Feedback on Various Class Aspects

Please follow the links below to provide feedback on various aspects of this class.

Mutual team member evaluation (this is important, it will be considered for the project score)

Final project presentation feedback

Class participation (contributes 10% to the overall class score)

Class feedback
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A1 Feedback

I just finished the grading of the first assignment, and you should receive a feedback form soon. As I was working on the grading, I realized that there was a mismatch between the suggested structure of the assignment, and the grading criteria listed in the assignment description. If possible, I’d like to avoid regrading all of the assignments, but if you feel that yours was graded harshly, feel free to discuss it with me. Several students lost points because it was not clear how the data collected through surveys were incorporated into the assessment. I’m willing to consider amended assignments that discuss this aspect.
I’ve made some modifications to the assignment description, which hopefully will make it easier to avoid these problems next time. In particular, I’ve revised the guidelines for writing the evaluation, and changed the grading criteria to mach the points listed in those guidelines.
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Paper Proposal Feedback

For the reviewer feedback, please select two paper proposals that you’d like to review by entering your name in one of the two columns “Feedback {1|2} Proposal” in the presentation schedule table on the Blackboard Wiki. Create a new page with your feedback, and link it to your name in the table. We’ll keep the feedback for the proposal informal; for the draft and final versions, I’ll have a template (it is posted on the Wiki; a link is at the bottom of the overview table for the paper and presentation). You should look at the following issues for the proposal:
  • Scope: Does the paper address a broad, general, or a narrow, specific topic? (Either way is fine, but it should be evident from the proposal)
  • Relevance: Does the proposed topic appear to be relevant for the overall context of this class?
  • Significance: How important is the work reported? Does it tackle an important/difficult problem (as opposed to a peripheral/simple one)?
  • Understandability: Do the title and abstract convey a sense of what the paper will be about?
  • Background: Is there an indication of existing and related work that appears to be relevant for the topic? Are references given to sources for that work?

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Student Presentation Schedule

To accommodate the preferences of a significant number of the students for doing the presentations towards the end of the quarter, I’ve added extra rows to the schedule table on the Blackboard Wiki. There are now three presentation slots for the time period from Tue, May 17 until Thu, May 26 (Weeks 8 and 9 of the quarter).
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A1 Deadline: Thu, 4/21

The deadline for the first assignment is Thursday, April 21, end of the day.
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Access to Lecture Notes

Since this class combines aspects of 581 and 486, I had to make adjustments to the lecture notes, resulting in some broken links: The files with the slides is there, but the link to it doesn’t match the name. If you go to the directory containing the slides, you’ll see everything that is available, including the .key versions, plus the concept map examples, and slides from previous years.
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A1: Added Evaluation Criteria

For some reason, the evaluation criteria in the assignment description were invisible. I’ve fixed that, although the formatting is still a bit off.
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A1: System Evaluation Available

Assignment 1 is available; we’ll discuss due date and time constraints in class.
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Class News as RSS Feed

If you want to, you can follow theses class updates through an RSS feed. Since this is unlikely to be of interest to anybody outside this class, I’m not planning on making it available through one of the popular RSS channels. Let me know if you think that there would be any benefits in doing so.
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Slides Week 1 Available

You can download the slides for Week 1 now, either through the schedule by clicking on the link for the topic, or by going to the directory http://users.csc.calpoly.edu/~fkurfess/Courses/581/S11/Slides/. The latter is preferable if you want the Keynote version (.key) instead of the PowerPoint (.ppt) file.
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Blackboard Access Set Up

I had my quarterly wrestling match with Blackboard, and it should be available now. We'll use it for the submission of assignments and for the  research paper and presentation (under "581 Wiki"). If you already have a topic, pick a date, and enter your name and topic in the table with the presentation schedule. You'll also add a Wiki page there with your topic proposal, and later the draft and final versions of your paper and presentation material. Both A1 and the topic proposal are due next week.
Please note that the Wiki and the Discussion Board are part of a different, permanent course ( CSC-0480 ALL RELATED COURSES (CSC-0480-FKURFESS)), and linked to the 581 menu entry. I’ve copied the enrollment to that course, so it will appear in your list of Blackboard courses as well. Depending on how you navigate, you may also see the menu for that course, which has a greenish background. This linking business should be mostly invisible to you, however.
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Concept Map Examples

I’ve created a new directory on my course Web page with the examples of concept maps.
This directory contains a collection of concept maps. Feel free to browse and use them. If you decide to incorporate parts into your own, please indicate the source.
The sub-directory FJK contains maps created by me (Franz J. Kurfess). All of my maps are in a draft stage, and many have been created by copying bits and pieces or whole maps, and replacing entries. As a consequence, you may find concepts and relations in a map that shouldn't be there, there might be mismatches between the concept and its description or resources, and the pathways may not make much sense for that map.
I’ve made the maps write-accessible, so you should be able to use the VUE Firefox plugin to edit them. Feel free to do so, but try not to mess them up too much. If anybody’s interested in augmenting or revising any of the maps so that they can be used for instructional purposes, let me know. I’d be especially interested in experimenting with creating such concept maps for broader topics in a collaborative manner.

Other maps are examples that I've downloaded from the Web.
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