Project Objective

The project for the Tech Work unit is a podcast that will walk the listener through the experiences, hopes, and worries of the individual group members, as they relate to tech work. The content should summarize your dialogues for the prompts released over the four weeks of the unit, and highlight the most important, interesting, or contrarian ideas that surfaced. This should be a fun and creative way for your group to express its views on a variety of topics that are on your minds as you prepare for graduation and professional life. 

The Podcast is due 9/28 at 5pm.

Dialogue Guidelines  

Review the Dialogue Trainee Manual for information on how your dialogue sessions should be conducted.

Appoint one of your group members as the Facilitator. The facilitator's role will be to lead each discussion, and to keep the group organized. This means maintaining the focus of the group, helping to move the conversation towards the end goal of the creation of the podcast, and scheduling meetings and making sure everyone attends. Only one person should serve as the facilitator for the entire unit. 

Meet with your group each week for at least one hour to hold a discussion on the assigned prompt. Prompts will be released at the beginning of each week. See the Tuesday lecture information in the Course Calendar for the prompt and any additional instructions for that week's dialogue session.  

Each group member should be given an equal voice in the dialogues, and in the podcast. 

Keep the discussions friendly and avoid arguments (this isn't Twitter!), but don't shy away from ideas that might be considered controversial.  

Documenting Your Discussion on the Weekly Prompts 

Appoint one of your group members as the Scribe. Only one person should serve as the scribe for the entire unit.

The scribe's role will be to keep notes for each session. The ideas the group wants to highlight in the podcast should be recorded, along with any context you want to provide for why those ideas are important (Did an idea trigger a long dialogue? Were there diverging opinions on it when it was raised? Was it an idea that was new to the entire group?). You don't need to turn in the notes, but they should be reflected in the final production of the podcast. 

Podcast Production

Record a 45 - 60 minute podcast. Each group member should have at least 5 minutes of speaking time. A good suggested format is to have the facilitator provide an introduction and then cycle through the group members in different segments, with a segue between them to draw connections between what is being discussed.  

The podcast can be recorded incrementally and edited to put the pieces together, or it can be recorded all in one session. It's up to you. 

When you turn in your podcast, make sure to note in the introduction who was the facilitator and who was the scribe. 

The Scribe will add the podcast audio file to their shared Google drive folder for the course. Ahead of the deadline, the scribe should send Ellen an email or slack message noting that your drive is the one that the TAs should check to retrieve the submission. 

Expectations of Group Effort

All members of the group should contribute their fair share to the dialogues and the podcast. The Facilitator and Scribe are expected to put in some extra work. These roles will rotate in each unit, meaning everyone in your group will serve as either the facilitator or scribe, thus the work will balance out over the course of the semester. 

A form will be circulated to each group member after the assignment is turned in so that they can assign what they thought was the effort each person put into the dialogues and podcast. These effort reports will be factored into the individual grades that will be assigned to the students in the group.   

Prof. Scheirer will be grading the podcasts, and is very interested in what you have to say. The landscape of tech work is constantly shifting, and your voices will be important data points for helping everyone understand what Notre Dame students are thinking about with respect to tech work.