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, discussions, and prototyping. Grades will reflect performance on quizzes, slide preparation, paper discussions, participation, and the final team project. During presentations and discussions in the Monday sections, students are expected to actively participate.
Grading breakdown:
10% “Jigsaw Learning” Slides (prepare before discussions)
15% Section Attendance and Participation (during Monday discussions)
10% Lecture Attendance (includes prototyping sessions in W8/W10)
15% Weekly Quizzes (covers ALL papers each week)
50% Team Projects (spread across four phases)
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 policies:
Students are expected to attend ALL of the Monday discussion sections (except W7 due to a holiday). Please arrive on time and be ready to interact with peers as much as possible. If students must miss a Monday section for any reason, try to let your section leaders (IAs) know IN ADVANCE so they can plan accordingly. The slides are still due on Monday even if you cannot attend; if the slides are late, they are subject to the late work policy. Students can miss only one Monday discussion section with no penalty. For each Monday absence beyond the one, students will lose participation points. It is especially important to be present during W8 and W10 prototyping sessions for the team projects; students will lose 1% of their Section Attendance grade for not attending on those days.
Students are also expected to attend most of the Tuesday/Thursday lectures where we provide broader context for the readings and projects. We will be keeping attendance through a digital check-in process. Students can miss up to four lectures (20% of the time) with no penalty on the overall grade. For each lecture missed beyond four, students will lose points from their Lecture Attendance grade. It is especially important to be present on Thursday during the W8 and W10 prototyping sessions for the team projects; students will lose 1% of their Lecture Attendance grade for not attending on those days.
Late Work Policy:
It is vital to keep up with Monday discussions and team projects. Each student is responsibly for creating "jigsaw learning" slides for every week, except W1 when all students read the same paper and W8/W10 for prototyping. Slides are due on Monday even if you must miss the discussion. Likewise, the project phases must be turned in on time. Late submissions for project milestones will get feedback slower, which will be important for doing well on the next stage. Any slides or project materials that are late will lose 10% for every day it's late. If you or your team submit later than 5 days, you can earn a maximum of 50% on the slides / project milestone.
Make-up quizzes:
Students will have more than 24 hours to complete quizzes after Thursday's lecture until Friday midnight (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.
Financial Aid Requirements
The Satisfactory Academic Progress (SAP) refers to the academic standards students must maintain to remain eligible for federal, state, and institutional financial aid. If you are receiving financial aid, please ensure you review the SAP requirements and the appeals process. The instructor will complete activity reports at the end of Week 2.
Textbooks
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.