Peer Review Date: Thursday March 31, 2005

Final Due Date: Tuesday April 12, 2005

Each group will research and produce a domain in the class Wiki that will explore an assigned area of transcriptional or post-transcriptional control. The purpose of the assignment is for students to develop skills in searching for and identifying relevant papers from the scientific literature and presenting an analysis of those papers to an scientifically informed lay audience. The Wiki domain will be organized from a home page with subsidiary pages linked to it and to each other allowing the reader to explore the information generated by the group.

The pages that make up this project should conform to the format described in the Wiki Format page. It will be especially important that the site develop a hierarchical structure to represent increasingly specific information. Projects that are excessively "flat" will be downgraded.

To allow individual assessment of student effort each Wiki page produced will be identified with a single student author, whose name should appear at the bottom of the page. Labelling pages with multiple authors will not be permitted.

Undergraduates in BIOL 414 will be required to collaborate in the production of a critical review of recent literature relevant to their assigned topic. To begin the project, students should read one or more reviews on their topic. This should help to identify areas for each group member to specialize. In addition to the reviews, students should identify, read and analyze at least 5 papers from the primary research literature (web resources should in general not be used as primary reference material). Many of these may be referenced in the reviews, but they should also use online resources like Entrez a the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) to identify other papers related to the topic. You should clearly reference the source of borrowed ideas to avoid plagiarism. Wiki pages should not unduly focus on the details of the experimental or technical; the object of the assignment is not to provide close readings of the papers but to extract information about the state of the field as well as providing a critical assessment of the validity of the conclusions and hypotheses presented in the papers. In order to critically assess the papers, students will need to understand the experiments performed, but extended discussion of experimental details in the Wiki will not be appropriate.

Graduate students in BIOL 614 will also collaborate on the production of a site critically reviewing recent literature relevant to an assigned topic. Each student will have identified, read and analyzed approximately at least 10 papers from the primary research literature. Review literature may be used to gain an understanding of the field in preparation for reading primary research literature (web resources should in general not be used as primary reference material). The purpose of the BIOL 614 Wiki will be to provide a detailed critical analysis of this literature with extensive description of both the state of the field and the prospects for future work. As in the BIOL 414 assignment, students should avoid a repetition of technical details or extensive research results and instead focus on analysis of the intellectual content of the papers. They will be expected to provide extensive critical analysis of the validity and importance of the conclusions and hypotheses presented in the papers and to correlate the results of competing papers in the scientific literature.

An excellent project, worthy of an A, will identify a set of critical papers relevant to the field and provide a clear and critical description of the intellectual content of those papers. The project will be group graded; an excellent project will provide a high degree of useful linkages among pages representing the complexity of the topic.

A project worthy of a B will provide a clear description of the field but not as extensive and critical an analysis of the state of the field. A B project will have links among pages but may not be as complex.

A project worthy of a C will provide a description of the field, but not as clear or comprehensive and may have less analysis of the state of the field. It will have some links among pages, but not a complex hierarchical structure.

A project worthy of a D will lack an adequate description of the field or critical analysis.

A failed project will lack evidence of accurate or substantial description or analysis.

As a group project, students will be expected to collaborate extensively in designing the overall product. However, each student will be responsible for one or more well-defined sub-topics within the larger question. The group should discuss the organization of the Wiki site and decide on a division of the work. Each individal Wiki page will be labeled with its author's name. Since the pages are easily edited, students should print out a copy of finished pages as they are produced. Each page is labeled by the Wiki with a current time stamp; this stamp will provide evidence of the order of editing if any authorship disputes should arise. There should be no problems of this kind since no student should, without authorization, edit the work of another.

If any difficulties in group dynamics occur during the project, students should feel free to contact the instructor who will be available to rectify any problems and assist in creating a productive and collegial group dynamic.

Understanding the process of completing this project is an important goal. In order to have a greater understanding of that process, each student will turn in a self-assessment at the completion of the project. While doing the project, students should be thinking of the following questions: What aspect of the project did you find most challenging or difficult? What parts of the finished project are you most satisfied with? At the end of the project, what did you want to know more about?

Students should be vigilant to avoid committing plagiarism. This is all the more important since it is very easy to improperly acquire and use content available on the web. As is always the case, any material copied verbatim must be presented as a quotation and properly attributed. Paraphrases of material do not require quotation but also should be attributed properly to identify the source of the paraphrased material. Inadequate paraphrasing, in which the material is changed in only minor ways from the original quotation, should be avoided at all times. A discussion of the problems of plagiarism is available at the Kuhn Library web site at http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/reference/plagiarism.php3. This page has links to more extensive discussions of plagiarism that are available on the WWW.