Also known as: CSCI 4830 and CSCI 7000
Meets Monday/Wednesday from 2:00 to 3:00 in ITLL 1B50
Instructor: Tammy Sumner
A project-based seminar course on networked communities, knowledge media, and digital divide issues.
The aim of this course is to survey the leading edge of current Internet issues such as privacy, intellectual property, building online community, and moving from 'information to knowledge' in several content and application areas: education, e-commerce, electronic publishing, etc. The emphasis will be on developing a detailed understanding of these issues that can effectively inform the design and analysis of interactive systems. We will explore these issues through weekly 'roundtable' discussions of readings, weekly 'show and tell' presentations of technologies, tools, and exemplars related to the readings, and through semester-long projects.
One class meeting per week (probably wednesdays) will be devoted to roundtable discussions of readings from the text (Internet Edge by Mark Stefik) and additional readings on topics of mutual interest. Such additional readings will include chapters from other books, recent articles from conference proceedings and academic journals, and selected 'classics' such as:
Travels in Hyperreality, by Umberto Eco
Empathic Communities, by Jenny Preece
Who will own your next good idea?, by Charles Mann
Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape, by Philip Agre and Marc Rotenberg
One class meeting per week (mondays) will be devoted to 'show and tell' presentations related to the readings led by class participants. Last year's presentations included eGroups, photo.net, a brief history of online gaming, a comparison of electronic book reading devices, Expert Exchange, lambdaMoo, ActiveWorlds, GVU Web Survey results, and many more.
In addition to reading and talking, we will also experience some of these technologies and issues for ourselves! Mainly, we will be using eGroups to support our course communication and coordination activities. Our eGroup is called "idreams2000" and is now open to the public for viewing.
The primary goal of each project is to get in-depth experience in applying the ideas from the course to a substantial problem. A secondary goal is to learn how to do good interdisciplinary research, usually meaning research leading to publication. Projects are done in teams of three to five. Topics are chosen from a list provided by the instructor, augmented by student suggestions made at the beginning of the course. The type of project is flexible, depending on your skills and interests - it can be implementing something, evaluating something, researching something, etc. There should be a service element to your chosen project; i.e., you should be doing something real for someone. As part of organizing this course, I will line up a few potential 'customers' interested in sponsoring projects.
Designing a Web Presence for a Community-Centered Digital Library, By Melissa Dawe, Lynne Davis, and Suzanne
Shi
Report available in PDF: Community Center Report (386K)
Designing A Simple Resource Search UI for the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE), By John Weatherley
and Troy Weingart
Report available in PDF: Resource Discovery Report (893K)
Real Time Data Project, By Natalya Dikovitskaya and Glenn Blauvelt
Report available in PDF: Real Time Data Report (276K)
Privacy Statements, By Kelly Bourke
Report available in PDF: Privacy Statement Report (28K)
Distill: A Web Log Analysis Tool, By Sue Hendrix
Report available in PDF: Distill Report (19K)
Easy News Project, By Wenming Ye, Lu Fan, Eric Gunderson
Report available in PDF: Easy News Users Manual (1.2 MB)
The I-Mail Project, By Leo Burd, Jan Kaiser, Thuha Nguyen
Report available in PDF: Inclusive Mail Report (344K)
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Mondays (Show and Tells) |
Wednesdays (Discussion of Readings) |
| Aug 28: About the Course; (Tammy) | Aug 30: About the Projects (Tammy, Eric, Hal, Wenming, Leo) |
| Sep 4: No Class Today - Holiday | Sep 6: Our iDreams for 2010 (everyone) |
| Sep 11: Consumer Mental Models of Cellular Phones (Mick) | Sep 13: Readings: Why is paper so hard to get rid of? |
| Sep 18: Portable Document Readers (Tammy, Wenming, Glenn) | Sep 20: Readings: Mobility and Collaboration |
| Sep 25: E-commerce Business Models (Thuha and John) | Sep 27: Readings: Trusted Systems and Social Informatics |
| Oct 2: Smartcards, Digital Cash, Virtual Banking (Kelly, Eric, Lu) | Oct 4: Readings: Intellectual Property in Cyberspace |
| Oct 9: Napster and the IPR debate (Suzanne, Jan, Eric, Jesse) | Oct 11: Readings: Technological Frames |
| Oct 16: Knowledge Tools on the Internet (Melissa and Lynne) | Oct 18: Readings: Sensemaking |
| Oct 23: No Class Today | Oct 25: Readings: Knowledge Media and Community Online |
| Oct 30: Community Online Demos (Wenming, John, Leo) | Nov 1: Readings: Internet Paradox and Bowling Alone |
| Nov 6: Internet and Patents (Glenn and Eric) | Nov 8: Readings: Privacy |
| Nov 13: No Class Today | Nov 15: Readings: The Pleasure Binge (technology and the entertainment economy) |
| Nov 20: Privacy (Sue and Kelly) | Nov 22: Readings: Digital Divide (special class session before thanksgiving) |
| Nov 27: Digital Divide and the Center for the Democratization of Information Technology (Leo) | Nov 29: Readings: Globalization |
| Dec 4: Globalization (Leo, Natalya, Thuha) | Dec 6: Surveillance and the Internet |
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Dec 11: Project Presentations
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Dec 13: Project Presentations
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The core text for the course will be:
Internet Edge: Social, Technical, and Legal Challenges for a Networked World
by Mark Stefik
MIT Press, 1999
From the author......
Sometimes when we face change, we feel conflicting forces driving us forward and pulling us back. This place of tension and confusion can be called an "edge." The "Internet edge" is our collective struggle to change as the world becomes more connected. Turmoil at the Internet edge occurs around interacting social, legal, and technical realms. Examples include issues of on-line privacy, censorship, digital copyright, and untaxed business transactions over the Net, Such issues reflect conflicts between values - local and global, individual and corporate, democratic and nondemocratic.
This book is an eagle's eye view of the Internet edge. It is about the experiences of those who encountered similar issues as they built precursors to the Net such as videotext, teletext, and the Source. It is about the trends in technology that will make the net of the next few years a very different experience from the desktop surfing of today. Finally, it is about how old myths of magic, power, and control can help us to understand our fascination and fear of new technology.
The Table of Contents
The Internet Edge: Change and Connections
The Portable Network: Away from the desktop and into the world
The Digital Wallet and the Copyright Box: The coming arms race in trusted systems
The Bit and the Pendulum: Balancing the interests of stakeholders in digital publishing
Focusing the Light: Making sense in the Information Explosion
The Next Knowledge Medium: Networks and Knowledge Ecologies
The Edge of Chaos: Coping with Rapid Change
The Digital Keyhole: Privacy Rights and Trusted Systems
Strangers in the Net: Access, Diversity, and Borders
Indistinguishable from Magic: The real, the magic, and the virtual
From the back cover, a blurb by Robert Kahn, President, CNRI....
"The Internet Edge provides a panoramic compendium of issues and recent developments in crafting the Internet for real applications. While a major focus of the book is 'content-related' applications and the technology to support them, the implications for electronic commerce, more broadly, are clearly visible. This is a very readable treatise by a well-known and insightful practitioner in the field."
Anyone who is keenly interested in this topic and likes small, highly participatory and interactive classes. If you like to sit back and listen to lectures, then this class is not for you! The class size will be small to facilitate roundtable discussions. Enrollment is limited to 15. Undergraduates interested in taking this course should contact me directly about enrolling. Graduates students can enroll in the normal way.
Finally, this class is not just for computer science students! Interested students from other departments such as psychology, education, anthropology, philsophy, fine arts, journalism, business, etc. etc. are also welcome. If you are unsure or need more information, please send me email or come by my office.
Contact the instructor: Tamara Sumner
email: sumner@colorado.edu
Office: ECOT 734
Phone: (303) 492-2233
WWW: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~sumner