Course Requirements

• Midterm examination -- 25%
• Discussion -- 5%
• Final Examination -- 30%
• The Project -- 40%

• Mid Term Exam --- This will be your standard mid term exam with questions in a variety of formats ranging from the true/false to the brief essay.

• Final Exam -- The form of this exam will probably be similar to that of the midterm, but there is the outside chance that the final might be a take-home submitted electronically (as an e-mail or HTML document)

There are no formal discussions scheduled during the course of the term, but the classes tend to be interactive. Please note that we are interested in what you have to contribute rather than in how much you have to say. Also note that part of your grade is based on discussion/contributions.

• What the Project will be:
  The course project is to do something that is unique and useful. The expected format of the project is a set of linked Web pages on a topic that has yet to appear on the Internet. Moreover, the topic must have value to serious seekers of information. Frankly, if the first condition is met, that of uniqueness, the topic will be serious. If it's pointless and useless, it is almost certainly already on the Web. A catalog of your T-shirt collection or a collection of scanned images of your dog at play is uniquely yours. But unless your T-shirts contain the full text of Das Kapital or your dog is the product of artificial DNA manipulation, we fail to see how they will be of interest to twenty million inquisitive minds. Sports stuff, rock groups, academic department propaganda brochures, why we should join your church, business advertisements, space alien kidnappings -- it's all been done. Sorry.
  We will offer you as much guidance as we can in selection of a topic, but we can't easily impart creativity. Your project topic needs to be submitted for approval to the instructor by April 15.