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READINGS ARE THE BACKBONE TO THE COURSE. To be able to participate in class and on-line, students will need to complete the readings and write reviews as explained here and in second link to the left. Each person is expected to read the essays and articles, and come prepared to discuss them in class. For the first 10 weeks of the course, readings include two aspects:
A) the HCI Remixed essays ("essays") and
B) the original articles ("original articles") upon which those essays are based. A few of these texts are videos.
You are required to read all essays in the book, which provide an overview of the field and will support discussion of the major turns and forks HCI has taken as a field. For about 70% of the essays, you will be reading the "original article" upon which the essay was topically based and writing up a one page review. An examination of the book will make this arrangement clear. The original articles (which are sometimes in fact videos) are available via Yammer, or linked to on the course syllabus. For the other 30% of the essay-article pairs, you will read the essay, and read the abstract of the original paper (or skim the article, as appropriate). Even though you will not be required to write up a review for these other 30% (see syllabus), it is important that would are at least familiar with issues, themes, and researchers. You will receive guidance on this in class.
At Week 11, we will turn to the Ways of Knowing in HCI volume. We will read these chapter together. You will do a little writing (.5 page - 1 page) for each of these yet, but as this is a new volume for me as well, I have yet to have details about what I will require, but it will be in line with the work you completed in Weeks 1-10.
ON-LINE PARTICIPATION. I will upload all the readings to our group Yammer site (demo & details to be provided in class). Yammer has a lovely set of annotation features that allow you to highlight and comment upon a pdf document that others in the social network can see. To encourage off-line discussion that helps students learn how to critically read a paper, yields benefits for class discussion preparation, and provides a take-away resource for each student, you will annotate comments to each assigned reading. You can highlight sections that you think are really important (and briefly state why). You can highlight parts that you don't understand. You can mark places that remind you of other work, and so on. Please create at least 2 comments per paper (more are welcomed) by noon the day of class. This collaborative annotation will aid in your critical reading of the document during the course--and then will be a resource you can take with you as you go on in your careers.
CLASS PARTICIPATION. In class, students should be prepared to pose questions about the readings that they would like to discuss in greater depth. A major aim in this class is to exit with a strong sense of the field in the large, and Professor Palen will direct the conversation over the arc of the course to make sure these threads are apparent to you. It's an exciting feeling to have these threads in hand when it is all said and done.
In addition to feeling comfortable with the readings, each student should come to class knowing a little bit about who the essayists are to give context for their selections and for the essays they write. What fields do they most closely associate with? What institution are they at now? What kind of research do they do? Google/Bing/Yahoo/etc are your friends.