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Your final extra credits problem is now online! See below for the links.
Your seventh and final extra credit problem is online! Due Monday 5 May at midnight.
There are a number of prominent "internet-oriented" features of this course, links to the most important of which are provided at the top of this page. These are:
Our regular weekly format consists of two lectures and a one hour lab. The Logic Lab, where the labs take place, is located in 019 Bolton Hall (basement floor). The lab contains 20 workstations, and there are typically 30 to 40 students per lab. Each lab begins with a brief discussion/lecture led by your TA, followed by an online quiz. Typically, a pair of students will share a single workstation and work on the quiz together, but you are free to discuss and ask questions about the quiz problems openly in the classroom with your TA and your other classmates.
The most prominent web-based feature of our course is the Power of Logic Web Tutor. The Web Tutor is an online program that supplements our text, The Power of Logic The tutor provides an interactive environment for working nearly all of the problems in the text. It is especially useful for those elements of the course -- notably, Venn Diagrams, Truth Tables, and Proofs -- whose mastery involves learning a certain set of skills that can only be acquired through diligent practice. The weekly labs will often give you the opportunity to work on the Web Tutor, though, of course, you will need to work on it during the week on your own considerably more often than that.
I will be putting links to my lecture notes on this page. Barring difficulties, I will have the slides online by noon on the day of the lecture (typically sooner). To read and print these notes you will need the free Adobe Acrobat reader. You may also have to configure your browser so that it will know what to do with the PDF (Portable Document Format) files that the links below point to. Let me know if you don't know how to do that.
Every week or so I put up a link to an online extra credit problem covering recent material. They are typically a little more challenging than the weekly quizzes, but they are worth up to 3 points of extra credit by the end of the semester.
Your grades at any point are available to you on the Web via an online gradebook. You will need the course password that you gave yourself in the first lab. The gradebook is secure, and cannot be viewed by anyone unless you give them your password. Don't give them your password.
On Emailing Me: Proper EtiquetteI generally read and respond to email very quickly. Feel free to write me about anything related to the class (or to music, politics, or cycling). However, please do not email me with questions that are easily answered by looking around on the site (e.g., the date of an exam). Also, Windows software has this nasty habit (one of many) of sending mail formatted with all sorts of HTML junk. So if you can, please send me plain text mail. There is an option for this in your mail program. Thanks for your support.
A further note on this matter: Not only is HTML mail a wasteful use of internet bandwidth, in this day and age of multitudes of email viruses it is also unwise — most internet virus checking programs flag HTML-formatted mail as a likely candidate for spam. Depending on how paranoid your recipient is, you risk your message being shunted to his or her trash.
On AIMing MeI am regularly available via my AIM instant messaging account. My AIM screen name is "TXLogic". Feel free to ping me anytime you see that I'm online — if I didn't want to be disturbed, I wouldn't be there!