I've finally looked at everyone's response to What Colour are your Bits? I was curious to see how you responded. (more below.) I will move on to (planned) paper #2, projects, and presentations. I am going to just assign credit (10 points) if you have a blog post on "non-obviousness" and Silvers patent. My only goal there was to have you thinking about Silvers & Phototmosaics as you worked on the paper.
Thoughts having read your responses to What Colour are your Bits, some being general, some specific to this piece. (Some of these are positives I saw, some negatives. Negatives only get mentioned if I saw them repeatedly, and in the spirit of trying to help you understand expectations; it is an FYS after all.)
- Read the assignments and remember what you read. The assignment was 40 points. It had two parts: your own response, which I assigned 30 points, and making comments on the posts of two classmates (which I assigned 5 points each, looking only for existence, not quality.) Several of you made no comments. Making comments is part of being in the class, and not making comments throws away points. Look at it either way you want, you get to the same conclusion; you should have made comments.
- Two of you did something that warns the hearts of faculty members everywhere (and I assigned a couple points extra credit for it, which does not always happen). One person clearly indicated having read the author's link on the Monolith web site. Another found a follow up piece by the same author. (That student has a link on the blog post - if you read your classmate's blog psts you saw it.) Following up, following through, aside from giving you a better experience it indicates to us that you are engaged and independent.
- Some of you found the piece "long". Our of curiosity I pasted the text into word and set it to 12 point Times Roman. 7 pages, 4420 words. If you think that is long, well, get ready to expand your horizons!
- Some of you found the piece confusing and said so. Candor ir OK, but "I just did not get it" is not enough. If you don't get it start by reading it again. If you still don't get it then talk to someone. Plenty of your classmates "got it" well enough. If you're not sure if it is OK to discuss a reading with a classmate then ask the faculty member (either if it is OK to discuss or to discuss it with you.) Anything less usually comes across as lazy and disinterested.
- Sometimes you read something and you think the author is ... an idiot. If you are responding to ideas then that can be fine. If you find the author's writing off-putting that is typically a non-sequitur relative to what you've been asked to do. The exceptions are when you can point out specifically how the writing leads to an important ambiguity for example, or if evaluating the writing is part of the assignment.
- Summarizing your understanding of what the author said is a good idea. Lots of you did that. What was the piece really, at heart, about. Even if we disagree I can understand the level on which you read the piece and that helps me respond to you. (For my money this piece was about parallel mismatches, one representation mismatch between bits and what they do (and do not) represent, and the other a communications mismatch between groups who understand the first mismatch and groups who do not. "Colour" was a metaphor for abstract properties not represented in bits, and "lawyers" and "computer scientists", while literal on one level, were metaphors for larger groups.)
- Summarizing your understanding of what the author said is not enough. Go past taht and provide some analysis and/or response to that.
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