2.0 Updates:
- 2023-01-23: Reformatted the specifications.
CSC587 Ideas File
The goal:
This is a fun and easy assignment, as long as you keep up on it regularly
throughout the quarter. The goal is to have you develop a quarter-long habit
of writing down your interesting, creative, blue-sky ideas
relevant to the fascinating topics we discuss in this class. We are
explicitly not critiquing the ideas. Instead, let them flow. We can
always edit them later if we wish. For now just WRITE THEM DOWN. You
do not need to justify any of these ideas. It is explicilty intended to be
intellectual, creative play, modeled after the work of scientists and
learned academics the world over.
Grading:
We will use
Partial Order Grading.
For full credit you'll need:
- Submit a version to D2L before the deadline.
- Submit a WORD format file, or an HTML format file(ONLY!) [Text as last resort].
- Provide a word count at the top of the file.
- Write your NAME at the top of the file.
- In the parts of your ideas file where you use prose (as opposed to
lists, bullet points, heirarchies, or ??), please use paragraphs with normal
topic sentences to separate the ideas. No monolithic stream of
consciousness please. Impossible to read!
For A students, the general expectation is ~400 words of your own ideas a week, generally
relative to this course, resulting in ~4,000+ words of your own ideas by the
end of the quarter. (Some students have submitted 30,000+ words of ideas.)
Academic Integrity:
- In general, these are YOUR ideas. Sometimes you may want to refer
to the work of others. If so, you must cite any work not your own.
- The use of AI text-generation or text-manipulation tools is absoutely
forbidden and will be considered plagiarism.
General grading heuristic:
These are intended to be your own creative, blue-sky ideas losely relative to the ideas and
discussions covered in class. As long as you've made a good faith effort to
record them on a regular basis, and met the minimum specifications, I'll
look for a reasonable quality, and the length and breadth of your
commentary. The format (prose, hierachy, hypertext, lists, graphs,
diagrams...) is up to you. If you use prose, you must use paragraphs with
standard topic sentences.
[Your name goes here]
My ideas file, NNN words
Keeping track of your possible ideas for areas of future study is good
practice, and also can be a form of review. Writing is a different mode of
learning, and will also help you to cover the material. For Ph.D. students,
or those that might consider this option in the future, it is an
excellent way to record ideas for possible research paths in the future.
Use simple text to record any interesting ideas that occur to you
during the progress of this course. We will be discussing psychology,
philosophy, computer science, linguistics, etc. Along the way interesting
ieas for possible research projects, interesting relationships between
papers and ideas, and interesting questions will occur to you.
For each entry (or at least small set of ideas) I recommend writing down the
date. This will help you later as an indexing scheme when you are
looking back trying to find a particular idea.
Note: we explicitily do not need good ideas, we just need
interesting ideas. Write them all down. If you want to
editorialize, you may do so, but write the idea down anyway.
Sometimes bad ideas lead to really bad ideas, that lead to good ideas.
Submit your updated ideas file to D2L as directed, before the deadline.
Have fun. Do not worry that your ideas are not profound, or have already
been thought of by someone else. This is not a research paper, but rather
the collection of thoughts over time that might some day lead to, e.g., a reasearch
paper or interesting set of discussions at a conference workshop.