Organization of Information

Evaluation & Grading

Course grades will be determined as follows:

• 10 points: Participation (see below)
• 40 points: Assignments (8 points each)
• 20 points: Midterm
• 30 points: Final report

For graduate students, points will be converted to letter grades as follows:

100-95: H, 94-80: P, 79-70: L, < 70: F

For undergraduate students, points will be converted to letter grades as follows:

100-95: A, 94-91: A-, 90-88: B+, 87-85: B, 84-81: B-, 80-78: C+, 77-75: C, 74-71: C-, 70-68: D+, 67-60: D, < 60: F

See the undergraduate bulletin for definitions of these letter grades.

Participation

You are expected to attend class and actively participate in (but not dominate) class discussions. Beyond that baseline, there are are two other ways you are required to participate:

• Leading discussion of readings. During the semester each student in the class must volunteer to lead discussion of at least one assigned reading. When it is your turn to lead discussion, please come up with 2 good discussion questions pertaining to the reading, and email them to ryanshaw@unc.edu. You must email your questions prior to the beginning of class. In class, you will be expected to kick off the discussion by asking your questions and opening the floor for discussion.

• Blogging and commenting. We will have a class blog, and you are expected to post and comment there throughout the semester. Consider blogging an opportunity to think out loud and share ideas and insights you’ve had with your classmates. Blogging will also help you to see the concepts we’re introducing in this class out in the real world, helping you better understand the material. Great topics for great blog posts include news stories relating to issues we’ve discussed in class; questions or comments relating to lectures; a story about something related to information organization that happened to you; or reflections on things you’ve learned.

Quantitatively assessing participation is difficult, but here’s one way to think about it:

You begin the semester with five participation points. You can raise this to the full ten by regularly participating in discussions, regularly posting interesting and relevant items to the class blog, and insightfully commenting on others’ blog posts. Conversely, failing to attend class, tuning out of class discussions, and not volunteering to lead discussions will cause you to lose participation points.

Communicating with me

Email is the best way to communicate with me outside of class. It is particularly well-suited for short-answer and clarification questions.

I will try my best to respond to you within a 24-hour period, but in some cases it may take 2 to 3 days. Please keep this in mind when you are scheduling your own activities, especially those related to exam or assignment preparation. If you wait until the day before an exam or assignment due date to ask me a clarification question, there is a good chance that you will not receive a response in time.

If you need assistance understanding a concept or an assignment, or have another potentially complicated question, then please make an appointment for my office hours. If you ask a question via email that I believe is better suited for in-person discussion, then I will ask you to make an office hours appointment. If you have questions about how your assignment was evaluated, then you must make an office hours appointment. I will not discuss your grades or my evaluation of your work via email.

Honor Code

You are expected to know and respect UNC Honor Code. Collaboration, discussion, and seeking assistance from other students is encouraged in this class and is not inconsistent with the Honor Code. In the case of written work, all words drawn from others must be attributed appropriately.