CLASS AND FORUM PARTICIPATION (10%)

Attendance policy: If you miss class because of illness, you need to contact me ASAP to see how you can make this up. An unexcused absence is = missing a week's worth of classes and will affect your grade negatively.

Class and Forum participation

1. Please put away your cell phones. Computers may be used, but only to take notes. No surfing the web, texting, video games, shopping on Amazon (all of which I have actually observed students doing in the past). Note: not following this rule will be noted, but I will not call you out on it in class. It will still affect your participation grade, however.

2. This is a seminar (not a lecture) class, so ideally everyone in the class will contribute to the discussion. I expect you to speak at least twice during each weekly class.

3. However, you can also make up for lack of class participation (to a certain extent) by excellent weekly forum contributions. On the other hand, lack of forum participation will pull your grade down in this category.

Weekly Forum

The weekly forum (on the class messageboard) will begin right after class week 1 (note that each forum runs from class to class, so "week 1-2 forum" runs from after our first to class to the second class, i.e. from April 5 to April 12).

To get full credit, you need to post an answer yourself, and reply to/comment on at least one other posting. Although quantity does not *always* equal quality, I have generally found that longer posts and more frequent posts generally equal better grades for this category.