ICS 139w • Summer Session II 2011 • Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences • UC Irvine
Quick Links: Home, Assignments, Schedule, Email Archive, Slides
University of California, Irvine
Summer Session II, 2011
Joel Ross (email: jwross@uci.edu; office: Calit2 3423 or 2006)
TA: Dmitri Arkhipov (darkhipo@uci.edu; office: DBH 4081)
Mon/Wed from 1:00pm to 3:50pm, DBH 1200.
We have only a few sessions and peer-review is a significant component of this course, so attendance and participation is very important.
Writing is pervasive in our personal and professional lives, though as technology specialists we often think of developing these skills last or on an “as needed” basis. In this class we have an opportunity to share ideas and to concentrate on our writing and oral communication skills. The emphasis will be on writing for different audiences and using different approaches.
This course satisfies UCI's upper division writing requirement, which gives students the opportunity to do writing in ways that are specific to their own academic disciplines, guided by faculty from that discipline rather than from Composition or English.
After completing this course, a student will be able to:
Satisfaction of the lower division writing requirement is a prerequisite for this course, so we expect every student to be able to write cogent, grammatical English at the level expected in Writing 39C. Please be sure you can meet this prerequisite comfortably. We will not correct basic grammar and your assignments will be graded down if you do not use correct grammar.
The quickest and most effective way to reach us is by email (jwross@uci.edu and darkhipo@uci.edu). Please do not send mail to your instructors from non-UCI accounts. Since this this a writing class, please write in full sentences with proper grammar and punctuation. Please use our names (you are welcome to call me Joel) and sign your emails with at least your first name but preferably your first and last. Use this correspondence as practice for other professional communication! Also include "ICS 139w" in the subject line to make sure we see your email.
Joel's office hours: Tues/Thurs from 1:30pm to 2:30pm. I am also happy to make arrangements for other times during the week—"making an appointment" is not a big deal (but if you make an appointment, be sure to show up!). Learn to take advantage of professors' office hours!
Dmitri's office hours: Mon/Wed from 4:00pm to 5:00pm upon request.
There are no required texts for this course. However, it would be helpful to have a good writing reference. While there are many references available on the web, the following hard copies are suggested:
Having access to an English dictionary and thesaurus is also helpful. Online versions are fine (though the thesaurus in Microsoft Word is a bit limiting and should be supplemented).
Other readings may also be distributed via the class mailing list.
There are six (6) written assignments for this course:
See individual assignments for details. All assignments are due at 11:59pm on the specified date. Assignments should be uploaded to the appropriate EEE Dropbox in .doc, .docx, or .pdf format.
A note on page requirements: So that we can speak consistently of the length of assignments, "one page" will refer to one standard, double-spaced typewritten page. At roughly 30 lines of text per page and roughly 10 words per line, one page by this measure contains roughly 300 words. Thus a 4-5 page assignment should be around 1200-1500 words. It is perfectly acceptable to use images, figures, or tables to support your paper, but these images do not count towards the page requirement of your writing.
Attendance, Participation, and Peer-Editing: 15% of course grade. Each class meeting, students will need to bring in a draft of the current assignment for peer-editing. This editing will be based on guidelines provided for each assignment. Students will need to follow the editing guidelines, and turn in the commented version of the sheet on the class meeting following the assignment's due date.
Much of this class will involve peer-editing, with you responding to your classmates' writing. The class may also involve in-class discussion of topics in which you and your classmates may have differences in opinion. Please be respectful of others at all times.
When emailing us, please try to use proper grammar and make sure to sign your emails. This will help us to better answer any questions. Also include "ICS 139w" in the subject line to make sure we see your email!
We will send out course announcements by email to the official course mailing list, so you should check your email daily. Note that this mailing list goes to the email address that the registrar has for you (your UCInetID address). If you prefer to read your Email on another account, you should set your UCInet account to forward your Email to your preferred account (you can do this on the web at http://phwww.cwis.uci.edu/cgi-bin/phupdate).
Attendance in class is important—content will only be covered in-class, and as we have very few meetings you'll miss a lot of you miss one. I will attend every class, and you should too. If you can't make a session, please check in with me about options for making up the work you missed.
Please turn off all cell phones/pagers/etc. before the beginning of each class. Please do not use notebook computers or any other technology during class for any purpose not directly relating to this class.
Assignments turned in late will lose one full letter grade for every day past the deadline. Assignments will not be accepted more than 3 days after the original deadline.
You will be able to submit a revised version for any assignment for the chance to raise your score by up to one full letter grade. The due date for revisions will be specified in-class—generally two days after assignments are returned. Although writing is an iterative process, we expect you to primarily iterate through peer-edits, and to hand in a final polished copy to us.
Plagiarism means presenting somebody else's work as if it's your own. You may use whatever outside sources (books, friends, interviews, periodicals) are appropriate for an assignment, so long as you cite them: Any time you use two or more words in a row that you didn't think up and write yourself, you must put the words in quotation marks and indicate where they came from. (There could be situations where this two-word rule isn't appropriate. If you think you have one, check with us.) Even if you paraphrase (state in your own words) someone else's work or ideas, you should cite the source (e.g., "Dijkstra says that unrestricted branching is dangerous."). Plagiarism is academically dishonest, and we expect that nobody in the class will engage in it.
That should be enough said, but unfortunately there have been instances of plagiarism in these courses in the past. We will check for it both manually and by using software that compares students' work with work from other sources, including the Internet and work submitted in previous quarters. ICS school policy is that plagiarists fail the course and have their offense recorded in the department office. Academic honesty violations can affect a student's graduation, financial aid, and eligibility for honors. The school deals with plagiarism cases every quarter, even though most people don't hear about them. No matter how pressured you feel, don't plagiarize; it's not worth it.
The latest UCI academic honesty policy can be found at: http://www.editor.uci.edu/catalogue/appx/appx.2.htm. Remember: the consequences of academic dishonesty are not worth the risks.
While we do not expect any such occurrences in this class, because of previous instances of plagiarism, we will be using turnitin.com to help us check for instances of academic dishonesty. Assignments will be submitted to EEE, and then we will run them through turnitin as needed. All results from turnitin will be manually checked by the teaching staff.
We apologize for the fine-print nature of this, but the University wants us to be perfectly clear: We reserve the right to compare the work of all students in the course for textual analysis and evidence of plagiarism to the work of other students, both in this course and in others, and to other sources on the Internet and elsewhere. This may involve the storage of students' work on computer systems outside of the university, such as the Turnitin.com reference database; this storage is solely for purposes of detecting plagiarism. Use of the Turnitin.com service is subject to the usage policy agreement posted on the Turnitin.com site.
Any student who feels he or she needs an accommodation based on the impact of a disability should contact me privately to discuss his or her specific needs. Also contact the Disability Services Center at (949) 824-7494 as soon as possible to ensure that such accommodations are implemented in a timely fashion.
I encourage all students having difficulty, whether or not due to a disability, to consult privately with me at any time.
| Date | Topic | Assignments |
| Mon, Aug 01 | (no class) | |
| Wed, Aug 03 | Introductions | |
| Mon, Aug 08 | Outlining and Pre-writing peer-reviewing: assignment 1 |
ASSIGNMENT 1 DUE TUES 08/09 |
| Wed, Aug 10 | Writing with a Purpose peer-reviewing: assignment 2 outline |
|
| Mon, Aug 15 | Structure of Language peer-reviewing: assignment 2 |
ASSIGNMENT 2 DUE TUES 08/16 Reading for Wed: ACM Code of Ethics |
| Wed, Aug 17 | Ethics (assignment 3 in class) | ASSIGNMENT 3 DUE FRI 08/19 |
| Mon, Aug 22 | Rhetoric, Argument, and Persuasion peer-reviewing: assignment 4 |
ASSIGNMENT 4 DUE TUES 08/23 |
| Wed, Aug 24 | Visual Writing and Presenting peer-reviewing: assignment 5 |
ASSIGNMENT 5 DUE FRI 08/26 |
| Mon, Aug 29 | Multimedia and Digital Literacy peer-reviewing: assignment 6 |
ASSIGNMENT 6 SLIDES DUE TUES 08/30 @ 5PM |
| Wed, Aug 31 | Presentations |
If you need help with writing, please check in with the LARC (Learning and Academic Resource Center). You can schedule an individual appointment to go over a paper or get help with any other issues.
Tips on editing and proofreading from UNC.
On-Campus Computer Lab Information: Information on campus computing labs.
Library Research Resources: Access to various library information-gathering tools.
UCI Academic Honesty Policy: Academic Senate Policy on Academic Honesty.
More general resources can be found on the UCI homepage under "Resources".
Below are some helpful hints that may be useful for this course (or in general).
Check your electronic mail regularly; this is an official channel for course announcements. When sending course-related mail, start the subject line with "ICS 139w".
Attendance in class is essential; concepts and issues will come up in class that aren't easily available from other sources, and those concepts will find their way into the assignments and exams. Also, class participation in various forms will count towards the course grade.
Read each assignment or essay prompt with care, more than once. Expect to refer back to the assignment often, and check it first when you have questions about what's required or how to proceed. Make sure to follow all the instructions for an assignment!
Always keep your own copy of each assignment, both electronically and on paper; if an assignment should get lost in the shuffle (or if the file server should crash), I'll expect you to be able to supply a replacement easily.
If you find yourself having trouble or getting behind, speak with the instructor. But never take the shortcut of copying someone else's work and turning it in; the consequences can be far worse than just a low score on one assignment. The School of ICS takes academic honesty very seriously; for a more complete discussion, see the ICS academic honesty policy: http://www.ics.uci.edu/ugrad/policies/index.php.
Take advantage of campus resources, such as the libraries and LARC. These are valuable resources that can help you make the most of your time at UCI!
If you have a Mac, you can print almost any document "to PDF".
If you have Windows and you want to make a PDF from a document you made in a program that does not "export to PDF", you can install a free program like PDFCreator or CutePDF Writer which will add a printer called "PDF" to the "Print" dialog box. If you "print" to this printer, you'll get a .pdf instead of a piece of paper!
