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Interactive RBA Preliminary Research Blog

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This activity helps students get their feet wet in starting their RBA research and getting early feedback on their RBA projects. It reduces the burden of starting a substantial research project by allowing students to do fun, preliminary research to get their RBA going while interacting with their classmates online and helping each other make research progress.

Activity title: Interactive RBA Preliminary Research Blog

Author: Yanshuo Zhang

Course: PWR 1 and PWR 2

Activity length and schedule:  This activity takes place at the beginning stage of the RBA. It can be placed immediately after students have submitted their RBA topics. This is an asynchronous activity to be completed on Canvas. 

Activity goals: This activity builds class community, helps students get going with their RBAs, and makes digital learning more fun by allowing students to interact with each other and helping each other out in the research process. This activity will result in a research gallery that students create on Canvas, where they can freely browse and comment on each other’s projects.

Activity details: Students complete this activity as an asynchronous activity/assignment for their RBA. They need to both create blogs for their own projects and comment on their classmates’ projects.

Instructions for students:

  1. The goal for writing this blog is to get you started on your RBA research and writing. Even if you later drop some of the sources or add new ones, that's OK. This is an opportunity for you to start collecting materials for your RBA and thinking about how these materials can help you answer the research question or tackle the research issues that you laid out in your RBA topic.
  2. Start a new strand under Discussions on Canvas. Please include 3 primary sources and 3 new scholarly sources (not from your TiC) in this research blog and describe the status of your research now.
  3.  Please take a look at others' sources and get some inspiration about the kind of sources that you can use for your own research. 
  4.  For the primary sources, if they are images, please copy and paste them to your blog; if they're websites or videos, please include a link; for other sources (such as memoirs and literary works or interviews you plan to do), please simply describe them in as much detail as possible.
  5. There is no word limit or other formal requirement for this blog. Please look at other people's blogs and see what you can learn from them about collecting primary and scholarly sources for your project. 

For more detailed information and instructions for students, click here