China 1500-1800 and Unit 2 topic The Last Great Islamic Empires Assignments | Essay Help Services

Tasks
1. You must do a Discussion Board assignment for either Unit 1 or Unit 2 of Week 1. The Discussion Board assignment includes a 300 word response to the prompts and two paragraph-length replies to other students’ posts.
2. You must do the Info Lit Blog assignment for both Units 1 and 2.

Literacy Blogs Instruction
Important Reminders
Before working on the blog, review the section on “What are Historical Sources” under Course Information. Also, read carefully the Information Literacy Blog Instructions linked above.
Here are some extra pointers: When assessing an article on a website, you need to check deeply into the source to see if it is being presented by a reliable website. Be sure to find the home page and check out the “About” section to see what the site’s producers say about their mission, goals, and point of view. If the aim is to do anything more than present facts, you need to be careful about biases.
You also need to check out the author of any articles you access and read the article carefully when you look for biases. To be reliable, the author must present some academic credentials (the name of the author tells us nothing). When you read the article, check carefully to see if the author is making an argument about the subject matter. If the author does anything more than just present facts, he or she is not being objective.
Finally, in addition to discussing the information you found on a specific topic, you should look at the website as a whole for its overall value to researchers. It is important to note whether the site includes primary source documents, multimedia and interactive features, etc. This is what makes websites especially valuable.
What are Historical Sources?
The reading materials in this course have been designed to help you learn history by exploring some of the thousands of online historical sources that can be found on the Web. Many are primary sources — that is, they are first-hand sources drawn from people who lived in the past. Most of the time, the primary sources used by historians are written: letters, diaries, newspapers, government reports, or books written at the time the historian is studying. Most of the documents you will use for this course are primary sources. This means they are taken from as close as we can come to the history itself – to the experience of people who lived through the period we are studying. Of course, we can never duplicate the precise experience of someone who lived fifty or a hundred years ago, in a very different time and place. But when used carefully, primary sources allow us to come closer to the history we are learning, and to ask better questions about the events and actions and ideas that transpired in the past. Before we are able to ask those questions, though, we need a method for evaluating the sources themselves.
How Reliable is a Source?
There are a few ways we can judge the reliability and value of a primary source. Here are some questions to ask as you read a source document. Your instructor may ask you to answer these for class or in writing. These questions can be also be used when reading a source.
• Who is the author of the source? What was the author’s motivation? Why did they take the trouble to write it?
• Was it created spontaneously (for example, a letter written in response to a sudden change of circumstances)? Was it a routine transaction (for example, a government report)? Is the source the result of a long, deliberate, thoughtful process, or was it written quickly?
• Did the author or authors of the source have first-hand knowledge of the event described? Or did they report what others saw and heard?
• What was the intended audience of the source? Was it personal (a letter or diary)? Was it public (a published book or article)? Was it “official” (the work of a government, a political party, a state functionary or office)?
• What was the author’s intention in writing the source? Was it intended to persuade others of its point of view? Look closely at the language used. Try to find key words that will tell you if the author wanted to persuade, or if she wanted to be objective.