GAOC VideoBlogging

Overview:
With the last round of GAOC you will report on current events for one specific country and choose one story to report on in-depth. This time, however, you will also provide additional historical context and record your reports to video and podcast them to the world via a video blog. Your work with GAOC will build on both your experience with geography-based current events reporting and also your video production skills. You will be asked to review all podcasts of your fellow core members each week and complete a weekly quiz on the material. Lastly, all of your research and practice will culminate in a final video documentary on the history and current status of relationships between the United States and the rest of the world (more on this in a separate document).

The Details:
Each week you will be asked to create a video podcast of the news for your GAOC with the following elements:

• Introduction of your country – should include pictorial geographic overview moving from big to small, highlighting continent, significant neighbors and bodies of water, and any other important geographic details. You should be able to reuse this piece of your report each week, though you should also highlight state/province or cities from your focus story for a particular week.
• News headlines – Provide at least 3 news headlines for your country. Your headlines can cover a broad range of interest areas, but should include at least enough information so that the viewer has some sense of what the headline means.
• Focus Story – Choose one story from your headlines you can provide a more in-depth account of. This should include not only an overview of the events of the current story, but also a brief explanation of the historical background for at least one aspect of your story. To the extent that you choose stories that involve international relations, you will find that you will naturally develop knowledge and material to support your final project.
• Sources – Include in your credits a listing of all of your sources for your headlines, focus story, and background research. As always with GAOC, your news should come from international sources, and should be varied within a single report and especially over multiple reports.

Dates:
Your finished podcast will be due by Tuesday each week. You will be responsible or viewing all of the podcasts of your core members by Friday morning each week when the weekly quiz will be administered.

Grading:
You will be assessed an Effort score for the successful completion of your weekly podcasts and a Critical Thinking score based on your performance on your weekly quizzes.

Early Modern Story

Overview
You will be writing an original story from within the “shared universe” of your Early Modern blog topics. The goal of this assignment is to create a compelling narrative that captures the drama that lies between the great and the personal conflicts of the Early Modern Period, and also to draw connections among related topics. In the first week, you will post as a new topic on your blog a proposed plot outline for your story. You will then read all of the plot outlines for those topics that are related to yours, or within the "topical cluster" of those topics that you commented on or that commented on your topic. You'll then comment on plot ideas or changes in order to create connections between your story and theirs. In subsequent weeks, you will post each of progressive drafts on your blog and continue to make comments on each others’ drafts, providing not only editing advice but also suggestions for achieving a clear and compelling plot.

The Specifics
• Plot outline should contain 8 sections: 5 plot elements (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution), internal conflicts, external conflicts, and the relationship between them.
• 5 – 10 pages (3000 words min. – 5000 words max.) typewritten
• Should contain at least 3 “sections”: exposition and rising action, climax, and falling action and resolution; sections may be written as scenes, chapters, or whatever makes sense for your story
• Can be written in any genre or style
• Must include all of the following (this is what you’ll be assessed on):

• Detailed and expansive descriptions of setting and character.
• Successful plot containing all 5 main plot structures: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution.
• Clear external and internal conflicts within the plot. External conflicts should contain references to and details from research on Early Modern topics, including at least one relationship between topics. Internal conflicts should be related in some way to external conflicts.
• Linkages between your narrative and those within your “topical cluster.” These may include common characters, setting, events, or any plot elements. You do not have to write within the same “story,” but rather within the same “universe” (think of writing fan fiction of one another’s work).

• Final draft must be spell checked and should be edited for grammar to the best of your ability


Key Dates:
2/12 – Plot Outline Due
2/15 – Draft of Exposition-Rising Action (800-1200 words)
3/1 – Draft of Exposition – Climax (1800 – 2500 words)
3/8 – Draft of Exposition – Resolution (3000 – 5000 words)
3/13 – Final Draft of story due

Your next assignment will ask you to find a set of topics from our list of Early Modern topics that relate in some specific way to your own topic. For each of these, you will first read the blog entry created by the person who researched that topic so that you can benefit from their work. You will then add a comment on their blog entry specifying the relationship that you have recognized between your topic and theirs.

Each comment only needs to be 1-2 paragraphs long, though can be longer if you wish. Your comments should be more than vague generalities (e.g. they both involved Europe) but rather should identify specific relationships, whether cause/effect, personal of ideological influence, enemies or allies, or some other specific. Please make sure to create a link back to your own blog entry when you comment. Also, try not to just repeat the relationship that someone has identified for your own topic.

First 2 comments due January 29
Second 2 comments due February 5

Early Modern Topic Blog

You will be researching your topics and reporting out to the rest of the class via your blog on what you’ve found. You should take notes as you go and make sure you take down your sources, as you will be asked to cite them on your blog entry. Each of your topics are potentially huge and vast in scope, so you should limit your research to enough to get a general sense of the key people, places, and events involved in your topic, such that you could convey these in a blog entry in 3-5 paragraphs.

Your blog entry should be written in the fact-oriented form of a news story. It should answer the following questions:

• Where did the key events occur? Were they focused in one country or region or were they spread across multiple areas? If so, what were the most important ones? What were the key geographical features of these areas that contributed to the events of your topic?
• Who were the key people associated with your topic? Who were their principal allies and enemies and why? What were the parts of their personal histories or personalities that contributed to the events in your topic?
• What were the key events in your topic? What were the main conflicts that emerged and how were they resolved? How did these events affect the lives of the people in the country, region, or the world as a whole? What was the relationship between the larger conflicts of your topic and the personal conflicts of the people involved with them?

At the end of your blog entry, please list your citations as web links to your sources.

Due January 22, 2007

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