EC213 Macroeconomics
National University of Ireland, Galway
Semester II 1999/2000
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Web Project Guidelines
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Requirements
Your web project accounts for 35% of your grade in this course. Note
that as per the Faculty rule, you must score at least 35% in the
Summer Examination for your mark in the web project to be taken into
account.
You are required:
- To write a set of web pages, with about 1000 words of text,
focusing on one aspect of the general topic which you were
assigned, when you registered for tutorials.
- To post this set of pages on the web itself---I will cover the
mechanics of this in a lecture next week.
- To submit also a hard copy of your project to me, as a back-up.
(I will not accept projects on disk, or sent as attachments by email,
nor will I mark projects only submitted as hard copy.)
The submission date is the last day of the Semester, Friday
14th April 2000. No extensions.
Objectives
- To produce a set of web pages on a particular aspect of a topic
in macroeconomics which would be a useful starting point for someone
studying/researching the topic in question. This implies that a key task for you is to provide your reader
with useful, top-quality references, and especially to
provide links to relevant on-line resources.
- To introduce you to the process of research, and thereby
appreciate how the relatively abstract concerns of a textbook can be
related to lively theoretical and policy debates in macroeconomics.
- To introduce you especially to the wealth of on-line research
resources in economics, and in the process, to enable you to
discriminate between them in terms of quality and relevance.
- To provide you with an introduction to the process of writing
and posting up web pages, a valuable element in your portfolio of
skills.
Beginning the project
Your first task is to survey the topic (including those materials
provided on the web page related to your tutorial group), in order to
begin to select a particular aspect on which your own project will
focus. Some of the topics relate to areas of the course we have not
covered yet; a natural first step is then for you to seek out an
introductory account of the topic, and this you will more than likely
find in the required text for this course, and/or other intermediate
macroeconomics texts. The main problem you face is one that recurs in
all research exercises; how to narrow down a potentially very large
amount of material into a project which is focused and manageable.
I would strongly advise you to contact other members of your tutorial
group, via email if necessary (I've posted listings of names and email
addresses on the web site) to help find your way through the material
and share e.g., working papers/articles which you may have downloaded.
In about two weeks time, if you have settled on some particular aspect
of the topic on which you wish to focus, you are welcome to email me a
brief outline, and I may be able to give feedback for at least some of
these individually. Starting next week, we'll take a look at how one
actually writes and posts up web pages.
Assessment Criteria
I will assess your project work by asking the following sorts of
quesitons:
- Is this a focused, relevant and coherent account of the topic
in question, which displays understanding of the material?}
- Would this project provide a useful starting point for someone
else who was studying/researching this topic?}
- Does the project provide clear indications of where the raw
material is sourced e.g., by clearly indicating where direct quotation
is involved, and by providing comprehensive references to sources?}
- Does the project take advantage of the possibilities of web
pages to provide direct links to high quality resources of relevance?}
- Is the project well presented? This can cover whether the
writing is clear and free of grammatical, typographical and spelling
errors, but also whether the pages are easy to read and print out, whether
it is easy for the reader to navigate the set of pages and whether all the
links, internal and external, work or not. Good presentation in this
context is not a matter of fancy graphics and/or a jumble of
colours and fonts: simplicity and readability are the appropriate criteria.
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