Here's my Information Technology & Society course as it's currently taught. There is an enrollment of 22 (3 students have dropped the course); in previous years enrollment has reached the ceiling of 30.

Syllabus

Overview

Students in this course will get a grip on computer technology, how it's used to disseminate information (and the trustworthiness of that process), and how this all affects the society of which we are a part.

Topix :

email, course management, browsing and searching the web, building web site, enhancing photos, producing presentations, crunching numbers

Tools:

squirrel, moodle, mozilla firefox, macromedia dreamweaver, adobe photoshop, ms powerpoint, ms excel

Pedagogic :

assignment journal, discussion forum, peer assessment workshop, working groups, shared web site

Higher order thinking (Bloom):

Cultivate an awareness of Internet hazards from hoax or fraud to phishing & viruses, critique own & other's web sites and articulate statements in a non threatening way, co-operate in a group to create a web site that assesses the social impact of a recent I.T development .

Specifics

Next year

• I'd like to make more space to cover 'society' issues such as the credibility of information on the web (and have students engage in assessing this). I'd also like to spend time in assessing the usability and accessibility of web sites and have students articulate their critiques of web sites in a non-threatening way.
  To make space for this I'd like to drop the two weeks I spend with Excel.
• It seems to me that the level of work I require does justify this course being relabelled as a 200 or 300 level course. In practice, first years can manage the course - indeed they often perform better than their more experienced peers because they make sure to do all their assigned work.
• Currently I have students working in groups to do their major project. When the group gels this seems to work well. However, there have been major personality clashes or students just opting out and this interferes with what can be accomplished. I am toying with having student do individual projects and use groups for discussion forums.
• Next year I will have students subscribe to 'Wired' magazine (at $12 a year, this is cheap) and subscribe to the Webreference email list and then make these resources the subject of group discussion forums.

Excellent links to Photoshop resources:

• Web photos that pop. Wendy Peck nakes the following comment which is very important:

I am quite comfortable telling you that a scanned photo will most likely need contrast, levels and sharpening adjustment.

• Using Photoshop levels
  This is an excellent tutorial, although there is a better way to choose black & white areas - Use Alt & move the levels slider.
• General purpose tutorials
  Some really fun ones here including make an ipod person.
• Another bunch of P’shop tutorials

Am I trying to do too much in different areas in this course so that it ends up being overwhelming?
Problem is that a lot of students aren’t ‘getting it’ - mainly cos they don’t keep up with the classwork.
Ask some questions in the end of term survey about this.

• Have students subscribe to Wired magazine, and email lists Webreference
• Less stuff about web design and more about Society.
• Have students do a ‘personal’ page where they scan in a couple of photos and write about themselves / family / hobbies.
• More forums for discussing society issues.
• Abandon web groups and just conduct discussions in groups.
• have students write about an Internet issue but individually instead of groups. Have them create their own stylesheets.