CS course proposal
CS 1xx Social Impact of Computer Technology
A proposal for an intro level general course
Digital technology has never been more pervasive in western society and yet the public is often ignorant of the real issues and the technology involved; decisions made by lawmakers can often have unintended but predictable consequences. This course would address some of the most pressing and pertinent issues in this realm from technical, moral & ethical standpoints making use of social software tools such as blogs and wiki to write research and opinion pieces and to comment on each other’s work. I would also hope to involve alumni who would be invited to make comments on student blogs or trackbacks in their own blogs.
List of possible topics
- Digital Music
- Has the ipod killed the CD or is the future digital?;
Rise of peer to peer music sharing - can the RIAA stem the use of Kazaa? Is it OK to ‘share’ ‘your’ music?;
Who owns the music you buy - are you really ‘renting’ music when you sign on to Napster?;
Issue of control. How does DRM work and how it can be circumvented.;
Is digital music the next desktop publishing killer app for Apple? - player convergence, tech trends. Apple puts the squeeze on Indie labels - who makes the money in the digital music world anyway?;
- Social Software
- New community building or addictive menace? ;
Social impact of the blogging boom - journalism, publishing, writing. Your own blog - creating your niche in the blogosphere. Blogging begets better brains — writing for your brain ;
The wikiverse — what are wikis and why are they paradigmatical? ;
Folksonomies — del.icio.us , flickr , FURL ; Friend networks — Friendster , Orkut ;
Downsides of online reality — dangers of addiction, flaming, chatspeak, stunted personal interactions ;
- Internet Information
- Is the internet a goldmine of useful knowledge or is free information that is worth anything just a dangerous delusion? ;
How credible is the information we find - what factors do people consider that make an information source believable? ;
Is Wikipedia changing the way we view knowledge? ;
- Open Source Software
- The revolution is here or is it really ? ;
How open is open — different copyright schemes and their implications ;
Will SCO scupper Linux or is a business model based on litigation doomed to failure? ;
- Threats to the Internet
- Will worms, viruses & spam bring down the internet as we know it now? Is the freedom of the internet threatened by anarchy? ;
Zombie alert — with increasing broadband use should you be allowed to operate an unprotected machine on the internet? ;
Making an honest buck — is spam really justifiable?
- Google
- Search engine supreme or evil empire? ;
Google loves blogs - how & why ;
Pagerank - what is it and why is it important to you ;
Google knows everything about you — privacy issues
- Privacy
- Big Brother is watching you or he thinks he is — what are the privacy issues? ;
Are cookies a threat to your privacy — how they can be manipulated to reveal web surfing habits ;
Data mining — how you could be fingered as a terrorist ;
Freedom of Information — who knows what about you ;
Identity cards in the UK — what’s proposed, why biometrics won’t work & why it’s a hazard to your freedom with the collosal danger of false positives;
- Web Accessibility
- Overblown hype or essential concept for the modern web site? ;
What is accessibility and why does it matter on the web? ;
Section 508 — what’s it about and how does it affect my business ; European approaches to accessibility ;
Can web sites be made usable by legislation — Jakob Nielsen seems to think so ;
What inaccessible and accessible web sites sound like to a screen reader ;
How to make an accessible web site — the web standards approach;
The Class
- Three credit course meeting three times a week :
- 1 lab session (covering setting up blog, using trackback, using Textile,
- 1 lecture
- 1 class discussion
- My preliminary idea would be to examine six of the topics above for two weeks each.
- The course would be totally online using the following tools:
- student blogs :
- write reflective commentary on topic with web references
- comment on each other’s blog entries using trackback
- find a relevant blog on the web and comment on an entry using trackback
- invite alumni to comment on blog entries or trackback to their own blog.
- wiki : group / class collaborative work
- Moodle :
- Post resources
- Post grades
- RSS feeds from blogs
- Tying it all together.
Assessment
- Quantity of blog entries
- Quality of blog entries
- Quality & quantity of web references
- Commentary on other’s blogs
- Participation in Wiki project
I’d welcome comments on the theme idea, topic list, class structure, assessment; anything you think of.
Is this something that would be workable for Fall 2005?
Posted by markp at March 10, 2005 05:40 PM
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