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No late work is accepted.
[accordion-item title=”Why?”]I need to spend my energy preparing for class and helping you to succeed. Deducing the truth or falsehood of an excuse is not an appropriate role for an instructor and disrupts my teaching schedule.
The no-late-work policy emphatically includes blog posts and comments; not only is it unacceptable to submit your blog post or comments during class, it’s also disrespectful to your classmates and to me.[/accordion-item]
I do take attendance.
[accordion-item title=”Why?”]You undoubtedly have your own opinions about whether it’s worthwhile for you to attend class. But attendance isn’t just about you. The dynamic of a classroom is a collaborative effort, and it’s important that you contribute to this effort, respect your classmates, and honor our shared discussion space by attending class regularly.[/accordion-item]
No excuses are necessary for missed classes.
[accordion-item title=”Why?”]No matter what grade you’ve contracted for, you have an allotment of excused absences. Things happen, people get sick, and emergencies take place. As competent adults, you can decide when the situation warrants an absence. There’s no need to explain the circumstances to me. It may, however, be a good idea to reserve your allotted absences for occasions when they’re strictly necessary.[/accordion-item]
While I strive to respond to your email within 48 hours, I cannot respond to emails on evenings or weekends.
[accordion-item title=”Why?”]I enjoy communicating with you very much, but I’m only one person. Your email may just require a quick answer, but multiply your email by several hundred and you get a sense of my inbox. In addition, I have a small child and many other responsibilities that limit my ability to communicate with you after-hours.[/accordion-item]
I expect you to check the email address associated with your MyUCLA account every weekday.
[accordion-item title=”Why?”]This class has many moving parts — guest speakers, technical variables, and complicated activities. Therefore, plans, readings, deadlines, and meeting locations are subject to change. I will expect you to be responsible for reading and understanding my emails.[/accordion-item]
Double and triple-check to ensure that your blog post has been posted.
[accordion-item title=”Why?”]Invariably, students tell me belatedly that they’ve forgotten to press “submit,” suffered a computer crash, or lost their work in some other way. Unfortunately, I can’t verify these claims, and it’s a drain on my time and energy to referee them. Therefore, I suggest that you do some or all of the following:
- Draft your blog post as a text document first, saving it frequently.
- Press “Save draft” frequently on the WordPress compose screen.
- Use the Lazarus browser extension, which will recover the text you’ve typed if your browser crashes.
- Check (and double-check) to make sure that your post actually appears on the course blog.
- Give yourself sufficient time to ensure that your post is submitted before you get to class.
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In this class, we’ll have laptop days and no-laptop days.
[accordion-item title=”Why?”]You might expect a digital humanities class to be all-technology, all the time. But perhaps because this is a DH class, we understand how difficult it can be to keep your attention from wandering from live human beings when you have a screen in front of you. So even though we’ll use technology intensively, we’ll also focus our attention carefully on each other.[/accordion-item]
Tardiness really bugs me.
[accordion-item title=”Why?”]It’s just a matter of respect for the shared space of the classroom. Late arrivals disrupt our discussion and the flow of the class.[/accordion-item]
You don’t need to raise your hand.
[accordion-item title=”Why?”]Your discussing ideas with each other, not just with me. You’re competent adults and can respectfully and thoughtfully moderate the discussion yourselves.[/accordion-item]
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