Tutorials
Tutorials are where the reading gets discussed. Once a week you meet for 50 minutes in a small group with one of the course assistants and work through that week’s papers together, roughly 25 minutes per lecture topic. Tutorials are 40% of your grade, so they are the center of the course, not a supplement to it.
Sign up for a tutorial time by 9:00pm on Sunday, September 27.
Before the tutorial
Read the papers in full and submit a commentary on each one by its deadline, noon on the day of the lecture. Commentaries are not graded on a scale, but they are required: your course assistant reads them before the tutorial and uses them to shape the discussion. Missing commentaries drop that tutorial’s grade one step, for example from a check to a check-minus.
During the tutorial
- No laptops or notes. Anything you want to say has to be in your head; a printout of the paper is fine if you want to bring one. The point is to find out what you took from the paper, not what you can look up.
- Be ready to open on any paper. For each paper, one student is asked to be the discussant: two to three minutes laying out their take on it.
- Expect follow-up questions. After the discussant speaks, the course assistant will press on the details behind their commentary. If you wrote that Tangible Bits is compelling, be ready to describe the systems in the paper and say what about them convinces you. If you wrote that Weiser’s vision feels dated, be ready to name the concrete systems that date it and say why. The questions stay on the main ideas of the paper, the parts anyone who read it should be able to reason about.
- Then everyone discusses. The course assistant opens the conversation to the group, usually by asking another student to respond first, and steers it toward the core concepts rather than nitpicks.
How tutorials are graded
You receive a grade for every tutorial:
- 0. You did not attend.
- Check-minus. Thin knowledge of the readings, or little participation.
- Check. Strong knowledge of the readings, and you participated.
- Check-plus. Rare. Stellar knowledge of the readings, and you brought a genuinely new insight to the discussion.
If you did not submit the commentaries for that tutorial’s readings, your grade drops one step: check-plus to check, check to check-minus, check-minus to 0.
We drop your lowest tutorial grade, so you can miss one tutorial, and its commentaries, without penalty. Tutorial times and group assignments are set during the first week.