Dogfooding

This quarter, I am teaching a graduate seminar called “The Practice of Scholarship” that is required for second-year students in the Northwestern MTS and TSB programs. Following Mako’s lead, I am using the Community Data Science Collective wiki to host the (editable) syllabus. In other words, I am eating to my heart’s content.

dog food.
© 2006 chrismetcalfTV (cc-by-2.0)

We had our first class session yesterday and it went really well. The goal for the quarter is for every student to prepare a manuscript for submission to a peer reviewed venue. I told the students that the course will serve as a hybrid writing boot camp and extended group therapy session. There will be much workshopping and iteration and sharing of feelings. There will also be polite, friendly, and unyielding pressure to produce scholarly work of exceptional quality.

In keeping with the wikified ethos, much of the course schedule remains tbd at this point, so please drop me a line with comments, suggestions, or pointers to great readings that brilliant, interdisciplinary, empirical social scientists and HCI researchers like my students would appreciate.