What's this blog all about?

This blog is designed to be a companion for the subject Knowledge Technologies (COMP30018/90049) at the University of Melbourne.

[Edit: moved content below the fold because jump breaks are awesome.]



It contains supplementary material - the material presented here is designed to be used in conjunction with the lectures/workshops/assessment: it doesn't replace material from the subject itself; it is not assessible; it may not make much sense if you aren't taking the subject.

What it does (will) contain is material that we'd like to have time to cover in the regularly scheduled programming, but can't sensibly get around to, given that we're trying to cover a sensible syllabus. Basically, I expect to write two kinds of posts:

• Reinforcing academic skills that we expect students to have, but may lack for whatever reason (e.g. report writing, referencing, test taking, certain kinds of data analysis)
• Extension of material from the curriculum that we find fun or interesting or relevant to Knowledge Technology in the real world, that we can't squeeze into the time available.

I consequently expect that the material here will be most useful to two kinds of students: 1) Students needing remediation because they come from non-technical fields or are rusty with their technical skills; 2) Students looking for a little more depth on the topics from the lectures, because they are interested or thinking about going further in the field of KT (academia or professional or both). Note that this isn't everyone - we aren't expecting or requiring enrolled students to read and work through every minor detail here. On the other hand, for example, if you find that you're being docked marks for poor citation style (read: citing Wikipedia), we will point to this space for both the rationale and remedial guidelines.

Some more meta-notes:

• While the blog is new, I anticipate posting once or twice a week to populate it with the most important topics; once it's established (e.g. future semesters), I don't expect to post very frequently.
• We'll try to use tags to help you search through the blog for the posts that are most relevant to your immediate concerns. (Let's face it, you're probably pretty good at filtering data on the Internet already.) This will become more of an issue as the blog gets more established and there is more content.
• Comments are, of course, appreciated. On the other hand, this isn't supposed to replace the LMS and the Discussion Board there. The rule of thumb that's currently in my mind would be that you should comment here about the material here; if you have questions about the assessible material in the subject, you should ask them on the LMS (because not everyone will be looking here). I guess I'll respond to requests for further detail in both places, and respond in the more appropriate location.