Class Activities
Each week there will be assigned readings and many weeks there will also be an assigned technology for you to familiarize yourself with. Our engagement with these assigned readings and technologies will begin on-line, before the class session for which they're assigned, and continue in class.
Each student will be responsible for making a single "blog entry" about each of the assigned readings and technologies before class. Each entry will consist of some combination of:
- Description: statements or questions about what the author claims.
- Critique: arguments about whether the author is correct or what the author has left out.
- Connection:how the claims or concepts relate to those in other readings
- Application: how the reading applies to the community or technology you have chosen to study for the semester, or the research project you are planning.
You may comment on each other's entries. You may also edit your own entry in response to comments that others have left or in response to other blog entries. The end-result of this process should be a page with a set of coherent blog entries, not a record of the entire set of interactions.
There is also a voting mechanism. Entries with the most positive ratings automatically rise to the top of the page, and especially highly rated entries will appear on the front page of the site. Writers or popular entries will attain glory, (not so) valuable prizes, and probably good grades as well.
Occasionally, the 684 class will be dismissed early so that the 884 students can discuss research issues that will not be of interest to 684 students.
In-class discussion will also focus on description, critique, connection, and application. For each reading, I will pick a student to offer a summary of the article at the beginning of the discussion. Please be prepared! I will frequently call on students to state ideas that they wrote about in their blogs, at appropriate points in the discussion.
This is a 3-credit course, so you should expect to spend, on average, 12 hours per week on the course, over the course of the 14 week semester. Here's my approximate estimate of how that time would be split up:
- required reading and technology exploration (4 hours)
- class time (3 hours)
- weekly blog entries (1.5 hours)
- major assignments (3.5 hours/week averaged over the term)