Assignments Due

Week 1 checkpoints should be submitted by Monday, 01/08/2018 at 11:59 PM PST.

Perform

No checkpoint due this week :)

Compose

Intro Video

Right from the start let’s put clients in the front of our minds. Some of us work in very structured roles within organizations while others may freelance. For the former, the client may seem distant, while the latter may face the client more directly. In either case it is going to be very helpful to think about your audience as the person or persons you need to satisfy or persuade. We may naturally think of the paying customer as the client, but in RDADA the client is whomever the data science is for. That means it could be a team member, a direct supervisor, a stranger on the internet, a potential investor, basically anyone who is a stakeholder in your actual or aspirational situation. Though there may be multiple people able to hold your data science accountable, for now start with whomever you feel is most important.

To help you practice keeping your client in mind, I will ask you to avoid treating myself or the rest of the section as your audience when you prepare work for this class. That actually requires a bit of role playing where you treat us as if we are the client. This might not feel comfortable at first, but we’ll get the hang of it over the course of the term. Start practicing this in your video by saying something like this:

Hello World! My name is OSKI BEAR and if you’re watching this then you’re A CLIENT with A PROBLEM. Let me tell you a little about myself and how I think data science can help address your challenges…

Fill in the blanks with your own client-problem pairing, and then just express yourself for about a minute and consider all of the things that brought you to the program to begin with, being sure to talk to your client and not to the class. If you don’t know who your client is, now is the time to start thinking about it! That said, don’t sweat your script too much and instead aim for a first draft. This video is something we will play with later so you’ll have a chance to improve it.

How to submit

To complete this assignment you will need to set up your bconnected account and have submitted your Slack handle to your instructor via the onboarding questionnaire so you can be added to our private channel.

Record your video however you like so long as it can be encoded in a web accessible mp4 format. We will use bDrive because it offers unlimited storage and because integrations in your video software may help you handle encoding from large source files. A smartphone camera using the Google Drive app will work well because it may encode the video before uploading it, saving you time and bandwidth. There are many solutions so find a reproducible one that works for you, and feel free to discuss your choices on our private Slack channel.

Upload your video to this shared bDrive folder. Using your unlimited bDrive storage will be a convenient way to embed video later. To know if you’re in the ballpark your video should be under 20MB. If you’re closer to 200MB, it’s ok to upload it, but you’ll eventually want to learn how to reduce the filesize with a more web friendly encoding. bDrive will downsample a preview for you, however, which is very convenient!

If you aren’t able to figure out a bDrive workflow for video this time around then as a last resort you may punt by recording your video directly to the W201 course wall on the ISVC. Unfortunately this will not enable you to publish the video in a different venue later, so we will still want to debug your workflow at a future time.

Review

No checkpoint due this week :)

Some notes on pedagogy

Our Slack channel is not the public W201 channel open to the whole I School. It is a private channel for currently enrolled W201 students in sections 3, 4, and 5. We will be sharing a channel across a few sections to make for a slightly bigger forum. Similarly, the video in the bDrive folder will be viewable by an audience of peers slightly bigger than your section. This is intentional because we are only going to practice producing publicly facing work in this course. I’m happy to hear your thoughts on this, just direct message me on Slack.

Why, you may ask, do I have to go through all these hoops for a simple intro? Why couldn’t we just do introductions live in class? I can’t argue with you there, but almost every exercise in this class is going to be a little more complicated than necessary because the extra steps will model workflows that you may find useful for your own purposes later. I don’t mind asking you to work, but I do not want to waste your time, so be forthcoming with feedback about the value added for the time you’re putting in. Bear with me because there is method to the madness!

Figure 8: Unbearable Meme (via GIPHY)

readings (links) & lectures ～ assignments due