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[ Formal Data | Syllabus | Materials ]
INFSCI 3005 is a course established by the Information Science faculty to introduce new doctoral students in the Information Science program to the working of the scientific enterprise, scholarly research, ethics, and the current state of the art research in information science. The participants of this course are first year doctoral students in the Information Science program. Others can take the course or audit it by permission of the instructor. As you might have already experienced as aspiring scientists, being a researcher requires intelligence, independent, creative thinking, and most of all commitment to hard working. This course reinforces this.
The course includes a fair amount of readings. The readings were selected by several SIS faculty in such a way that they are fun to read. In addition to reading, the course features several assignemnts and projects, which focus on specific important skills such as paper analysis and presentation and peer reviewing. As in the pasy years, you will be expected to prepare a draft of a research problem, work it out over the course of the semester, and present it to the class at the conclusion of the course.
Course assessment includes attendance, assignments and projects. Each lecture bears 1 attendance point. Each assignment and project bears certain number of points. The instructor also reserves the right to administer unannounced quizzes for up to 5 points each if he feels that the students are not pursuing a resonable amount of assigned reading. Your final grade depends on the percentage of points you have earned. Score < 50% corresponds to F, 50-62.5 is D range, 65.5-75 is C range, 75-87.5 is B range, and 87.5-100 is A range.
Class attendance, while not mandatory, is required if you want to succeed in this course. While the course has a good set of assigned readings, by the nature of this unusial subject most of the material is not sufficiently covered by the books. Finally, many lectures include demonstrations and videos. The attendance credit is engineered to encourage your attendance. Each lecture bears 1 attendance point. The maximum number of attendance poits is 12. If you have missed the lecture, make sure that you have a copy of the slides and watch the video of the lecture if it is available online. The links to the lecture slides and videos are provided on the Materials page. Spare copies of lecture slides can be picked up from a folder next to the instructor's office.
Every week, you are expected to do four things
To practice specific skills, each student will need to complete the following special assignments and project. Eeach assignments will be introduced in due course and bear a specific number of points
In addition, each student is expected to pass University of Pittsburgh Research certifications and self-study modules on research integrity and working with human subjects. Upon the completion of it, you will be given certificates. No further points will be assigned, it is a course requirement.
You can earn extra credit points for several things such as asking a good question in class, helping during the lecture, finding errors in slides, and finding good supplementary materials for the class (books, articles, videos, etc).
You are expected to be fully aware of your responsibility to maintain a high quality of integrity in all of your work. All work must be your own, unless collaboration is specifically and explicitly permitted as in the course group project. Any unauthorized collaboration or copying will at minimum result in no credit for the affected assignment and may be subject to further action under the University Guidelines for Academic Integrity. You are expected to have read and understood these Guidelines. A document discussing these guidelines was included in your orientation materials.
Homework or projects submitted after due date will be accepted, but your objective grade will be scaled so that you lose 10% of the grade for every late working day. I.e., if you will submit your work one week late, you will lose 50% of the grade. Note that most homework and projects require submission in both electronic and printed form. The submission date (used in calculating late days) is the date when the last of these forms is submitted. In addition, projects have a portion of the grade for presentation of the project. If you will fail to present your project on due date, you will lose these points.
Disability Policy: If you have a disability for which you are or may be requesting an accommodation, you are encouraged to contact both your instructor and Disability Resources and Services, 216 William Pitt Union, (412) 648-7890/(412) 383-7355 (TTY), as early as possible in the term. DRS will verify your disability and determine reasonable accommodations for this course
Copyright © 2010 Peter Brusilovsky