Spring 2000, TAM Course "Designing the Information Society of the Next Millennium" — Ernesto Arias and Gerhard Fischer

 

 

 

 

Course Projects — Objectives and Requirements

 

 

 

 

GENERAL OBJECTIVES

The central purpose of the course project is to gain an in-depth understanding of a theme relevant to the course. While we encourage to do a project accompanied by an implementation of a new system or the further evolution of an existing system, we will also accept projects which engage in conceptual work accompanied by empirical analysis of existing approaches, systems and websites. Projects need to be carried out through a learning-by-doing approach throughout the rest of the semester, preferably as a collaborative activity of team(s).

 

Schedule

due dates: post information on the respective date on the class website by 10:00am!

1. Wed, 3/15: Initial Description of Course Project
Discussion of Projects in Class by Instructors

2. Wed, 4/12: Project Proposal (including formation of teams);
Discussion of Projects in Class by Students

3. Monday, 4/24: Progress Report

4. Monday, 5/1: Final Report

 

Recommendation

To achieve something non-trivial during remaining two months in the semester, we strongly encourage you to work together in a group . The group formation process should be facilitated by your experience doing the same thing in the book presentation project. You should see the project as an application and opportunity to apply and critically evaluate the themes which we are discussing in the course

 

Examples of Non-Implementation Projects:

  1. do a broad-based assessment of the open source movement; create a conceptual framework for it; assess the success/failures of some open source projects; get involved in some of the discussion groups about open source (for some initial URLs and References, see the lecture about open source
  2. do an empirical study of the opportunities and problems associated with high-functionality applications —as a starting point, read the paper: G. Fischer: "User Modeling: The Long and Winding Road", Proceedings of UM99 (User Modelling) Conference (Editor: Judy Kay), Banff, Canada, June 1999, Springer Verlag Wien New York, pp 349-355. http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/um99.pdf (more info from Gerhard); develop a questionnaire and collect empirical data (e.g., at least among the members of our class, maybe the people at your workplace, …)
  3. analyze the importance/relevance of motivation in collaborative design efforts and develop a questionnaire and collect empirical data (e.g., at least among the members of our class, maybe the people at your workplace, …) — as a starting point: analyze the Example: "Experts Exchange" at http://www.experts-exchange.com

 

Examples of Implementation Projects:

  1. Extensions and Improvements to Dynasite Projects (e.g., the an example is Dynagroups; see http://www.arjune.net/dgi) (more info from Jonathan and Andi)
  2. Create a new application and/or extensions and improvements to Sources (a Dynasite project — see: http://Seed.cs.colorado.edu/Sources.Home.fcgi) (more info from Jonathan)
  3. Develop an Application with Smalltalk and Jun (Jun is a open source environment build on top of Smalltalk to support 3D applications; more info from: Eric and Hal Eden); to get started see: http://www.srainc.com/~tomohiro/EDC_proto/ and http://www.srainc.com/)
  4. Get involved with the SPIDER Web Project (more info from: Rogerio and Andy) — SPIDER stands for Sharing Pertinent Information in Dynamically Evolving Repositories; main use case: "People Want to Share Ideas with the Members of their Group"

 

REQUIREMENTS FOR PROJECTS

An Initial Description of your Course Project

Format: one page max or less

Things to Do:

  1. Think about what you want to do! why is the problem interesting to YOU?
  2. Remark: In the spirit of vertical integration, we would like to encourage experienced graduate students to serve as leaders of teams and approach and undergraduates to join their team undergraduates to approach graduates in case they are interested to work with them
  3. describe your project idea commenting on the following specific issues:
    1. goal: which problem do you want to address?
    2. objective: what do you want to achieve?
    3. means: which media/technologies do you expect to use?
    4. specific challenges: what do you consider the most challenging aspect of your project?
    5. relationship to course: in which way is your course project related to the course

Project Proposal

Format: A maximum length of 2 pages

Team Description — Members of the Team, Anticipated emphasis of individual contributions

Content — The proposal must contain the following sections - statement of the problem, rationale, technical approach and implementation. Each section will be graded on appropriateness, completeness and clarity.

  1. Statement of problem-
    1. What is your project all about? Be specific. You should operationalize your terms in order to clarify the problem you are trying to address as well as the approach you will pursue. If appropriate: use literature citations and references to other systems to support your arguments and descriptions.
  2. Rationale -
    1. State the reasons why you want to explore what you are. Why is this a good idea for a project? What do you believe you will learn by doing it? Derive the implications from your project to design, learning, and collaboration.
  3. for non-implementation projects:
    1. develop null hypotheses for the questions you would like to investigate
    2. articulate clearly what your work will investigate issues beyond what is already known
  4. for implementation projects:
    1. Outline and justification of technical approach — This is a method showing how you will do and prove your point or argument, e.g., how will your program work? What tools do you intend to use? Why do you think your approach is reasonable? What other potential approaches seem to be feasible?
    2. Implementation Plan — Mention the steps you will go through in creating your program and preparing your report. Proceed in a way that you consider early implementation efforts as prototypes to give you a deeper understanding of the problem.
  5. References — List the key references, other systems, previous projects on which your work will be based.

Progress Report

Format maximum length of 2 pages.

Evaluation: Progress reports will be graded like the proposals, based on relevance, appropriateness, completeness and clarity. You will not be graded on how closely you adhered to your original plan.

Content — The progress report must contain a description of your progress against your original schedule. If you have changed your plans (based on your work), it must include a clear description of the revisions and arguments for them.

Final Report

Format A maximum length of 6 pages

Evaluation: The final report will be graded based on relevance, creativity, appropriateness, completeness, and clarity.

Content — The final report must include the following sections (it is encouraged to extend and reuse arguments from previous reports):

  1. Statement of the Problem — it describes how your understanding of the problem has changed while you have worked on it over the period of the course
  2. Rationale — it explains why is the problem interesting or important? Relate it to other systems and the literature! Why should someone else be interested in the problem chosen by you? i.e., tell about the contribution it makes to the knowledge of a community.
  3. Non-Implementation Projects:
    1. articulate clearly your contribution
    2. describe how you advanced the knowledge (e.g., questionnaire, testing of developments, new conceptual framework, empirical data)
  4. Implementation Projects:
    1. Technical approach — discuss the impact of the tools (which you have selected) on the problem solution. Contrast your approach with other approaches to similar problems described in the literature.
    2. Description of the system — describe the structure of your system in sufficiently abstract terms (so that the reader does not get lost in technical details).
    3. Description of the system behavior — what does the program do? Illustrate it with a scenario!
    4. Evaluation of the program / system — it should address questions such as: how well does it work? what are the shortcomings and limitations? which theoretical issues does it clarify?
    5. Potential further developments of your program /system — assuming you would have another year to work on: what would you do?
  5. References — List the key references, other systems, previous projects on which your work will be based.