I am hoping that all coursework completed by students can be presented publicly - i.e. that they will be posted so that other students can read them and potentially give feedback.
The key to academic success is practice – especially practicing writing. Writing is hard for everyone, especially when a genre is unfamiliar. Above all I just want you to get used to writing without worrying too much about being perfect at it.
All written work must be completed for a student to pass the course.
So, let's get this out in the open. Participation is always difficult to assess. Even in face-to-face classes, I can measure what I see, but I don't know the work that has been done behind the scenes (especially if you are a quiet or shy student). So typically, I have had students assign themselves a mark for participation each class – based on a rubric assigning points for attendence and for degree of participation.
Your participation mark will be determined by your attendance and the quality of your contribution to class discussion. At the end of each class you attend (5pts), I will request that you also assign yourself a mark out of 5pts for the quality of your participation. At the end of each term, you will write up a process letter explaining the quality of your participation.
Part of effective participation is learning to lead discussions. Each student will be in charge of facilitating the seminar each week.
We are using Obsidian to help you practice different kinds of writing - using the reading to build a library of notes useful for your future work in historical games studies. We will practice citing works properly, turning the texts of experts into your own words, and then processing these ideas. At the end of term, you may wish to submit your Obsidian library to showcase your work over the course of the term.
You will be asked to produce notes which will prepare you for completing the annotated bibliography, which will need to be submitted as Obsidian notes.
Some weeks we will complete exercises to introduce you to different tools in the Historical Game Studies toolkit. These are meant to get you practicing the tools and techniques we will be learning in class, but will not used for the purposes of assessment.
You will use your own interests to structure your assignments, and you will choose a path to complete the three major assignments that aligns with your scholarly and professional goals.
All students will complete the first assignment, the annotated bibliography. After completing your annotated bibliography, you will pick one of the following paths, Game Pedagogy, Game Design or Game Research, which will determine your other two assignments for the course. You should build on the research you have already completed in your annotated bibliography to complete the other two assignments.
You may be asked to provide comments and constructive criticism on written work completed by your peers (expectations set out here). We'll use the annotation tool hypothes.is or in-built commenting functions if they are shared as word processors files (Google Docs/ Word).
A "process letter" is a term we use to describe an end-of-term self-evaluation of your own work. You will write this up as a way to justify the grade you will assign to yourself for first term, based on guided questions I will provide. Some of your work may be done in groups, so part of your letter will be the pleasant job of acknowledging those who did an exceptional job and the more difficult one of calling out those who were less satisfactory.
Each week you will:
prepare for class by completing the assigned readings and making annotations on the texts (primary sources, secondary sources, images, websites)
attend seminars, where students will discuss preassigned questions suggested by the weekly (student) seminar leader
play games and think about them and then write about them.
