| Lectures: | Monday and Wednesday - 1:25-2:15 - Thurston 205 |
| Discussion Section: | Friday - 1:25-2:15 - Thurston 205 |
| 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, Tuesday 12-1PM (or by appt.) |
| Instructor's Assistant: | Sarah Birns, sbirns@cs.cornell.edu Information Science, 301 College Ave. 255-5925 |
| Teaching Assistant: | Sadat Shami, sadats@cs.cornell.edu 301 College Ave. Information Science, 301 College Ave. 255-4654 |
| TA Office Hours | Friday 2:30PM - 3:30PM (or by appt.) |
Students are expected to have programming expertise and knowledge of computer systems, data structures, and algorithms commensurate with completion of CS211. Students who have not taken CS211 should talk to the instructor to determine whether they are prepared for the course. Students 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 and talk 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 relatively recent research and implementation. Students will be assigned 2-3 papers each week that relate to a specific research or application area. Most of these papers are available on the open-access Web. A few are in on-line publications 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 are the focus each week's Friday discussion section. Students are expected to come to section ready to approach each week's readings critically and discuss 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.
The success of section depends on how prepared students are to critically evaluate the assigned readings. To encourage preparation, a discussion blog has been set up for on-line discussion of the weekly readings. The blog is located at https://blogs.cit.cornell.edu/cs431/. Each student will have periodic responsibility for leading the discussion on this blog. The instructor and TA will monitor this blog, and base the in-class discussion section on the issues raised on-line. The quality of contributions to this on-line forum will be one factor in evaluating students' scholarly attitude (a factor in final grade computation).
Reaction papers are another vehicle for integrating information from readings and lectures. Each paper is a critical evaluation of three papers, one of which is chosen from assigned readings and two others chosen by the student. There are two reaction papers due during the semester. The tentative reaction paper due dates are March 7 and April 25.
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. There are two projects for the course - the second builds on the first. The tentative project due dates are April 7 and May 12 at 11:59PM.
There are no exams.
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, especially for new material. An Introduction to XML and Web Technologies is available at the campus store. It is listed as "required" but I'll leave the decision up to you. Here are some other possible books (all available from Amazon):
Final course grades will be based on the combined effort throughout the course including project assignments, reaction papers, and scholarly attitude. The last criteria is a subjective evaluation that combines a number of factors including participation, attendance, and contributions to online discussions. The rough weighting given to these components is as follows:
| Projects | 40% |
| Reaction Papers | 30% |
| Scholarly attitude | 30% |
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 letter 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 enter 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.