The purpose of the Session Long Project in Trident University classes is to give you the opportunity to explore the applicability of the Module to your own life, work, and place in space and time, and to experiment with the Module to see how the otherwise academically rigorous presentation of a topic may, with more or less work and/or trauma, become "up close and personal".  This is done in a number of different ways -- sometimes cumulative papers, sometimes practical hands-on experimentation with a tool of some sort, sometimes reflections on a place of work or life.  The common thread is personal application, aimed at demonstrating a cumulative knowledge and understanding of the course's material.  The main purpose of the written parts of the assignments is to show that you've had some experiences doing the project, that you've thought carefully about what they mean for your own education, and that you can make some personal applications of this meaning to your own professional and/or personal understanding. Demonstrating this understanding is actually considerably more important than carrying out any spwecific step in the project instructions.

For this course, the Project will take the form of hands-on encounters with information tools and resources of several forms.  Each Module will feature some information technology experience to which you can apply yourself and hopefully stretch the bounds of your familiarity with our increasingly information-rich but sometimes painfully crowded professional toolchest.  It's almost inevitable that for any given Module, some of the class members will already have had some experience with the "tool of choice"; when it happens to you, please resist the temptation to lay into the faculty with a claim that we're not teaching you anything new; we assure you that even if it's known to you, it is NOT known to a good many of your colleagues, and they'll be glad for the opportunity.  If you do have such experience, regard it as a minor gift of time from the Powers in charge of Session Long Projects; the write-up will be a piece of cake for you.  You can use your spare time to dig further into another site or tool, or even to use the Threaded Discussion forum to share your experience and evaluations with your colleagues. 

It is a good idea to be sure that your computer is appropriately protected from the bad Guys Out There.  There are some security precautions that are particularly important to observe before setting out on any Internet excursion, including these projects.  In particular, it is essential that if you are going to download anything from the Internet, that you have adequate virus protection and anti-adware/spyware/malware screening on your systems.  Please review our suggestions for preparing your computer for active Internet use before diving headlong into that world.

Most online demo sites, when you encounter them, will require you to enter a name and an email address by way of registration; if this bothers you, try using a pseudonym and a convenience free email account from Hotmail or Gmail or Yahoo, or just try some other name.  All they want is a place to send a password, generally.  It is also possible that you will receive follow-up inquiries from sites that you have visited.  For a fuller discussion of these issues, please click here to read our policy note/advisory on website relationships.

If you work in an area subject to security clearances and regulations, or if the computer to which you have access is restricted in critical ways in terms of what you are at liberty to download and use (because of capacity, policy and/or security rules, or other factors) then your ability to carry out the assignments as presented may somewhat compromised.  Never Fear!  TUI is known for its flexibility and ability to reconfigure assignments imaginatively, and we stand ready to help you here as well!   Please click here to review our policy on assignments and national security.  Alternatives are available, and while you might miss some of the learning benefits of the assignment, you can still get a substantial measure.  Please let your instructor know as soon as you can if you will be operating under any sort of limitations on your computing capacity, so that you can work out suitable arrangements.

So -- that's the general SLP approach for this course.  If you have questions at any point about what to do or how to strategize your exercises, please contact your instructor for illumination and assistance. 

Module 1 SLP assignment: 

As your project assignment for module 1, you are to experiment with alternative web browsers and compare their utility and features. As you undoubtedly know, a web browser is simply a piece of software that requests and then decodes and displays the files that make up Internet pages. Certainly Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox are by far the most commonly used browsers, but there are probably at least 50 to 70 others that are available for public use, and virtually all of them have their staunch fans and supporters. Two other major players in the game are Google's entry Chrome and Opera, which has been through many versions ans is very popopular particularly in Europe.  Different browsers appear to have different degrees of utility depending on the materials to be accessed and the used to be made of the material by the recipient. So for this exercise, you are to compare the performance of your most commonly used browser, whatever it might be, to at least two others that you can either download or access directly online, in terms of the way they perform on several basic kinds of Internet tasks.

A fairly complete list of possible browser candidates can be found in Wikipedia's list of web browsers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers).  There are also numerous browser comparison sites that you may choose to examine and use as a basis for your choice of tools.  If you mainly use one of the Big Three, it would be most beneficial for you probably to try one of the other majors and one of the lesser known ones.

For each browser, try to use it to at least access, if not actively work with, each of the following type of common web sites:

• A news site (newspaper, cable news outlet, etc.)
• A sports site
• A large retail operation (Amazon.com or BestBuy.com might be good examples)
• A travel site
• TUIU's CourseNet site
• If possible, a private site used in your workplace (obviously, nothing too confidential!)
• A social networking site (Facebook, Twitter, etc,)
• Something else that you use frequently, if possible

When you have had a chance to conduct your comparative evaluations and make notes (it may be helpful to take screenshots if possible -- the key combination ALT-PRNTSCRN will copy the active window into your computer's clipboard, and you can then use PASTE to insert the resulting picture into your Word document), please prepare a brief summary of your experiences with the different browsers, identifying:

• any differences you detect,

• your overall assessments of their respective utilities, and for what,

• what you may have learned from the exercise about yourself, and

• how you may be able to apply this learning to your own future understanding.

AS AN ALTERNATIVE, PLEASE NOTE:  If for various reasons you do not have the flexibility on your computer system to actually try out alternative browsers, you can still do the assignment by doing some online research about alternative browsers and reporting the results of your inquiries.  It's not going to be quite as fun as hands-on experimentation or quite as revealing, but you can still show that you understand the issues and demonstrate your ability to learn lessons for yourself from such research.  After all, as we noted above, that's what these exercises are mostly about anyway.  You will never be penalized because your computer system won't allow you to do something.

Try to have some fun with this!

SLP Assignment Expectations

LENGTH:  2-3 pages typed and double-spaced

The following items will be assessed in particular:

• The degree to which you have carried out the assignment completely, or clarified why you could not and investigated alternatives

• Your ability to describe your experiences clearly and draw conclusions from them, not just narrate events

• Your ability to focus on the overall purposes of the assignment, not just its specific steps

• Your use of some in-text references to what you have read, where appropriate; please cite all sources properly