Logistics
Important Links
Lecture slides as PDFs will be posted to Canvas before class
Course dashboard on Google Sheets (see Canvas for link)
Grading
This class will involve a great amount of discussion with time devoted to lecture, zoom activities, student presentations, and prototyping. Grades will reflect performance on reports, paper presentations, participation, and the final project. During presentations and discussions in the Monday sections, students are expected to participate actively.
Grading breakdown:
32% Paper presentations (4 papers to present this quarter)
8% Quizzes (8 quizzes this quarter)
10% Participation
50% Final team project
Team peer evaluations will be conducted for each of the Final Project milestones and can influence an individual student’s grade by +/-5%. Teammates should take great care to communicate with each other and to equitably contribute to the project!
Attendance:
Attendance is part of the participation grade. Students are expected to attend ALL of the Monday discussion sections (except W1, W2, and W7). Please arrive on time and be ready to interact with peers as much as possible. If students must miss a Monday section for an excusable reason, let your presentation partners and section leaders (IA) know IN ADVANCE; the team can prerecord their talk or give the talk without the missing member. Students who miss on Monday can make up for their participation score by adding a comment to your section's slack channel.
Students are expected to attend most of the Tuesday/Thursday lectures. We will be keeping attendance through a digital check-in process. Students can miss up to 5 lectures (25%) with no negative impacts on the overall grade. For each lecture missed beyond 5, students will lose 0.5% of the participation grade (e.g., with 7 absences, students drop 1% independent of how much they participated).
Late Assignments:
It is vitally important to keep up with paper discussions and projects in order to participate fully. If students miss a presentation, it will negatively affect your peers since they will not get to learn about that paper from you. Late submissions for project milestones will get feedback slower, which will be important for doing well on the next stage.
Presenting requires action before the Monday discussion sections (except for week 1) so that you can teach your peers about the paper. If you and your presenting team do not prepare in time for your paper date, you will be docked 50% on that presentation. Your team can still earn 50% by turning something in a video presentation by Thursday's lecture, otherwise you will get zero.
Final team project milestones. Your team will lose 10% for every day it's late. If you submit later than 5 days, your team can earn a maximum of 50% on the project milestone.
Work with your Presenting groups and Final Project teams to stay on schedule. Please try to avoid missing Monday presentations, but if you must, work with your partners to prerecord the slides. See the Discussions page for more details.
Make-up quizzes:
Students will have a full 24 hours to complete quizzes after Thursday's lecture until Friday evening (with one hour maximum to submit answers). These will be "open book" quizzes so you may refer to the papers and your notes during the quiz period. If you absolutely cannot finish the quiz during this time frame, you must reach out the the TAs before the quiz period to arrange a makeup quiz, which must be completed within 5 days. Makeup quizzes can earn up to 50% of the full credit for the quiz.
Teams
You will work on teams for paper presentations as well as for the final project. Teamwork is complicated! We appreciate that part of the challenge in this class will be figuring out how to work with people that have different work styles, time zones, backgrounds, and experiences. Keep in mind these points as you develop a relationship with your team.
Collaboration can thrive through differences. Some people may be better at ideating and leading, others may be quiet contributors. Try to understand your team's skills and proclivities, and allocate work accordingly.
Teams take time to develop. Give your team a chance to grow and learn together. It’s normal to disagree at times, but listen to each other and move on from those disagreements so that you can learn how to perform together.
Team reporting. At the end of the project, each of you will submit a report sharing an analysis of your own contribution and the work of your team members. Your overall grade on the project will be adjusted based on your individual contributions.
Team obligations. Everyone on the team is responsible for knowing and being on top of the steps of the assignment.
Team leaders. Your job is to help coordinate your team to take the next steps. Communicate regularly with your peers. We appreciate that this is extra work. If you have a busy week, turn over leadership to someone else on your team to step in for you.
References and Cheating
In all your work in this class, you should utilize and cite any sources of information you can: search results, news sources, scholarly papers, personal contacts, and outside faculty. Acknowledge them with specific footnotes or hyperlinks. Specify each source well enough that a reader can find it. We will reward you for using/citing sources and penalize you for using none. If you cut and paste content from elsewhere, use quotation marks and footnotes. Not acknowledging your citations is an ethical failure, but failing to seek help limits your effectiveness.
Presenting groups are not allowed to view slides from other sections; any attempt to simply copy another group will be consider a violation of academic integrity. Likewise, students are not to share or discuss the quiz questions with any other students. Students shall not leverage an LLM (e.g. ChatGPT, BARD, Gemini, etc).
Should any student be found guilty of cheating on an assignment, the University will be notified. Additionally, depending on the circumstances, and at the discretion of the instructor and the Department Head, a student could fail the course and may be expelled from the University. A student can appeal any faculty decision to the UC San Diego Academic Senate.
Special Needs
If you are will be missing class for religious reasons, let us know during the first week of class and it will not be penalized. If you have a disability and wish to request an accommodation, please contact the Office for Students with Disabilities. We will be happy to work with you to support your success in the class.
Time Allocation
As a rough weekly time allocation, students should set aside 2-3 hours per week for reading and preparing presentations. Dedicate an hour for participate in Slack discussions (or participate verbally during the live discussion sections!). Devote 1-2 hours per week for final project work. Project work will likely ramp up towards the last few weeks of class.
Text books
There is no official text book for the course. If you like to buy books, we recommend the following:
It's Complicated, danah boyd, 2014.
Building Successful Online Communities, Robert E. Kraut and Paul Resnick, 2012.
Handbook of Collective Intelligence, Edited by Thomas W. Malone and Michael S. Bernstein, 2015.