The questions below are ones I have been asked about W2240 that are not covered in the course Syllabus. If you have a question that is not answered here, send it to me via e-mail and I will try to answer it. I also will post the question and answer (without your name) if I think it might be helpful to others. But please first check the Syllabus to be sure the answer's not there.
For the last several years, enrollment in 2240 has been "capped" at 95 (the room's effective capacity) and a number of students have been prevented from preregistering. However, every year some of the preregistered students decide not to enroll in the course, so it is possible to add students after the first class meeting. I keep a waiting list of students who are interested in taking the course. If you'd like to be on the waiting list, send me your name, e-mail addreeess and ID# via e-mail. You also should be sure to attend the first class meeting.
Not exactly. The topics covered in W2240 and those covered in the typical Psycholinguistics course overlap considerably, but the focus of W2240 is communication rather than language, and that affects both the topics that are covered and the way topics are approached. Generally speaking, a Psycholinguistics course will spend more time on such topics as syntax, sentence processing, language acquisition and neurolinguistics than will be the case in W2240.
It's important. The course tries to assess the adequacy of different theoretical approaches to communication by examining how well they accord with empirical observation. Without understanding how data have been obtained, it's impossible to assess their theoretical implications. Experience and intuition, while valuable in their own right, are not sufficient.
That depends a lot on what you mean by "getting something out of a course." You almost certainly will learn some things about language and other communicative behaviors (e.g., facial expression, gesture) that you didn't know before, but what you learn won't help you to write a better poem or argue more convincingly. The goal of the course is to develop a systematic understanding of the mechanisms (cognitive and otherwise) that make human communication possible, and to provide some ways of thinking about communication that can be tested empirically. If you don't value such ways of thinking, it's unlikely you'll feel you've gotten something (other than a grade) out of the course.
The general answer is "no," although occasional exceptions have been made when there was reason to believe the student would not be at a serious disadvantage. The lectures and reading assignments assume familiarity with concepts and methods at the intro course level, and we have found that students lacking this background had a difficult time with the course materials. If you know of some reason this would not be so in your case, you are welcome to make you argument to the instructor, preferably via e-mail.
I don't think so, but it probably depends a lot on how involved you get with the subject matter. See the Caveat section in the Syllabus page. Frankly, I don't understand how someone can "hate science," although I can imagine finding some kinds of science more absorbing than others. Science is a way of achieving a particular kind of understanding (not the only kind of understanding) of certain things. If you find that kind of understanding irrelevant to your concerns, then I guess you will "hate science." But if you are interested in communication, you may find that Human Communication gives you some new insights. What I hate is the idea that a student would take W2240 because it is the lesser evil.
Yes. The readings contain some material that won't be covered in class but may appear on exams, as well as material that will make understanding the lectures much easier.
Good question. The distinction between cognitive and social has become increasingly difficult to draw in recent years, and the kind of psychologist one calls oneself is, to a considerable extent, an accident of history. These days, most of the social psychology I find interesting has a strong cognitive component, and most of the cognitive psychology I find interesting has a strong social component. Some speech production researchers are doing work that many social psych journals would be happy to publish, and some social psychologists publish as often in cognitive journals as in social journals. My own publication history is not atypical. W2240 spans the border of cognitive and social, where I think many of the really interesting theoretical problems lie.
What goes into the calculation of the course grade is discussed in the Syllabus under Course Requirements. It's hard for me to generalize about degree of difficulty, because so much depends on the individual. One way to get an idea of the course's difficulty is to examine the distribution of grades in the past. In Spring 1999 about 35% of the class got A, 40% got B, 18% got C, 6% D and 1% F. This distribution is roughlly consistent with those of other years. However, these numbers may be misleading. For what it's worth, my impression (and I should stress that it's only an impression) is that a substantial proportion of the students who get C or lower have no particular interest in the subject, take the course for the sole purpose of fulfilling the Science Requirement, and put in what they judge to be the minimal effort consistent with passing (some of them may have miscalculated). I would describe W2240 as demanding, but not difficult; getting a decent grade requires some time and effort. It's not a course one can pass without doing the readings and attending (and understanding) the lectures.
The specifics of the Project changes from year to year. We try to devise projects that take 30-40 hours of work to execute acceptably, but individuals vary greatly on the amount of time they spend on it. Although it's not impossible (indeed, not uncommon) for students to get As or Bs without doing the Project, as you might expect there is an association between doing the Project and final grade. On average, about 25% of the students who got As, 55% of the Bs and Ds, 35% percent of the Cs, and 90% of the Fs did not do the Project.
It's true that the course does try to use modern technology, and may go a bit further in this direction than some courses. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, it's an efficient way of disseminating information to a large class. Second, it permits us to link to and utilize information in a variety of formats. However, I would be less than honest if I didn't admit to being intrigued by the way the technology can enhance teaching (a form of communication BTW). I use the technology because I think it makes for a more informative and more interesting course. I also hope that using it in this way will help us understand the process of communication as it occurs in a teaching setting. Everyone agrees that the technology has great potential as a tool in teaching, but I also think that we need to better understand its limitations if we are going to make effective use of it. [End of sermon.] The course certainly isn't about electronic communication, and the topic isn't discussed except in passing. Students who haven't used e-mail or browsed the Internet (for goodness sakes, where have you been the last five years?) will see how easy it is to use the technology. In the process, they may discover an exciting new world they've been missing.
Nothing. As the Syllabus explains, you can only connect to the topic notes (and some other course-related materials) from within the Columbia domain. There are a number of reasons for restricting access this way, some of which involve issues of copyright for materials that are openly circulated on the Internet. If you live off-campus and use an Internet service provider, you should obtain an account on the Columbia machine (the TAs can tell you how to go about getting one). Then you will be able to access the course notes from one of the many public machines that are available on campus.
13. Sometimes when I try to access a web page, not everything on the page will work. Like sound files. Some time I can play them and other times there seems to be nothing there. Am I doing something wrong?
Some of the links on the Topic Notes pages don't work becuase the site's address has been changed or the site is no longer functioning. Unfortunately, sites are taken off-line frequently, and it's impossible for for me to check all of my links regularly (I'm sure someone has written a program that does this). However, I think the problem you're writing about is not simply a matter of broken links. My guess is that you're not allowing sufficient time for the pages to load completely. Some files (especially sound files) are relatively large, and if a page has several of them it can take a while for it to load. If you click on a link to a file before it's fully loaded, you won't get the file. Try checking to be sure the file has loaded before clicking on links. If it still doesn't work (and if you do run across any broken links), please let me know.