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Syllabus

December 22, 2006 - 6:18pm — Professor Shortell

Goals

The primary learning goals of this course are:

  1. to generate new knowledge about computing as a kind of social practice and its relation to democratic social change;
  2. to cultivate a greater awareness of how political and economic power affect computing, and the potential for computing to affect forms of power;
  3. to explore the ways in which technology-mediated interaction can change the way people work together; and,
  4. to develop proficiency in using the internet as a source of information about contemporary society.

Objectives

To this end, by the end of the semester, students will be able to:

  1. identify and discuss in depth one major issue relevant to the social consequences of computing;
  2. critically summarize the literature in some of the following areas: computing as a distinct subculture (e.g., hackers, "computer geeks", techno-utopians/visionaries, etc.), privacy and security in the information age, open source programming and the "free software" movement, social movements and online communities, changing definitions of property in the digital age, computers and inequality, among others; and,
  3. identify the major effects of globalization on the social practice of computing.

Assessment

These learning objectives are enacted in the assignments of the course, including:

  1. a web-based collaborative project in which the students collect and synthesize relevant information from contemporary sources, including the web, to draw out the relationship between computing as a social practice and democratic social change, and at the same time, reflect on the nature of collaborative work using technology-mediated interaction (worth up to 40 points);

  2. online discussion and blogging in which students suggest and summarize relevant readings from various online sources based on the classroom lecture/discussion (worth up to 30 points); and,
  3. in-class participation, including collaborative exercises and polls (worth up to 20 points).
  4. brief topical essays that synthesize the assigned readings and additional material (worth up to 20 points).

Grades will be assigned according to the following scale: [100+ points = A+] [99-92 = A] [91-90 = A-] [89-87 = B+] [86-82 = B] [81-80 = B-] [79-77 = C+] [76-72 = C] [71-70 = C-] [69-67 = D+] [66-62 = D] [61-60 = D-] [below 60 = F].

Readings

Our textbooks will be (1) Society Online: The Internet in Context, edited by Philip N. Howard and Steve Jones. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004 [ISBN 0761927085]; (2) Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open-Source Software, by Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter. New York: Routledge, 2007 [ISBN 0415978939]. Additional readings will be indicated on the schedule. Please do the reading assignments before the class meeting in which they will be discussed, in order to fully participate in the discussion.

Attendance

Attendance is required. If you need to miss a class meeting, use the absence form to report it. If you miss a meeting without completing the form, it will count as an unexcused absence. More than two unexcused absences will result in a lowering of the course grade.