Students are required to:
Grading: 20% presentations, 20% blog entries and class discussion, 10% position paper, 30% research project, 20% final exam.
Papers are available in the resource tool of the corresponding Sakai course site.
Students must prepare their own presentations! Even if the authors (or others) have posted slides for a paper on the Web, you may not borrow such slides directly. You are allowed to borrow some slides that might be painful to make (e.g., a nice figure or animation). But, the bulk of each presentation must be your own work.
Blog entries should be posted to the blogger tool in the corresponding Sakai course site. Each entry should be a comment on my (or Tuan's) original posting for a particular paper. Entries can be a summary of the paper, a question or an issue that the paper did not address adequately, a pointer to related work that was not cited, an answer to a question/issue raised in an earlier entry, etc. Each entry must be unique; that is, each student must contribute a new thought about the paper (rather than copy or post the same thought about the paper as someone else). Blog entries must be posted by 12noon of the Sunday preceding the paper's presentation in class.
Position papers will be written after we have progressed through about 1/2 of the course. We will brainstorm together to derive a list of potentially controversial issues (based on the readings that you have done to that point in the class). Then, each of you will choose an issue, take a stance on the issue, and use the readings in class along with supplemental information (additional papers, statistics, information from the Web, etc.) as appropriate to defend the issue.
Students are responsible for designing their own projects. Students may work in teams of 2-3 people (in fact, I encourage you to work together since it makes the project/course more fun). A worthwhile goal to shoot for is a workshop-quality paper at the end of the course. I will try to post some possible project ideas in the next couple of weeks. Students must present their proposed projects by the 7th week. One way to choose a project is to look through the syllabus and identify one or two areas that you might like to do your project in. Then, read through the required papers and look around the literature and Web for more advance papers discussing open issues in the area.
Students can use the discussion tool in the corresponding Sakai course site to discuss any and all aspects of the course (papers, project, schedule, etc.).