Essentially you have 3 options for the group project, though these can be subdivided and they can overlap.

1) Media Group: in teams of 3-5, you will choose cyberculture (includes videogame), TV (includes broadcast journalism), film, or advertising. Your team may want to further subdivide the topics or the tasks involved in improving the web pages associated with this topic. You can choose to rework existing pages, make pages that complement existing pages (we can just make a link from old pages to yours), or you can start from scratch and build your own pages. Your mission is to provide students next quarter with resources that will help them write smart drafts, as well as resources that will help us revise and research our final papers. Since you are your own client/demographic, it should be easy to figure out what would be useful, especially since you can test the existing pages. I recommend, however, that an anotated bibliography of articles ad books would be very useful: this would tell how to get them ,what they cover, and if they are any good. I have some book reviews students have written in the past you could use. Assessment: the best evaluation of the site will be by its users; you can do beta tests by asking people in the class to try it out, and we can do an informal poll or a formal survey at the end. We can also look to see how much of your material shows up in students' final papers. Finally, in your presentation of the site, you can point out how you've added value and functionality, to use the Silicon Valley buzzwords.

2) Community Service: a) this could be tutoring via email (though a face-to-face visit at the start and/or at the end could be fun and useful; I can help with transportation). Ideally, we would test and improve the tutoring center in Virtual College 8 , but this is not essential. Asssesment: you can write a brief narrative about what you and your tutee have gained from the experience; the tutees and the teacher can have imput as well. You can compare early vs later drafts of papers, or give a survey at the start and/or end assessing student attitude to school, likelihood of going to college, etc. You presentation could be for training or recruiting new tutors.

b) Build a website for a local non-profit group. Essentially the group would be your client and you would assess their needs and address them in the design. (I have very good project management guidelines for this.) Ideal/obvious evlauation would be by client, though you might also be able to demonstrate decreased administrative costs, increased public contact (hits, if nothing else). Beta test by users could demonstrate functionality and usability. Presentation could be on the website, or on the process of creating it.

3) Virtual College 8: this project seeks to create a prototype that will improve education, give high school students who do not have access to high quality education or high tech training a shot at a better future, and to increase green awareness and action. You can gather and categorize web resources, add these resources to web pages, program or merely train artificial intelligence agents (bots) [we need a fluent Spanish speaker for this], build structures, or help design user interfaces. These may sound tough, but anybody can do any of them. Assesssment by users or development team.

Any team can develop its own evaluation criteria, but better to do it at the start and give me a copy (it's not legally binding, after all) than later. I also highly recommend you give me a prospectus/plan for the project to give you a blueprint and to allow me to point out posible obstacles before they become a problem.

If you present on the last week of class, you don't have to come during finals week, though I require a quick debriefing/exit interview with everyone before you take off. Some projects lend themselves to a an academic paper more than others. If you want a backup for formal writing skills, you might want to consider this option, preferably with partners. Or you might want to do some sort of technical writing: a grant proposal, a user manual, a recruiting brochure, etc, especially if you think it will make you more marketable for summer internships etc. A well-designed website could also be an important part of your portfolio (you can put the URL right in your resume, along with the technical or people skills you acquire or sharpen in this project). I will describe your project and your role in your evaluation and in letters of recomendation, so taking a leadership role is a definite plus (the leader is not responsible if someone flakes out on you). You will have an opportunity to describe how you did this project in your presentation and in the project evaluation sheet (as well as who did what, and how the assignment could be improved). I have smaples of group research papers and videotape of presentations, mostly on critiques of boradcast journalism if you want to see them.