CourseMaterialsProject/Principles and Projects Course (Spring 2024)

This course is designed to give students, working individually or in groups, the opportunity to develop and complete projects of their own design, or to accept and complete a challenge project designed by others.I have developed a few challenge projects for Spring 2024 that mirror my current interests. I'll add other challenge projects here as they shared with me. If interested in this course, feel free to email steve@sunypoly.edu identifying a challenge project or suggesting an independent project. Also, indicate if you would be interested in working in a group.

Artificial Intelligence: Using and critiquing tools

Identify a project or task of moderate complexity that you find interesting or challenging, from your professional or personal life. The project should have a specific and well-define outcome or objective or deliverable (generate text, images, sounds, financial models, designs, etc). Write a brief overview of the project, and describe how you think AI tools might help you complete the project.
After discussion with the professor, write a detailed project plan with milestones, weekly updates, monthly presentations, and a final presentation.
Implement the project making use of the Chat GPT 4.0 or a similar level tool whenever possible and productive. Keep a journal explaining your uses and feelings about the AI tools along the way.
Carefully review your journal to detect patterns and insights about your use of AI.
Use AI tools to analyze your journal to detect patterns and insights about your use of AI.
Summarize your project, and provide an overall critique of artificial intelligence as informed by your work on this project.

Legal and Ethical Issues: Literature Review and Resource Development Using Zotero

Review the proposed syllabus for the Fall 2024 course, Legal and Ethical Issues.
Working with the professor, use Zotero to develop and annotate a list of resources, including cases, briefings, readings, videos, and other resources, introducing tags associated with class topics for organizational structure.
Integrate the resource list into Wikidata.

Podcast Design & Pilot: Legal and Ethical Issues Course

Develop a project plan to manage the anticipated podcast associated with the Fall 2024 course, Legal and Ethical Issues
Develop the necessary content and production methods, and direct and product one or two pilot episodes.
Develop hosting plan for podcast, to include upload and indexing on Wikimedia Commons, and a Web page serving and detailing the episodes.

Survey Analysis: Pew Research Center

Select a dataset available from the Pew Research Center that will allow you to explore a question of interest related to digital media, information or technology.
For example recent datasets examined attitudes about artificial intelligence, experiences using artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.
The project would first ask you to identify, develop and/or acquire the skills necessary to analyze data using the dataset, and the tools required to complete the analysis.
Then, you would use the dataset to address your question of interest
Finally, prepare materials showcasing and documenting your results, your process and the skills you've developed.

Wikimedia: Designing a project and critiquing the movement

The Wikimedia movement, including but not limited to Wikipedia, stands as a testament to the power of collaborative knowledge-building with an ethos of open, community-driven information sharing.

This project, which will serve as a pilot of the "Introduction to Wikimedia" course to be offerred this summer, introduces the range of Wikimedia initiatives and places them in the context of the philosophy of the Wikimedia movement . Students will explore the Wikimedia communities through engagement with its members, and exploration of introductory materials. In addition, students will develop technical skills using Mediawiki, the underlying platform powering Wikimedia initiatives.

Participants will develop a projects that aligns their interests with those of the mission of a selected Wikipedia platform. For example, students might choose to update a Wikivoyage destination, enrich content on Wikisource, integrate data into the Wikidata database, refine or begin an article on Wikipedia, or submit images to Wikimedia Commons. Others examples include adding definitions to Wiktionary, creating learning resources on Wikibooks, contributing news articles to Wikinews, documenting biodiversity on Wikispecies, and participating in academic collaborations through Wikiversity.

An example of a Wikimedia project is to create a Wikipedia page for MUCC, the Mid-Utica Community Center

Additionally, students critically evaluate Wikimedia's impact and standing in the expansive digital information domain of the 21st century. More details...