Grading

Evaluation in this course will include three components:

1. Writing assignments: 45%
   • There will be weekly writing assignments, which will be commentaries on the readings. There will be around eleven such commentaries assigned; only the top six scores will count towards a student’s grade. Students will receive regular, written feedback on their papers from one of the teaching assistants. Commentaries will have a prompt given every week at the end of class, and will also be posted online in the Slack channel. They will be due every week on Monday at 11:59 PM via the Dropbox connected to the course via LEARN, in either .doc/.docx format or as a PDF.
   • The six (6) best commentaries or position papers submitted by a student will each count for 7.5% of the student’s final grade. Therefore, the written component of the course will account for a total of 45% of a student’s final grade. Should a student wish, they may submit any commentary to an instructor by email, in an editable word-processing format (i.e., .doc or .docx) for additional feedback (beyond that received from the teaching assistant), particularly with respect to improving their writing style. The University of Waterloo’s Writing and Communication Centre (WCC) works across all faculties to help students clarify their ideas, develop their voices, and write in the styles appropriate to their disciplines. Centre staff offer one-on-one support in planning assignments and presentation, using and documenting research, organizing and structuring papers, and revising for clarity and coherence. We particularly encourage using the WCC for students whose English or writing skills are not at the level where they wish them to be.
   • Your weekly writing assignments should be approximately two pages (1000 words) long.
   • These assignments will be marked on a scale from zero to five. The weekly topic will be announced at the end of each class and will also be posted to the course Slack channel.
   • We have some examples of good essays for previous offerings of this course and related courses available on the LEARN page for this course.
2. Class participation: 20%
   • We will assess students’ participation on thoughtfulness and quality, rather than quantity. What we are looking for is for students who can demonstrate meaningful engagement with the material, justify their arguments, and respond respectfully to contrary positions presented by others. During the course of the semester, students are likely to be asked to advance or defend (either orally or in writing or both) positions that may differ from their own personal views.
   • Suggesting articles or videos for the “from-the-news” component of the class will count towards a student’s class participation grade, as will contributing meaningfully to discussions in the course Slack channel.
   • Students for whom English communication is challenging may need to work especially hard for this component of the course. Participation in the Slack channel or the Zoom chat thread (for the online version of the course) are particularly encouraged. Please let us know how we can help you participate if English is not your first language or you are introverted (for example, should we call on you?).
3. Group project: 35%
   • There will be a small-group project that will involve a small team comprised of two to four students. Each team will submit a joint work product that may consist of a creative project, such as the development of an online program or tool, an application, a chatbot, a website, a video presentation, or a podcast.
   • We urge you not to do a podcast for this project unless you have something novel to say or a particularly unique style to present the topic; it is too easy to just make a chatty conversation with not much content, which will not garner a good grade. If you do a podcast, please focus on a small number of topics, find articles to discuss that are not in the course readings, keep a tight thematic focus, and find a very creative way to present the material.
   • The group projects will involve a technological issue of the sort addressed in the course, regarding a computing topic that connects to discrimination, surveillance, and/or privacy and how they connect to computing. Teams will identify their topic, confirm the appropriateness of the topic with the instructors, divide the labour among their team members, and accommodate different perspectives, viewpoints, and expertise of the team members.
   • If students encounter undue challenges in the small-group project work, they should contact the instructors promptly; in particular, please do not wait until the week before the project is due to indicate that group members have been unresponsive to their assignments.
   • Students may, but are not required, to prepare a short presentation to give in the final class of the semester. For students who choose to present, this will contribute to their class participation grade.
   • The submission for the project consists of:
     1. A one-page description of the project, including the group members’ names, what question was being addressed, what form the project took, and a summary of the findings. This may also include a link to code repositories, or other specific items you want to have considered in your mark.
     2. A five-minute video tour of the project and its findings. This should focus on results and demonstrating any system built. For a podcast project, identify the articles you discussed, how you found them, and the technology you used in the preparation of the podcast.
     3. The actual project: a usable website, a finished podcast, a functional chatbot, a playable game, or whatever the final form takes. All of this should be submitted via the course's LEARN dropbox, with the due date of 10 April at 11:59 PM. There will be no extensions for late projects; we need to submit course grades on time!

This course has neither a midterm nor a final examination.

Rules for group work:

• The project should be work only done by your group members: in particular, nothing you submit for marking should be from anyone else. You may submit other people’s work that has been inspiration or that your project seeks to critique. The one exception to this rule is that you can use existing libraries or code bases, with proper acknowledgment; that said, the main intellectual contribution of your group project must be your own.
• For the weekly essays, they must be entirely your own writing; you may discuss your thoughts with your classmates through the lectures and in your own conversations outside class. A good rule of thumb is that if the instructors pull you aside and ask you to explain the arguments underlying your writing, you should be able to explain what you mean by every sentence; if not, you don’t understand your own writing, which suggests that it’s not sufficiently your own.