Scholarship Skills

• Course Description
  
  The purpose of this course is to make you better scholars. It will make you better writers, better presenters, and better reviewers. It concentrates on your reading, writing and presentation skills, that is, on the production and consumption (including critique) of the “media” used by scholars to communicate today. 
  
  You will learn to both read and write research material, such as conference and journal articles. You will learn to both listen to and prepare and present oral presentations; and you will learn a bit about constructing web resources. You will also learn skills that will prepare you for your career as a scholar including: structure and content of papers and theses; how to be an effective reviewer of material written by others; and how to prepare yourself for the job hunt in academia or industry when you graduate. When you have completed the course, you should have a feel for the tasks and activities of modern scholars, and be prepared to carry them out.
  
  While this course will help you hone your writing skills, it is not a remedial English class.   If you lack basic English skills, you should take some English classes before attempting Scholarship skills.
  
  
• Assignments
  
  There will be both exercises and projects for the course. Exercises will typically be due the class period after they are assigned, and will be graded on a “check-off” basis: if you turn in the exercise, you get the points.
  
  Projects will typically take a week or more each, and will be graded with specific points. There will be seven projects during the course:
  
  • (P1) an annotated bibliography,
  • (P2) a revision of a 2-page (~600-word) summary of a research paper, you will have written the original as an exercise
    
  • (P3) a 5-minute presentation of a research paper
  • (P4) a 5-page (~1500-word) background paper on a technical topic,
  • (P5) a revision of your 5-page paper P4, and
  • (P6) a 15-minute presentation based on papers above.
  Some presentations may be scheduled outside of normal class periods, but all students are requested to attend. All assignments are due at the beginning of class on the due date.

  Assignments should be completed independently, although you can and should ask others for feedback on what you write. Be extremely careful to avoid plagiarism in completing your exercises and projects. If you are cutting and pasting text from another document, you are probably plagiarizing, unless you are quoting the material and citing the source. Plagiarism can take other forms, such as paraphrasing, or offering the ideas of another person as your own.

• Grading
  
  There will be no exams in the course. Your grade will depend on the exercises and course projects, roughly as follows. P2 won't be graded independently; it's a milestone on the way to P4.
  
  

  Project	Value
  Exercises	15%
  P1: Annotated Bibliography	15%
  P2: Revision of 2-page summary	10%
  P3: 5-minute Presentation	10%
  P4: five-page technical paper	15%
  P5: Revise 5-page paper	20%
  P6: 15-minute Presentation	15%