For undergraduates, there are FIVE ways in which your final course grade will be assessed, in a combination of individual and group assignments. For graduate students, there will be SIX ways:
1. Readings & Comments on Readings (DUE AT THE BEGINNING OF CLASS ON THE SPECIFIED DATE)
There is no text book for this course. Instead, the course is supported by a set of carefully selected readings (ugrad, grad) to support your learning. It is imperative that you come to class having read the assigned materials, which you will be able to access on the course Yammer site.
You are required to add two comments to each reading using Yammer's annotation tools. You may comment on something you find interesting, or problematic, or that you don't understand--and briefly say why. Comments are due by 9am of the day the readings are assigned.
2. Quizzes (FIRST 10 MINUTES OF CLASS ON SPECIFIED CLASS DATE)
Instead of exams, this course will be characterized by evaluation through quizzes, which will be administered at the beginning class as specified in the syllabi (ugrad, grad), with the exception of the quiz at the end of Week 10, which will be administered on the same day at the end of lecture given that Spring Break immediately follows.
Quizzes will be brief--approximately 10 minutes in length--and are meant to test your knowledge of the lecture topic on the previous day. If a student attends the lecture, he or she will perform well on the quizzes.
3. Individual Assignments (DUE AS SPECIFIED IN SYLLABI)
There will be 5 individual assignments during the first 1/2 of the semester. These assignments will emphasize lessons from the materials discussed in class. Each assignment will take approximately 3 hours each. Topics for each assignment are listed in the syllabi, with details for each to come. All individual assignment instructions will be posted on the course Yammer site over the course of the semester.
Students will sometimes be asked to post the results of their assignments on our private Yammer course site to support class discussion and look for commonalities and differences in results. Instructions for submission of all work will be forthcoming, and included in the syllabi.
4. Group Mini-Projects (DUE AS SPECIFIED IN SYLLABI)
There will be 2 group mini-projects, one based on our study of Twitter-based social behavior and another based on our study of OSM-based social behavior. Group projects include brief class presentations, as noted in the syllabi. As a guideline, each of these assignments will take approximately 12 hours total divided across all members of the team.
5. Semester Project
The semester project will begin during Week 10 of the semester, leaving teams 6 weeks to conduct an in-depth project that extends our early work on social behavior with respect to the Twitter or OSM platforms. These will be ambitious projects.
Groups will work in the Bachelors track, the Masters track, or the PhD track. All PhD students will be assigned to the PhD track, where final projects are intended to be of publishable quality and indeed should lead to a research publication submission. All MS/MA students will be initially assigned to the Masters track, which will pursue high-quality graduate-level projects without the additional expectation of producing a publishable paper. All BS/BA students will be in the Bachelors track, which has the same high-quality standard as the Masters track but will have all BS/BA students assigned to the teams.
Undergraduate and masters students who would like to work toward a publishable paper may speak to the instructor about entering the PhD track.
6. GRADS ONLY: Graduate Student Topic Specialization Project
In addition to the above 5 items, graduate students will undertake a Topic Specialization Project during the first 1/2 of the semester. By the end of Week 3 (as specified in the syllabus), graduate teams will self-assign to one of 7 social computing topics. Over the next month, teams will research their selected topic, aided by the initial bibliography that the instructor provided. Teams will expand their search bibliography by about twice the initial seeded bibliography. Teams will produce a 1) well-planned lecture that surveys the social computing topic; 2) an annotated final bibliography that they will provide to the rest of the class; and 3) propose a draft quiz based on the particular way in which they approached their topic. All teams will submit their work on Week 7 to the instructor for review, and after any necessary revision, will present their lectures over the course of the last 1/2 of the semester, as specified in the syllabi.