| Lectures: | Monday and Wednesday - 1:25-2:15 - Hollister 110 |
| Discussion Section: | Friday - 1:25-2:15 - Hollister 110 |
| Instructor: | Carl Lagoze, lagoze@cs.cornell.edu Information Science, 301 College Ave. 255-6046 http://www.cs.cornell.edu/lagoze |
| Instructor's Office Hours: | Monday, Wednesday 12-1PM (or by appt.) |
| Instructor's Assistant: | Sarah Birns, sbirns@cs.cornell.edu Information Science, 301 College Ave. 255-5925 |
| Teaching Assistant: | Theresa Velden, tav6@cornell.edu 301 College Ave. Information Science, 301 College Ave. 255-4654 |
| TA Office Hours | Thursday - 2-3 PM (or by appt.) |
Students are expected to have Java programming expertise and knowledge of computer systems, data structures, and algorithms commensurate with completion of CS211. They should also be familiar with the basic technologies of the web including HTTP, HTML, and URLs.
I try to make my lecture style as interactive as possible. My goal is to engage students in the lecture process and encourage questions and comments. At times I will spontaneously ask for input, thinking, and opinions from students in lecture. You should come to lecture prepared to think about the materials presented and how they relate to the overall course content and readings, and recognize that your role in lecture is a reflection of your overall scholarly attitude towards the course.
The subject of the course is a dynamic area. Most of the material in the course is the result of recent research and implementation. Fortunately almost all of this work is available through papers on the open-access Web. A few are in sources that are licensed to Cornell, meaning that you must access them from within the cornell.edu domain. This will be noted on the reading list when appropriate.
The readings assigned for each week's discussion section are listed in the reading schedule. At a minimum, students are supposed to read the readings. To provide the incentive for doing this, I've tried to make the readings sufficiently interesting and informative. As an extra incentive, students will need to complete a short set of questions about the readings. The questions will be available every Wednesday evening and will be due before the next section meeting on Friday. The questions will be short, designed to make sure that the assigned papers have been read. These questions will be graded.
Beyond just looking at the readings, students are expected to approach each week's readings critically and understand how they compliment, or perhaps disagree, with lecture content. Are the ideas sound? What are the alternatives and trade-offs? How well do the ideas fit into the larger information context? What are the barriers to success: technical, social, legal, and economic?
Weekly sections are meant to be a forum for discussing these critical reactions, driven by student participation and NOT by instructor or teaching assistant presentations. The amount of section participation and the degree to which it represents critical and content-based thinking is an important criteria of grading.
Reaction papers are another vehicle for integrating information from readings and lectures. Each paper is a critical evaluation of three papers, two of which are chosen from assigned readings from the three preceding sections and another chosen at the discretion of the student. Reaction papers are due every four weeks. The tentative reaction paper due dates are February 23, April 16, and May 6 at 11:59PM. More details about reaction papers are given on the readings page.
Work in the area of web information systems requires the ability to understand and use protocols, markup languages, and integrate tools. The course projects provide students with the opportunity to gain expertise in these areas. Students will work in groups of 2. Grades will be awarded based on the final product of the group and each student's contribution to the work of the group. The tentative project due dates are April 9 and May 11 at 11:59PM. Project details are available on the assignments page.
There will both a mid-term and final take-home exam. These exams will cover material in lectures and readings and will test technical proficiency and expository knowledge regarding course content.
Some of the readings are chapters from books, all of which have been placed on reserve. These are all excellent books that you may want to buy after sampling them in the course. These books are:
The project assignments require use of XML and related tools. All of these technologies are extensively covered by on-line materials such as tutorials and specifications. But, a real book is sometimes a help and here are some suggestions (all available from Amazon):
Final course grades will be based on the combined effort throughout the course including project assignments, reaction papers, exams and scholarly attitude. The last criteria is a subjective evaluation of you that combines a number of factors including participation, attendance, and conscientiousness (taking the time to complete the weekly questionnaires is one demonstration of this). The rough weighting given to these components is as follows:
| Projects | 30% |
| Reaction Papers | 15% |
| Exams | 35% |
| Scholarly attitude | 20% |
An excellent student, deserving an "A", is one who excels in all areas of the course.
Late assignments are accepted within 3 days after the due date, and will lose one half point grade for each 24 hours after the due date. Under exceptional circumstances you may petition the professor to have your late homework accepted without penalty; please note that, since homework assignments are scheduled well ahead of time, "too much work in other classes" is not considered an exceptional circumstance.
We will be using CMS for grading and assignment submission. All students will be added to the CS431 CMS site by the instructors and should be able to ener the site using their netids. Let us know as soon as possible if you can not access the site.
Students are responsible for keeping track of all course email. This includes:
All course email, both list and personal, will have the prefix "CS431:" on the subject line. Make sure that your spam filter is configured to let course e-mail through.
Similarly, all mail sent to the instructor and TA should have the prefix "CS431:" on the subject line. Mail not sent with that prefix may be lost in spam, endless lists, etc.
Whereas the mail list is one-way communication from me to you, for communication such as announcements, the course blog is two-way, with all of us able to post messages and comment on them. To use the course blog you must:
This is the first semester that I have used a blog for the course and I am interested to see how it works. In order for it to be successful, please obey the following guidelines:
You should keep track of activity in the blog. Of course you can do this by occasionally visiting the blog, but an easier way is to:
We will be using Connotea to share and tag citations. All citations related to the course will be tagged with "cs431". We encourage you to add references with this tag when you find something on the web relevant to the course material. You should also add other appropriate tags and use the description and notes fields. The cs431 Connotea page will then show the complete reference list for the course. You will note that this is also available as an RSS feed.