MEMO

Catalog course description

An exploration of the impact of computing and information technology (IT) on individuals and society in the United States and the world. The course addresses the impact of IT on areas such as: digital technology at home; personal devices; rapid unregulated spread of (mis)information; political processes of dissemination and polling capabilities; empowering individuals and families with information included in medical and other databases; personal and work place communication; the networked information economy and globalization. Other topics may include the interaction of IT with intellectual property, privacy, ethics, security concerns and freedom of expression.

Prerequisites

It is expected that students have used a computer before and that they have high-school-level knowledge of reading, writing, and social studies.

Course overview

Our foundational idea is that the globalized society and the information technology revolution are shaping each other. Information technology embodies values and in turn produces change in our values.

One sociologist, Manuel Castells, advances the central idea that information technology and recent other changes in capitalism are producing a society organized increasingly as networks rather than as hierarchies (The Rise of the Network Society). The instructor shares this perspective, motivated from a computer-science point of view.

We will discuss hardware and software and how they are changing our lives. We will use some of this software and will use the Internet to manage part of our discussion, to access research material, and to present academic material in new media form.

Part of the course will be about social, legal, and political issues raised by changes in our lives due to information technology. Four such issues are freedom of expression, intellectual property, privacy, and social distribution of access to IT (“the digital divide”). Each of these cases forms the basis for an argument that IT changes and will change our lives in profound new ways.

This course contains three points of view: the sociological, the ethical/legal, and the technical. The instructor is a computer scientist whose research happens to intersect with the central theme of the course. In theoretical computer science, interactive computation and the theory of multiagent systems are relatively new areas of research.

As part of topic 8, we will introduce a relationship between theoretical computer science (theory of systems and computation), and the social interactions examined by sociologists. A second guiding idea for our presentation will be that the theory of interactive computation can shed light on the social changes being brought by IT. The reading by Mitchel Resnick will relate the notion of decentralized systems to some of the course topics.

Required reading

Slides and handouts.

Sara Baase. A Gift of Fire, 3^rd ed. Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008.

Mitchel Resnick. Decentralized modeling and decentralized thinking. Handout also found at:
http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/courses/tft00/
modeling/modeling.html

Textbook material, like classroom discussion, slides, and exercises, is essential for understanding this course. We will refer to the textbook a number of times in the gorup work and exams. The slides and questions handouts provide a summary and study guide only.

To contact instructor:

Office hours (Hemenway Hall 318A):

M 12:30-1:20 p.m., W 10:30-11:20 a.m.,

Th 2:30-4:20 p.m., others by appointment

Office: Hemenway Hall 318A

Telephone: (508) 626-4724

Email: dkeil@frc.mass.edu

URL: www.framingham.edu/faculty/dkeil

Classroom format

Format will center on lecture (with slides), discussion, and problem solving. Your questions and participation are important. Part of our responsibility is to express doubt about each other’s claims.

We will write some program code on the board; other code we will compile and run using a projector. On several occasions we may divide into in-class teams to solve discussion problems.

We will have one conversation in the classroom. Students may use laptops and enter and leave classroom consistent with a focused workplace governed by attention to business and by mutual respect.

Web aspect of course

This course has a Blackboard site at http://framingham.blackboard.com. The site provides all course materials and hosts a private discussion board for students enrolled. Group work and other discussion posts should be posted there. Quiz and group-work grades will be posted at Student Tools / My Grades on Blackboard.

Group work

Long and short answer problems will be posted. Some problems will be assigned to groups working in and out of classroom.

Research project

Each student will propose a research topic within one of the course topics, providing at least one source other than required readings; proposals are due by mid-February. Research will be documented and will be guided by instructor, with preliminary draft due in March and final paper in late April.

Presentations

Each student will present in class one problem solution from group work, or summary of research, or both.

Quizzes and final exam

Quizzes will be based in part on these problems. Major quizzes are open-book, open notes. Mini-quizzes are closed-book, short-answer or multiple choice. Final exam will have both kinds of question.

Grading weights

Group work	20
Major quizzes (2)	20
Mini-quizzes (8)	20
Final exam	20
Research paper	10
Presentation	5
Participation	005
	100	%

Objectives

After taking this course, the students should:

1. know the general impact of computing and information technology on society and on the humanities, including effects on privacy rights

2. understand how digital technologies affect the social and cultural life of an individual and family

3. be able to explain how IT raises issues of intellectual property and rights to copy information

4. be able to carry out documented research on social aspects of information technology

5. be able to make a presentation within the field

6. be ready to adjust to yet-unseen social changes resulting from technological changes

Collaboration and acknowledgement
of intellectual debts

Homework, quizzes, and exams are to be completed independently. Submission of the work of others as one’s own is considered academic dishonesty at FSC. Students are encouraged within these constraints to work together on the course material (not on writing homework), in order to help each other understand it. Excessive help with homework details will reduce a student’s ability to do well on exams.

Accommodations

Students who seek accommodations during the semester because of disabilities should meet with the instructor after class or during office hours early in the semester.

Course Plan (rev. 1/25)

Dates	Topic	Textbook chapters or handouts
1/24-1/25	Introduction
1/28-2/8	1. Cyberethics and the information-technology revolution	Baase, Ch. 1
2/11-2/25	2. Privacy and security	Chs. 2, 5
2/27-3/7	3. Freedom of expression	Ch. 3
3/10	Major quiz (topics 1-3)
3/13-4/4	4. Intellectual property	Ch. 4
4/7-4/11	5. Work and education	Ch. 6
4/14-4/18	6. Risks, control, and evaluation of IT	Chs. 7-8
4/23	Major quiz (topics 4-6)
4/25-4/28	7. Ethics of IT professionals	Ch. 9
4/30-5/2	8. The information economy and globalization: Centralized (hierarchical) and decentralized (network) structures	Resnick
5/5-5/9	Course review and research presentations
May 15, 9:00 a.m.	Final exam (Topics 1-8)