Research Project

Introduction:

This is where you pull all of the things you have learned so far into one assignment. You will be required to prepare a research "paper", and present it on your web page.

This report can be on any subject you choose. The purpose of this assignment is to demonstrate that there is a wealth of information available over the Internet. You should choose a topic that interests you, but one you may not have researched before. Hopefully, you already have a topic that you have been gathering information about in the previous assignments.

While any subject matter can be found on the Internet, some topics will lend themselves easier to research than others. If you are unsure that your topic is a good one, ask me.

You can modify the web page on gaia you began in assignment 9, or make a new web page at a location of your choice. All of the research information you collect must be found on the Internet (Note: since the campus library and similar places are accessible via the Internet, those are valid sources).

In addition, there is no restriction on the editor you use to create your project page, and if you want to use a commercial html generator or any other non-raw text type of editor, you are free to do so. It is not required to create the html "manually."

The assignment will be graded in two parts:

Written presentation:

You must make a presentation, using the class mailing list, to your fellow classmates. You must:

• (5 points) Describe the topic you chose
  
  
• (5 points) The difficulties you encountered
  
  
• (5 points) What you learned by preparing your project report
  
  
• Don't forget to include the URL of your web page, so that others may visit it!
  
  

Web Page Requirements:

• (5 points) Your information should be presented as it would be for any research paper. This means a title (use the heading tags), and a short abstract. The report should be at least one printed page's worth of text (about two screenfulls at a normal 12 point font, which is roughly 500 words).
  
  
• (5 points) You will be required to list the sources of your information. You can do this either in a "works cited" section, or spaced within the text of your report. The sources must all be listed as links (so the reader of your report can also visit those sites).
  
  
• (15 points) Your report must have:
  
  
  1. at least 5 http links (of other web sites). These are likely to be the greatest source of your information, so the more the better.
     
     
  2. at least two ftp sites. They can be anonymous or not. (an ftp link in a web page is in the form ftp://hostname.domain).
     
     
  3. at least three Usenet newsgroups (Usenet is covered in lab 10). A news link in a web page can be written in the form "news:groupname".
     
     
  4. two images from any source. They must be related in some way to your topic.
     
     

  Optional, but desirable elements (and generally "gimme" points):

  5. the names of telnet sites where you found information on your subject.
     
     
  6. any e-mail lists, or e-mail addresses of entities you contacted to find information.
     
     
  7. other sources can include: libraries (i.e, Eureka), online chat, information from commercial on-line services (if accessible to the general Internet population), and other sources that are on-line such as Gopher links (which we have not covered in this course).
     
     
• (10 points) You are free to use any HTML elements that you feel you should use; at a minimum, you should use paragraph tags, bold and italic text, headings, and lists. Advanced elements like tables are not required, but can be used, and you will get up to 10 points for including (properly formatted) tables.
  
  

Sending the written presentation of your project to the class list will be sufficient to receive credit for the research project. (Sending it to the class list means that I will also receive a copy of it.) There is no need to send me any additional information.