Discussion V: Special Project Ideas

I don’t know how to handle this History question and need guidance.

I am setting up this forum up so people can briefly share what they are doing for a special project and get suggestions from fellow students. I also want to make sure we have topics on a wide variety of cultures and time periods. (I want to avoid topics that would normally be covered in US History classes.) I will post guidelines for the Special Project in the Assignments section at the link for Special Project: Research Report.

Please reply directly to share your topic. Put a title at the top so people will get a quick idea of what you are doing. For example, it might be “Ottoman Empire Palaces (scale model)” or “Peasant Life in 19th Century China (slide show)” or “Reflections on the 100th Anniversary of the Versailles Peace Conference (poem)”.

Please share a little bit about your topic and why you think it is interesting. Also, please tell what sort of project you are doing (such as a slide show, short story, collage, etc).

Please give feedback to at least two other students. You might tell they why you think their topic is interesting, make suggestions, or perhaps ask questions. I have noticed that even when people do similar topics they tend to emphasize different aspects of the topic, and they tend to find different ways of conveying the information.

This forum is intended to be informal and it is officially worth 15 points. You can get up to 20 points if you do a particularly good job giving feedback or suggestions to fellow students.

Please send in a post with your project idea by the end of the fourth week of class. I will keep this forum open through the following Tuesday so that people can comment on each other’s ideas. Later on we will have another forum where people will actually share the projects and give each other feedback.

example:

Sykes-Picot Agreement (Slide show)

The reason I selected the Sykes-Picot Agreement is because of its impact on the Middle East. The agreement divided up the Ottoman Empire to determine which territory would be under British and French control. The impact of the Sykes-Picot Agreement still haunts the Middle East to this day. The Sykes-Picot Agreement shaped borders without consideration of different political views and different cultural identities. My project will be a slide show presentation that provides a historical breakdown of events that led to the agreement and the events that followed as a result. It will include comparison maps of the region before and after and show where the conflicts exist today to determine if there is a correlation. I think it will be interesting because it will help to better understand current events and conflicts in the Middle East.