Hi everybody, Professor Steve here. I want to take a moment to walk you through our upcoming assignment, the 20% Primary Source Analysis assignment. It's a really, really easy assignment, but it's easy to get sort of overwhelmed or confused when you're reading the instructions.
So seeing it visually, seeing what an assignment might look like, and walking through some of the mechanics of how to put this assignment together, I think will be helpful. for lots of students. So let's get that started.
Okay, the very best advice I can give you on this or any assignment is to read the instructions very carefully and make sure you are delivering exactly what those instructions are asking for. Take a look at the grading rubric for the assignment as well because it walks you through in detail exactly how your grade is going to be derived. And so you can read those rubrics and sort of... Use that to retro engineer your assignment, making sure it's, you know, making sure even further that it's fulfilling the assignment requirements as reflected both in the instructions and in the grading rubric. So a lot of history when you're doing history, a lot of it is cerebral, right?
It's about creativity. It's about creative thinking. It's going on in the creative part of your mind.
But a lot of getting grades. for a history course or getting grades in a college course is about following instructions. You know, I used to work for a pest control company, like getting rid of cockroaches and stuff. And there's this one guy that owned this pest control company, and he only hired college or university students.
And the other people in the other companies used to make fun of him because he used to have to pay extra because those people had diplomas and degrees. But he always justified it saying, hey I don't care what they took in college I don't care what they took in university if they have a college diploma or a university degree what that proves to me is that they're capable of following instructions and that's what I'm looking for in an employee so there is an analogy to be made with this assignment and other assignments as you look in the instructions and in the grading rubric a good chunk of your mark is simply for following basic instructions, right? Not even getting to the cerebral history part. If you know nothing whatsoever about history, you can get a substantial portion of marks on these assignments just by completing the mechanical requirements. So keep this stuff in mind, right?
When you submit your presentation, it needs to be in video format, MP4 format, and you do that by making a PowerPoint presentation like this. this one and then you render it into video format and there's step-by-step instructions linked within the wider assignment instructions on how to do that and I'm going to talk about how to do that I'm going to visually show you in upcoming slides here as well so make sure that's the case you can also take your rendered mp4 file and upload it to YouTube or a similar file sharing site and then just submit the link right Again, all this is just straight from the instructions. So you've got to be like me down here.
Video narration with your face visible must appear on all slides. Make sure you show your Sheridan ID card at the beginning of the presentation. Hold it up to the camera clearly and visibly for five seconds on the opening slide. Your video presentation should be five to ten minutes in length and a maximum of 20 words per slide.
The idea is not to... copy and paste a bunch of words from the internet or that you got AI to write for you and then read them off the screen, that gets you zero percent. This assignment is about your thoughts about what you think, right?
So you can use words on your slides as headings to kind of work as a cue or work as notes for what you're going to talk about. But again, your narration is supposed to be conversational, not scripted. And it's about what you think and what you say, not about what you can copy and paste onto a slide. So keep all those mechanical requirements in mind because they are relatively they represent relatively easy marks.
An important skill you're going to have to know is how to do these video narrations in the bottom corner of your PowerPoint presentation. It's really, really easy. You just go to slideshow on the top taskbar and then follow it from there.
Follow the tabs to recording. You can provide either audio or audio video recording and you want audio video recording like I'm doing right now in the corner here. I've given you an example here on this slide that kind of walks you through how to do this.
And different versions of PowerPoint, the screens may look a little bit different, but it's the same process. You go to slideshow and then you pick recording. Then you pick video recording. I think you'll find it all very, very easy.
And there is a tutorial video embedded right in the assignment instructions. Now there's this and then you can look for other examples for tutorials and walkthroughs on how to do this. But it's an important, it's an easy skill, but it's an important skill.
So you want to make sure that your project is narrated with video using the webcam so your face is visible like the example I'm providing right now. Taking screenshots of your assigned section of the Rosetta Stone and applying those screenshots to your presentation and talking about them is a big part of this assignment. I've used some examples here from previous iterations of this assignment when we were using different artifacts.
Just to make the point that you want to have an understanding of this ability, how to do that, how to take a shot of what's on your screen. I mean, one of the things this assignment asks you to do is to locate your assigned section on one electronic model of the Rosetta Stone and then give a screenshot that shows a close up of that section on a different e-model of the Rosetta Stone. So what you want to do is, you know, call up those images on your computer and then take a screenshot of that image.
and be able to drop that image into your PowerPoint presentation and then talk about it a bit. These are all really basic computer skills. Most of you, no doubt, can probably do this in your sleep, but some of you might be unfamiliar with this or at least unfamiliar with this presentation process. But so keep that in mind. Again, this is just reiterating what is in the instructions, adding and using and discussing.
screenshots, using those screenshots to illustrate what you're talking about, to illustrate the way in which you are answering the questions of this assignment. That's an important skill to have and it's one that you will want to learn prior to putting your assignment together. Okay so part one of this assignment involves locating your assigned section on the electronic models of the Rosetta Stone and so when you do that as we just discussed you want to take screenshots of that and use that to help illustrate what you're talking about you want to find it right you need to find your section on one of the e models and then and then go to a close-up of that section on the other e model So, you know, in order to confirm that you did that correctly and to give you a chance to talk about the process of how you were able to do that, you want to use these screenshots.
In part one, you also need to transcribe your assigned section of the Rosetta Stone into English. And there's step-by-step instructions for doing that and getting help with that. in the instructions. You don't have to know how to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. There's already basic English translations provided by one of the e-models and then you take it from there.
And again more details about that in the instructions. But that's the type of thing you would want to use screenshots perhaps to illustrate as well. But again, if you look at the instructions and in the grading rubric a lot of your grades from this section is going to derive from your creativity.
What you know do you think why did you arrive at the translation that you've arrived at what did you use to help put this the words on this artifact into context so for part one year you want to have like a minimum of two slides one for locating one for transcribing but you might want to go beyond that four or five slides or whatever you want the better the more you illustrate age your arguments here and your data, the better, the more illustrative, the more illustratively you present your data, the better off you're going to be in terms of grades and in terms of effectiveness of your assignment. All right, there's just two simple parts to this assignment. In part one, which we've already gone through, we located our assigned section on the e-models of the Rosetta Stone, and we used one of those models to help us come up with an English translation of that assigned section. Now, part two is simply answering two questions, and keep in mind this needs to be at least two slides, so one slide in your presentation for each question.
So the first question is now that you've translated your assigned section into English, what do you think it means? So, I mean, if this was my presentation, I think I would jazz up these slides with a few pictures. See, I got a little picture of the Rosetta Stone passage in Egyptian hieroglyphics, in Egyptian Demotic, and in Koine Greek, in ancient Greek. I think it looks pretty nice.
I'm not necessarily an artist, but hey, at least I got some pictures, right? But I know I didn't spend too much time with the pictures because I know that most of the marks for this section are going to come from my answers, from what I say. And again, if I just read off something from the Internet or read off something that I wrote for me, I'm going to flub this whole section.
Right. The instructor is looking for creativity, looking for, you know, applied knowledge, looking that you've. taken knowledge, knowledge from this course, knowledge from other sources, and you've assessed and analyzed that knowledge and you've turned it into received wisdom. A fancy way of saying, what do you think? That's all you have to do.
All right. So for instance, if I translated, if I had an assigned section of the Rosetta Stone and I was asked what I thought it meant, there's a good chance I might say, well, it showed the Egyptian population was restless. And there's a variety.
If you read a little bit about the Rosetta Stone and about ancient Egypt and more recent ancient Egypt that had been taken over by the Greeks in the wake of Alexander the Great, there's lots of reason to understand why the Egyptian population was restless. And again, you don't need to be a scholar of ancient classics. I spent like 10 minutes on the Wikipedia page and came up with that, right? But notice I didn't read the Wikipedia page.
I said, well, I looked at the module material in ancient Egypt. I read the stuff about the Rosetta Stone that's within the instructions itself. I read some of the optional readings covering the same topic from the module material.
And based on that stuff, here's what I think. The second question, how, if at all, do you think the contents of your assigned section might still be relevant or significant to us today? Easy. Again, I'm not being quizzed on my knowledge of ancient Egyptian history.
I'm being asked, hey, look at this stuff from thousands of years ago. Do you think we should still care about it? What do you think?
That's all I'm doing, right? Again, this assignment is not quizzing you about your ability to hold factual knowledge in your head. It's evaluating you based on your demonstrated ability to think like a historian, to work like a historian, to understand the historical process. And I'm trying to show that understanding here in my sample answer to the sample question by saying, hey, well, as I said, look at my assigned passage translated into English for all these reasons I listed. I think it shows that the Egyptians back then were pretty restless.
I think the government was afraid of revolution. So why do I think that's relevant today? When I look around the world, I see lots of people, lots of populations that are restless. I see lots of governments that are afraid of revolution. That alone makes it likely.
You know, making that connection, right? Making that connection between past and present there, that's the type of thing I will be looking for when I'm grading this assignment. And... So again, it doesn't have to be great detail, but your entire presentation needs to be anywhere from five to ten minutes. And a lot of that time you want to spend, a good portion of that time you would want to spend on the analysis and reflection section because it's a big chunk of the marks.
And again, to see how your grade will be broken down, to see how this assignment will be evaluated, you really want to take a good look at that grading. And then your final step is to render your presentation into video format. You can see in the example there, you just click on file on the taskbar, go down to export and then pick export to video.
Simply follow the instructions. There's options there in terms of resolution and that type of thing. And then you'll be able to save it to your computer.
And then that will be the file you submit. You can either just submit the MP4 file. Or you can upload that file to a video sharing platform like YouTube and then submit that link as well.
So, again, how to render your presentation into video format is there's a tutorial video for that also available in the instructions. So make sure you read the instructions very carefully. Make sure you are fulfilling the instructions.
You're doing what the instructions. ask you to do you're fulfilling the assignment uh requirements and then if you're doing that try to go above and beyond the assignment requirements say a little bit more than the minimum go in depth and again um you know you want this to be conversational you don't want to be reading off a script you don't want to print something out with ai and just read it that's the type of thing that kills your mark right because then that's not you expressing your you So you're documenting your journey through this historical research. That's basically what this primary source analysis assignment is all about. So read the instructions very carefully. Make sure you know what you're doing.
Deliver on those assignment requirements as closely as possible. And you should do very, very well on this assignment.