Course Journals and Journaling Details

This course will use journaling as a learning technique. You will be assigned a Wiki page on the course server, and you should journal about 3 to 4 times a week. It is not so much the length but rather the quality of entry that counts.

There are reasonable bounds. An amazingly insightful one-sentence entry is NOT going to score full credit across the board (turn it into a short paragraph, expand on the insight, take the thought process two steps further...). Likewise three paragraphs that simply drone on and on, re-hashing the same point over and over, or treating the course content in an overly superficial way won't score well either.

Journal Content

You can and should use your journal space to write about what you are learning in the course. This includes but is not limited to:

• What you feel like you "get", what clicks for you, what is easy for you to understand.

• Anything you feel you are not fully understanding, more specifically what about this content is confusing are hard to relate to.

• Programming assignments or written assignments.

• Thoughts and musings about the course content in the context of our society (past, present, and future) as well as how the course content relates to the future of science and engineering.

The course instructor will read and grade your journal entries about every week or 11 days. Reponses to questions and reflections on your commentary will written on your journal page in a loose, top down, "Email discussion" manner.

If you log a particularly insightful or thought provoking entry, feel free to contact your professor and request that they read and respond sooner than later.

Journal Logistics

1. Access your journal by clicking on your login name in the top left corner of the MoinMoin screen --- your journal page is your Wiki "homepage".

2. We'll start at the top of the page, and add entries downward as the semester progresses. Please, please, do not top-edit.

3. Finish a journal entry (one sentence? a paragraph? two paragraphs?) with the macro @SIG@; this will put a timestamp into the document for when the entry was made. This is not requirement, just a request that will make my grading easier. The wiki keeps a revision log of page changes, so I can always look to see the exact changes and when they occured.

4. I will probably try to read through and comment on about 5 journals a day, these will be chosen with a reasonable amount of randomness.
5. I may also be subscribed to your journal pages via RSS or the Wiki subscription system (you don't have to do anything on your part for this to work).
6. Journal entries will be graded on a simple rubric system (0 is poor, 2 is good):

   Component	Point Range
   Clarity	0, 1, 2
   Conciseness	0, 1, 2
   Appropriate content	0, 1

   So you can earn between 0 and 5 points per grading entry.

7. There is a link at the top of your journal page called JournalGrading, my ongoing assessment of your journal will be maintained there (you have read-only access to the page). If you delete the link from your journal page, you can still get to the page by either searching the Wiki for JournalGrading and choosing your page (you can't read others' grades) or by adding /JournalGrading to the URL of your journal page.

8. I have the Wiki setup to provide either a text mode or GUI editor. If you decide you prefer one over the other, you can specify a default through the Settings link in the top left corner of the MoinMoin screen.

9. I'm always impressed by the number of domain specific browser plugins out there. (I personally like the utilitarian It's All Text --- big surprise there.) If you find something useful or have other tips for your student peers (and future students of this course) you can share them on the JournalTips page. The page contents are embedded below.

-- khellman 2013-09-03 03:36:12