Evaluation
of student work is
done through participation in class, written work and a research
presentation.
- Participation means showing the development of analytic skills
and techniques for critically reviewing and explaining the literature
from the various fields that comprise information sciences and related
sciences and technologies.
- Writing includes brief papers on the topics covered and a longer
paper summarizing the research and position of a particular topic in a
field. Student writing will be evaluated on the ability to showcase
critical analysis, the use of concepts and theories, and the insight
revealed in the types of questions and issues raised in the analysis.
- The research paper and presentation should cover a particular
field or
subfield related to IST and how the topic of interest relates to other
areas of IST. For more details please see the Research Paper
and Presentation page.
Prior to
each week's class:
All students should read/summarize the assigned articles.
During each week's class, class
activities and discussion will center
on issues such as:
* What are the theories, issues, methods, and
approaches surrounding these topics?
* How would what was read be integrated into
information sciences?
* Which perspectives are strong (or weak) and what
does this imply?
* What are the issues with method or approach?
* If the results are data dependent, does the data
justify the results?
* What do we know that makes this work worthwhile?
* How does this week's work tie into other work we
have read?
* What else should we be reading?
Your grade will be based on four
contributions:
1. Written summaries of articles and exercises (30%
of overall grade)
2. Research paper (35% of overall
grade).
3. Research presentation (20% of
overall grade).
4. Class participation (15% of overall
grade)
* Some of this course
description and structure was directly borrowed from previous IST 501's
taught
by Professor Steve Sawyer and Professor Mary Beth Rosson, and they are
gratefully acknowledged.