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Each student will be responsible for the development of an issue or topic within four large categories:

• Governance
• Finance
• Race, class, and gender
• Sports and society

We will divide the class into research teams with five or six students in each team.

Each team will take charge of one category. The team will meet and discuss how it wants to develop its category and then each team member will select a topic or issue that contributes to an understanding of the category. Each member of the team will give me a short, one paragraph, description of the topic they expect to develop for the discussion. Then each member of the team will go to the library and collect a basic bibliography and reading list about their topic using LUIS, the Internet, and any of the other tools our librarians will help us identify. In preparing for the discussion and for the paper based on the research for the discussion, each student will pay particular attention to the different types of materials used including books, scholarly articles and dissertations, official reports of the NCAA or conferences, interviews, news articles, congressional hearings, and other primary materials as appropriate. One of the purposes of this colloquium is to gain experience in evaluating different types of source material, especially materials of a controversial or special interest character. Intercollegiate sports topics have an abundance of such materials, and the discussion as well as the paper should reflect a critical analysis of these materials, their usefulness, and their reliability.

Each team will design a presentation that will become part of our class web site on the Internet. This presentation will consist of a short presentation of the topic and materials easily posted on the web in the form of data or examples, or important quotations. In addition, the group will pick three or four discussion questions that will provide us with material for our moderated discussion on the web. This form of discussion will, of course, be generated by each of us connecting to the web site periodically during the week, leaving messages, comments, posting new questions for discussion, answering points made by others, and so on. This is a virtual asynchronous conversation in that we do not need to be on-line at the same time, but we do need to be on-line as often as possible during the week. I will be on-line monitoring and contribution to the discussion group every day. Students should be on-line at least two or three times per week at least, more as the spirit moves you. The students in charge of the week need to be sure at least one of the team checks in and participates in the discussion every day, more often if possible. During the first few weeks, I will give the class presentation and so it will be up to me to put short presentations on the web, prepare the questions, and monitor and participate in the discussion along with all of you. We will have strong support for your web use from a Decision and Information Sciences class that has us as their project. They will help make the technical issues disappear, and they will teach us and support us in the use of these tools. These Support Troops will provide us with printed materials and additional information available on our class web site.

At the end of the week, the class discussion and materials will go to archive to make room for the next week's presentation and discussion. We will, of course, keep all interactions on-line and available for continued discussion after the first week is concluded for those members of the class who want to keep on discussing any particular topic.

In addition to the virtual presentation, each team will also make live presentations at class time and conduct a live discussion with the class. This will involve a 10 to 15 minute presentation of the topic and a subsequent discussion of questions and issues relevant to that topic. The goal is to have all of us engaged in the structured conversation on both a live and virtual basis for each of the weeks. We will need to be flexible and creative to make this form of narrative exchange work well. Note that the class meets only two hours a week, leaving the third hour to the creation of our virtual discussion. This means that we will expect a reasonable amount of on-line conversation, preparation, and presentation to be equivalent to a real-time class hour. This has some interesting consequences. It is not possible for any of us to hide from the exchange of ideas because we all have equal access to the web. There is no calling on anyone for an answer or a response, because on the web we call on ourselves to speak. It doesn't matter if one student or professor talks a lot on the web because it does not monopolize anyone else's time. If I talk ten times on a subject or one time on the subject, it has no affect on how many times you can contribute to the same conversation. Good web-based conversations require some discipline and focus or the exchanges drift off into ramblings, but the purpose of the moderators (the student team and me) is to guide the discussion if necessary and in general participate.

The order of the live and virtual groups and individual presentations will be as follows:

• Governance
• Finance
• Race, class, and gender
• Sports and society

The written work for the class includes one ten page historical essay based on the topic presented in class that develops the topic as a historical theme, not an exercise in contemporary journalism or current events. In addition, each member of the colloquium will present one critical review of an important book or substantial article related to their historical essay. This critical review should be about five pages and should consider the usefulness of the book or article for understanding the topic, the perspectives of the author and how they affected the usefulness of the book, and the materials on which the books were based. The five page review focuses on the methodological strengths and weaknesses of the item under consideration. Also, the written work will include the presentations and questions presented as part of the web-based discussion forum.