Built at Week 1, Week 6 and Week 11.
The brief#
Keep a record of one artefact a week for eleven weeks, to a standard that would let somebody who was not there check it.
The log is the spine of the course. Everything else is written out of it.
An entry is not a paragraph about a funny sign. It is a record with four parts: what the artefact said, where and when it was recorded, how confident you are that it exists as described, and what you think produced it. The fourth part is where you are allowed to be wrong, and it is the only part where being wrong is free — as long as it is labelled.
What you submit#
A single markdown file, or a directory of them, in the format used by the shared corpus. Photographs where you have them, cropped as the policy requires.
Entries dated after their week are accepted and marked as what they are: a record written from memory. Say so in the entry. A log that pretends eleven Wednesdays went perfectly is less credible than one that does not.
What we are not looking for#
Volume. Eleven good records beat thirty, and a week where you found nothing and wrote down what you looked for is a legitimate entry.
The spec
The brief poses the problem and leaves room for a response. The spec is the fixed part: what a marker checks. Some lines can be checked mechanically; the rest call for judgement.
- eleven entries, one per teaching week, each with source, date and verification level
- every mechanism attribution is marked as an inference and not as an observation
- at least one entry revises an earlier entry, and says what changed
How it is marked
The log is marked on the quality of its records rather than the interest of its finds. A dull specimen recorded so that a stranger could verify it beats a spectacular one that cannot be traced, and a log that revises an earlier verification level upward or downward is doing the thing this course is for.