There are 13 weeks in the semester after week 1's introduction. Students must do a single assignment EVERY week. These assignments are chosen from three different groups of types of assignments given below in the corresponding three sections. You can not do a given type of assignment more than once. There are 19 types of assignments and 13 weeks, but some types of assignments are required. Please read the following carefully. You MUST sign up for ONE assignment per week. You can do more if you want, but they will be EXTRA work, because you MUST do at least one every week. You cannot sign up for 2 assignments in 1 week, and use that to justify doing NO assignments in another week.
YOU MUST CHOOSE YOUR ASSIGNMENTS AND INSERT THEM ON THE RESPECTIVE PAGE FOR EACH TYPE OF ASSIGNMENT BY THE SECOND CLASS MEETING. Also, please make a calendar of all your assignments organized by week on your own Participants page. This is the place where the instructor, other students, and yourself can and will enter assessment and responses to your work.
You are free to change your plans over the course of the semester. See the final section on this page for details.
These are all required assignments. Each one must be done for a different "fragment" in the Blue Annals. The one exception is that #2 and #3 may be done for the same chapter. This work must be done following the relevant guidelines, and is due at Sunday 12 noon the day before the class meeting in question on the Collab site for the seminar.
The 15 Blue Annals chapters vary from 20 pages to 320 pages, so obviously it would not be fair for the six specific Blue Annals assignments if people simply chose a single chapter. The bibliography assignment should be keyed to a single chapter, and the chapter summary just makes no sense to break it down further, except that for the very lengthy chapter eight, which for summaries we can break down into 3 one hundred page segments. For the latter, I would like three people to work together on that hopefully to negotiate the boundaries, and so something collaborative. The other four assignments - thematic markup in two languages, timeline, and reference analysis, I would like to see you do 40-60 page segments. If you are involved in a chapter that is longer, I hope you can reach out and negotiate with others. I have set up a WIKI called Seeking Partners to register your advertisements on this issue! What I want is an average of 40-60, so its ok to me if you do a short chapter for one thing, and a longer chapter for another thing, as long as the AVERAGE is 40-60.
This is just a short list of subjects that could be covered in the above essays - Architecture, Art, Environment, Literature, Medicine, Music, Philosophy, Politics, Religious Practices, Ritual, etc.
Once you have made your selections, please post them in the calendar. Go to the week in question, and under the "student generated content" header, add to a bulleted list there (i.e. put an asterisk and space in front of the item). Until you are ready to post something, do NOT make a WIKI page with brackets, but rather just write the item in plain text with your name and date. For example, "A Biography by John Smith (last revised 01/09/2007)". When you do post a draft of the item, give it an actual title, and make that into a WIKI page. For example, "Joe Doe 1456-1521 by John Smith (last revised 02/09/2007)". If you revise it later, keep changing the revised date in the list. Also, when you actually post the WIKI page, also link it to other relevant pages. The following give the guidelines for how to post the initial intention to do that assignment, and then also how to title the actual WIKI page when you know the details. If only one guideline is given, it means the actual title will be the same: