Hi class,
It was so nice to see all of you today! I really couldn’t be more excited to get things started for real this week. I’m also very much looking forward to getting to know you better; please feel free to say hello whenever — whether at office hours, after class, or even around campus (though in that case please remind me that you’re in the class!).
A few post-class notes that might be of interest to some of you:
In addition to the slides, I’ve also added a “learn more” link on the course website corresponding to today’s material. In this case, it contains PDFs of the two scientific papers I mentioned near the end of the class, about laptop use and handwritten notes. You are not required to read these in any way, and they won’t be on any exam — they are purely for your own edification. But I’ll often add things like this as we go along, just in case you’re interested.
A very clever student came up after today’s lecture and asked what would happen if everyone in the class tried to get a zero on purpose, as a way to game our grading system — the idea being that if everyone gets a zero, then zero is the top of the A range, and everyone would get an A. Believe it or not, something quite like this has happened before, right here at Hopkins; it required a massive organizing and boycotting effort and even made the news (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/12/students-boycott-final-challenge-professors-grading-policy-and-get). To anyone thinking of organizing every single student to boycott every single class, exam, and assignment in Intro Psych so that everybody ends up in a 500-way tie for the highest score of 0%, I say: bring it on!
Some of you came up afterwards to ask for clarification on when readings should be completed. You should do the reading corresponding to a lecture before that lecture. Sometimes I’ll refer to the readings in class in ways that won’t really make sense unless you’ve already done them; but even when I don’t do that, the readings will almost always enhance your understanding of the in-class lectures.
Sorry about the mishap today with Clickers; it’s a buggy technology, and that’s a bit out of our hands — but we want to make it work. On the bright side, we were able to see on our end that almost 75% of students were able to answer the in-class question. So now we have a new idea for next time: We’ll use the iClicker app to take “attendance” instead of a “poll” — the difference there is that an “attendance” point is registered as long as the app sees that you opened it and checked into class at some point. Since the issue today seemed to be about slowness/connectivity, we’re thinking that if you open the app once you come into class, at some point it’s bound to connect, even if it takes a few minutes. Then we’ll also do a real poll in class, but it’ll be OK if your answer doesn’t register. Let’s try this out on Thursday. If it works, great! If not, no sweat, we’ll keep searching for a good solution and just automatically give everyone attendance points anyway.
See you Thursday!
Chaz
P.S. Thank you for the love on sidechat. Very cutesy!
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Chaz Firestone
Associate Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences
Director, Perception & Mind Laboratory | perception.jhu.edu
Co-Director, Foundations of Mind Group | mind.jhu.edu
Johns Hopkins University