Milestone Assignemnt
In task 2-2, you will submit a final paper topic. You will introduce your chosen contemporary conflict and the country or region of that conflict. Specifically, assess ways your chosen country (or region) has impacted or modified the physical and/or cultural environment to its benefit or detriment. Analyze the advantages and disadvantages the chosen country (or region) has attained due to its location. Identify the major conflict the country (or region) faces. Regarding this conflict, describe potential solutions. The post should be 500 words, not including the in-text citations or a Works Cited/Bibliography of 3-5 outside resources/references. This milestone is graded with the Paper Topic Rubric.
GEO 200 Paper Topic Rubric
Requirements of submission: This paper should be a short paper of 500 words in length that is posted in the Journal section of Blackboard.
Your chosen conflict needs to be a contemporary conflict. It will structure what you discuss in your Milestone papers. Your information on the environment and location will be important to understand/analyze your chosen conflict.
All papers need to have the following formatting:
500 words of text.
Proper essay organization and tone.
In-text citations and a Works Cited/Bibliography section in APA or MLA citations. Citations/Works Cited do not count toward 500 word limit.
Instructor Feedback: Students can find their feedback in the grade book as an attachment.
|
Critical Elements |
Exemplary |
Proficient |
Needs Improvement |
Not Evident |
Value |
|
Assessment of Environments |
Comprehensively assesses ways a chosen country or region has impacted or modified the physical and/or cultural environment to its benefit or detriment, substantiated by scholarly sources (27-30) |
Assesses ways a chosen country or region has impacted or modified the physical and/or cultural environment to its benefit or detriment
(24-26) |
Minimally assesses ways a chosen country or region has impacted or modified the physical and/or cultural environment to its benefit or detriment
(21-23) |
Does not assess ways a chosen country or region has impacted or modified the physical and/or cultural environment to its benefit or detriment
(0-20) |
30 |
|
Analysis of Location |
Conclusively analyzes the advantages and disadvantages the chosen country or region has attained due to location substantiated by scholarly sources (27-30) |
Analyzes the advantages and disadvantages the chosen country or region has attained due to location
(24-26) |
Attempts to analyze the advantages and disadvantages the chosen country or region has attained due to location
(21-23) |
Does not analyze the advantages and disadvantages the chosen country or region has attained due to location
(0-20) |
30 |
|
Identification of Conflict |
Effectively identifies the major conflict the country or region faces, and describes potential solutions to this conflict substantiated by scholarly sources (27-30) |
Identifies the major conflict the country or region faces, and describes potential solutions to this conflict
(24-26) |
Minimally identifies the major conflict the country or region faces, and describes potential solutions to this conflict
(21-23) |
Does not identify the major conflict the country or region faces; does not describe potential solutions to this conflict
(0-20) |
30 |
|
Writing (Mechanics) |
No errors related to organization, grammar, and style (9-10) |
Minor errors related to organization, grammar, and style (8) |
Some errors related to organization, grammar, and style (7) |
Major errors related to organization, grammar, and style (0-6) |
10 |
|
Earned Total Comments: |
100% |
||||
Milestone 1 help/suggestions
Posted on: Monday, March 16, 2015 12:34:24 PM EDT
Hi students,
This announcement is specifically regarding Milestone 1. I want you to have something that you can easily reference when you go to the Announcement page. I’m going to discuss here the importance of a strong Milestone 1 paper, suggestions on choosing topics, and some help with writing this paper. Please do read this, and if you have further questions as you work on your paper, do not hesitate to email me.
The role of Milestone 1:
Milestone 1 is a topic proposal. This chosen contemporary conflict topic will be central not only to this milestone but also Milestone 2 and Milestone 3. Together, these assignments are a large chunk of your course grade. They build off of each other (with the help of comments from me) with the goal that your Milestone 3 paper is a polished analysis paper on your chosen topic. Therefore, it is quite important that you consider your contemporary conflict and do some research while putting together this paper. It is important that you give this assignment time and effort as the more refined and focused your topic is in this Milestone 1, the easier it will be for you to move onto the following milestones.
This can be very overwhelming for some students. I have some suggestions on how to choose a topic below. To start, please make sure that you go to Course Information and read the document on the final project AND the topic proposal. The topic rubric is important as that’s how I will be grading your Milestone 1 assignments. The final project document shows where you want to end up in terms of your final analysis paper at the end of the term. Once your milestones are submitted, I will review these papers. I will be grading them with comments, and I will also say whether your topic is approved or not approved. Then we can work together via email to make sure that your topic is refined for continued success through the following modules.
Suggestions about choosing topics:
These conflicts must be contemporary. That means that the conflict should be occurring right now, not something from the past. I do not want to see, for example, proposals to write about the 1970s Iran revolution or the US Civil War and so forth. I have exceptions to this rule in the past, and students have not succeeded in their papers as well as they could have with a contemporary conflict. Therefore, I do not make that exception anymore. I want you all to be as well placed as possible to succeed in these assignments.
One common issue is that people seem to be interested in proposing countries rather than conflicts. The central part of your paper should be the conflict and then the physical and human geography and details that help us to provide context and depth to those conflicts. You are NOT writing a research paper on, for example, China. But rather you should propose a particular conflict in China/with China/concerning China. There are a lot of conflicts. For example, China has a serious issue with dealing with aging populations due to one-child policies. China has rapid development that is based off of using coal as energy and serious pollution concerns in their cities. Then there are international conflicts over, for example, support of North Korea. So rather than say that you want to research China, you should be talking about what conflict you want to research and then provide information on China relative to that conflict.
These conflicts need focus. It’s very easy for students to see the description of 7-10 pages and then think that it’s a lot of space to deal with, for example, 50 years of conflict between Israel and Gaza. It’s not near enough space. So I suggest that you stay away from huge subjects like Israel (unless you can show me that you are focused on a particular conflict within the larger conflict). Also, topics that are too large are things like deforestation in South America or ISIS as a whole. These are huge topics with many different large aspects (poverty, colonization, trade relations, etc.) for a huge region. Immigration from Mexico is, again, way too broad of a subject. So while writing your paper, you should ask yourself if you are focused in your conflict. What aspects of human and physical geography are important? How do you frame this conflict? I’ve seen some very good papers on why Ebola is so difficult to combat in Liberia, but then I’ve seen some papers on Ebola that never really focused on a region or the issues concerning the spread of Ebola and didn’t turn out well.
The starting point is to start reading the news. Look at some online news sites (BBC News, NPR, CNN). Is there an article that catches your eye as interesting but not front page news (ex: Costa Rica is considering building their own canal; bees are being shipped to agricultural lands)? See what’s happening around the world. You can also choose a local conflict, so check some community papers if that’s more of your interest to see what’s happening in your neighborhood, city, and so forth (ex: some sort of development conflict)?
Structuring and writing your Milestone 1:
This is a paper. Some people think that because you’re posting this assignment in the Journal section, that you are writing a blog entry or something similar. We are looking to see an organized, cited, and well-written paper.
Organization: These papers should be in essay format. That means that you need to have paragraphs (introduction, topics broken into appropriate paragraphs, and a conclusion).
Quotes: Using a quotation is like using salt; do so sparingly. If there is a particularly amazing phrasing of something, then it’s okay to use a quote (not really long!). Otherwise, I want to hear your words, your understanding of what your source is saying.
Citations: Finally, you need to make sure that you are doing a Works Cited AND in-text citations in your paper. You can choose APA or MLA formatting, but you must do this. If you do not do both of these, you are plagiarizing (see policies on plagiarism), and there are serious consequences to plagiarism on your grade. 500 words isn’t a ton of space, so your works cited and in-text citations do not count as going over your word limit. If you are having some questions about how to cite, then an excellent resource is OWL Purdue (MLA and APA).
As always, if you are having some problems or you have some questions, you can email me. If you email me and tell me your idea (explain it rather than send me one sentence), then I’ll let you know what I think. I do NOT want to see your full paper, however. We’re working on topics and not proofreading your paper.
Cheers,
