Course homepage: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs6742/2013fa
Here is a tentative outline of the course schedule. (See course homepage for updates; click on the link above.) Many details will depend on the eventual size and interests of the class.
| Class meeting | Agenda item | Pedagogical purpose | Assignment released |
|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Course overview | A1 released: pilot empirical study for a research idea based on the given readings. Reading should be done before lecture 4; study write-up due a bit before lecture 5. |
|
| #2 & #3 | Lecture on online reviews: individual expression, community dynamics | Case studies to explore topics and research styles I find interesting. Get-to-know-you exercises to get everyone familiar and comfortable with each other. | |
| #4 | Lecture on conversation threads + group discussion of conversation-thread reading and/or A1 progress | Case study. Checkpoint/group feedback on how A1 is going. | |
| #5 | Group presentations of pilot studies | ||
| Next 4-7 meetings | Lectures on, potentially, linguistic coordination, influence, diffusion, discourse structure, advanced language modeling | Foundational material | Potentially some assignments based on the lectures. |
| Next large block of meetings | Dicussion of proposed projects based on the readings | Practice with fast research-idea generation. Feedback as to what proposals are most interesting, most feasible, etc. | Discussion of student project proposals, based on the readings for that class meeting. Each class meeting thus involves everyone reading at least one of the two assigned papers and posting a new research proposal based on the reading to Piazza. Thoughtfulness and creativity are what I'm most interested in, but take feasibility into account. Here is a real-life example of a proposal and subsequent discussion, posted with permission. |
| Roughly the last half or third of the course | Activities related to course projects | Development of a "full-blown" research project (although time restrictions may limit ambitions). For our purposes, "interesting" is more important than "thorough". |
|
| Dec 11: final project writeup due |
Grading Of most interest to me is productive research-oriented discussion participation (in class and on Piazza), interesting research proposals and pilot studies, and a good-faith final research project.
Academic Integrity Academic and scientific integrity compels one to properly attribute to others any work, ideas, or phrasing that one did not create oneself. To do otherwise is fraud.
We emphasize certain points here. The easiest rule of thumb is, acknowledge the work and contributions and ideas and words and wordings of others. Do not copy or slightly reword portions of papers, Wikipedia articles, textbooks, other students' work, something you heard from a talk or a conversation, or anything else, really, without acknowledging your sources. See http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs6742/2011sp/handouts/ack-others.pdf and http://www.theuniversityfaculty.cornell.edu/AcadInteg/ for more information and useful examples.
I take violations of the Code of Academic Integrity and the principles behind it very seriously, and have assigned failing grades for such violations in the past.