to show what the community is like, so stay focused on showing the community. There may be room for some first person 'I' point of view, but remember to think critically about what the first person perspective is doing for the text you are creating.

Once you have rendered a substantive review of the community, its mission, and values, you are to develop some open ended questions that will guide your project. Consider Greene's criteria for developing open ended questions as you craft your questions. Your questions must be open ended, and there cannot be obvious answers to these questions. Many of the articles we have read this term are framed around a research question, and your project should begin with a research question. As your project unfolds, your questions may change and evolve- that's okay. In fact, I'm a bit worried when questions don't evolve and change as the research process unfolds.

Your goal in responding to peers is to help one another. Ultimately, the goal is to develop successful ethnographies, and your job as a respondent is to bring insights, questions, and reasoning to the board that will help the writer develop his or her piece. If you notice that someone has fallen short in crafting some open-ended questions, then you might jump in and help frame a question or two. If you have similar experience in a community that is like the one that a peer is researching, you can share your experiences.

This posting will be worth 45 points, broken down as follows:

Double Entry Notes: 10 points
Write-up About the Community: 15 points
Open-Ended Questions: 10 points
Responses to Peers: 10 points

This is a very serious posting because it is the starting point for your final project. Make this posting great, and you will be doing yourself a favor going forward. Brush this posting off, and I promise, it will come back to haunt you.

If you have any questions, please get ahold of me.

Best,

Joseph