Class Meetings

by Mike Gleicher on January 8, 2012

This class is scheduled to meet Monday, Wednesday, Friday from 11-12:15 in 1257 Computer Sciences.

Presence and participation in class is required. If you don’t feel comfortable talking much in class, or don’t get the opportunity to (since there are a lot of people), you can participate online via Piazza.

Note: presence in class means more than just showing up. It means being actively engaged. It’s your job to convince me that this is the case – either by participating in the discussion, or by contributing the the online discussion afterwards.

If you choose to use a laptop in class, it must only be for class related activities. I reserve the right to call you on it to show off what class related thing you are doing. If you are taking notes electronically (the most common excuse for wanting a laptop in class) I ask that you either send me a copy of the notes, or post them to the Piazza lecture discussion. (this is more about curiosity about people’s note-taking habits and believing in their potential collective value than to check up on you).

Missing Lectures

If you are going to miss a required class meeting, please let me know, preferably ahead of time.  It is your responsibility to find out what happened in class. It is even more important for you to do a good job with posting about reading or other assignments that we might have discussed.

Fridays (Overscheduled Class)

You may have noticed that this is 4 contact hours worth of class time for 3 credit hours worth of credit. That’s because we will officially only meet for 2 75 minute periods (generally Monday and Wednesday) per week. Friday, we’ll either not have class, or have some optional non-lecture activity.

Some students have noted in the past (with classes similar to this one) that the Friday meetings are not really optional. Even though we didn’t officially keep score, they were valuable enough that people felt compelled to come. And it helped me get to know that students in the class were really learning stuff.

Note: in some weeks, we may choose to have lectures on Fridays in order to accommodate other scheduling constraints.

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