To maximize your experience and familiarity with concepts encountered during the course, you will be compiling a document that will be a representation of your activities. This “portfolio”, or “compendium”, of knowledge and experiences will combine both materials you've produced and commentary/reflection/revelation of concepts and ideas you've realized.

This is a great way to keep a written record of your exploits, enabling an informative look back on past activities (especially from future classes!), and being a potential source of information from which others can glean some understanding of ideas or concepts.

For grading purposes, your Opus, this great tome of knowledge, will be reviewed by a given set of criteria up to four times a semester; some of the objective criteria to be met for each review include:

• addition of a minimum of 1200 words
• information is contained within the appropriately named wiki page (part1, part2, part3, etc.)
• includes at least 4 dated entries (each within a level 4 heading)
• appropriately identifies, defines, and demonstrates a number of topics
• adequately identifies, defines, and measures a number of course objectives
• effectively performs/reviews and comments on a number of experiments

There will be a template provided that can be modified to meet these and other requirements.

These and additional requirements, specific to the course, will be presented in a follow-up document.

Projects constitute the portion of your grade involving activities you perform in the name of experiencing and demonstrating knowledge in this class- the means by which I will be assessing your understanding of the material through directed explorations of various topics. Such projects may be comprehensive to one another.

Two key products of performing a project are demonstration and documentation. Demonstration is presenting your finished project (that it meets project specifications), to the instructor and being able to respond to any questions on any particular facet therein.

Perhaps more important than demonstration of a working project is the documentation. Documentation includes the instructions for recreation of the end product from the ground up, allowing not only the original author(s), but individuals of sufficient requisite skill to recreate and understand important concepts through reading the prepared documentation.

I reserve the right to request, for any project as terms of acceptance of project demonstration, the recreation of an equivalently functional end result through following of accumulated project documentation. If documentation fails to produce the desired outcome, it will reflect negatively upon the project evaluation.

A list of provided projects may be given, but there might also exist opportunities for additional project ideas- such projects are subject to approval by the instructor prior to starting, and are held to the same demonstration and documentation standards as standard projects.

In some cases, depending on the situations involved, a project may be conducive for group-based collaboration. This is not the default case, but is specified on a case-by-case basis. In such scenarios, all involved group members should be identified prior to starting on the project. Additionally, ALL group members in a collaborative situation must perform fairly equivalent work output into the completion of the project. Deficient members may experience reduced success.

Maintaining an ever present effort in your journey with respect to putting forth effort and making your presence known is an important aspect to academic interactions.

During each week of class (excluding breakweeks), you are to perform the following activities by 11:59:59pm Saturday of the given week:

• Make at least 2 on-topic and relevant posts to the class mailing list or class IRC.
• Make at least 2 pertinent edits to the wiki (your Opus, your portfolio pages, etc.).

Participation is like the “I care” component of your grade. If you care enough to learn and help enhance the experience, you will have no trouble here. If you are disruptive or are not putting forth effort, however, then it will be duly reflected.

This isn't a “kiss up to the teacher” grade. I don't want people bending over backwards to please me. I want to see people learning and asking questions and growing, not agreeing with everything I say. Sometimes I will specifically ask questions or say things for the sole purpose of getting individual perspectives.

Participation is the contribution of YOU to the overall class, in a positive and harmonious manner to the overall group :)