Using Piazza for this Class

by Mike Gleicher on January 6, 2012

We will be using the Piazza online discussion system for this class.

Please give yourself a profile picture – this will be really useful for all of us to learn each other’s names.

I have no ideas how this will work out – so we’ll experiment. To be honest I have no idea how it will scale to a class this big.

With a class as big as ours, it will be hard for everyone to talk in class. Hopefully, by having a good discussion system, we’ll all be able to participate and learn from one another. That’s the plan. We’ll see how it works. Discussion is one of the best ways to learn. This might make it practical at scale.

Note: I am a little torn as to how best to use Piazza – for example, whether to have people post replies to my messages, or do each person’s assignment as a separate thread. We’ll experiment as the class goes on. Piazza gives us a few basic mechanics that we can employ for our own purposes.

One of Piazza’s main mechanics is a flexible tagging scheme – you can add a hashtag to anything. Be judicious in your use of hashtags: if we have tag soup, their value will be diminished.

I will keep track of who posts what. In addition to doing the required postings, you’ll need to be an active participant in the overall discourse.

What We’ll Use Piazza For

1. We’ll use Piazza as the primary way for you to hand in assignments including reading assignments. I will create a “Question” and you post your response as a “followup discussion” posting to it. For example, for each reading, I will ask you to post a response (sometimes with a specific question, sometime just in general).

Everyone will be able to see everyone else’s postings. I would prefer that you make your own posting before you read others. However – discussion is good. After you post your answer, you should look through other people’s postings – possibly commenting on things that you find interesting.

Note that your “top level” responses (ones made to my posting, as opposed to ones made to other’s postings) get a “resolved” button. We’ll try to use this as a mark that I have looked at your response. I may not give feedback.

2. We’ll use Piazza as a way to discuss lectures. For every lecture, I’ll create a question page so we can have a discussion about the lecture. Or, if there’s some topic from the lecture you want to discuss, you might just create a new discussion topic. I’m not sure what will work best. We’ll try the collective lecture posting thing first.

We will also use Piazza as a general way to discuss Visualization and other topics related to class. If you see some cool visualization, have something you’re curious about, come across something you don’t understand in a reading, need some help with programming, or …. – make a post.  If someone else says something interesting or has a question, or poses an idea, answer them.

3. If you encounter a cool visualization or tool or technique, post it! Give it the #coolstuff tag. Hopefully, everyone will contribute some of these. And discuss.

4. If you have a question, administrative issue, etc. Post the question – that way everyone can see the answer! (someone is probably wondering the same thing).

Piazza will be part of how you are evaluated for the class:

Assignments and Readings are explicitly part of your grade.

You participation in discussion is part of your class participation grade. Ideally, participation is a mix of on-line and in-class. If you don’t get a chance to voice your opinion in class, make sure to post it in a discussion so we know you have it!

Uploading Pictures to Piazza

While many things are great about Piazza, there are some things that they don’t support well. In particular, they aren’t as picture-centric as we might need for this class, so it’s a little bit of a hassle to use pictures in a discussion. However, it’s not so bad once you get the hang of it, and they said they are working on better mechanisms.

Most of the time, you will want to add a post to a discussion. To do this, you need to:

  1. Go to the “student response” section – note: the student response section is where all students collaborate to make a response. We won’t use this much. But it is where the “Actions” drop down is.
  2. From the actions drop down (in the student response section) use the upload file option. Note: since all students upload files here, please use a name that makes it obvious whose file is whose.
  3. When you click on “embed this image” you’ll be given a little snippet of HTML. You can put this into your followup discussion (so copy it). It will look like:
  4. Create your follow up discussion posting (or edit one you’ve already written).
  5. When you insert the html for you image, it will insert the image – full sized. This will be annoying to everyone. So edit the html tag to add a “width” attribute like width=”100px” src="/view/gx0ucbrydHl"/>.
  6. Now, you need to make a way to give people access to the big image. Type the URL, which is the thing in “src” with “http://piazza.com” in front of it like http://piazza.com/view/gx0ucbrydHl (note: if you put an URL into your posting, Piazza is smart enough to make it linkable).

OK, a bit of a pain, but Piazza has enough other nice features that we’ll deal with this. If it turns out to be too much of a pain, we’ll find something else.

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