Syllabus: Internet Dreams (Fall 1999)

Instructor: Tammy Sumner

• e-mail: sumner@colorado.edu
• phone: 492-2233
• WWW: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~sumner
• office hours: after class on Mondays in ECOT 734
• Class Meetings: Monday and Wednesdays, 1 - 2:15, in ITTL IB50
• Class Participants - contact information and interests

FINAL PROJECT PRESENTATIONS AND REPORT DEADLINES

Here is the presentation schedule and pointers to the final report if available online:
Monday, Nov. 29

25 min	XML Group	XML as a Standard Common Format for Viewing and Interchange of Threaded Discussions
15 min	Tim Greenfield	Medical Web Pages (abstract only)
15 min	Mark Bodmer	Using the Internet to Improve Parental Participation in Primary and Seconday Education (abstract only)
15 min	Gary Love	Blazing Newspaper Trails (abstract only)

70 minutes total

Wednesday, Dec. 1

15 min	Mick Khoo	Characteristics of Peer Review in a CMC Environment
20 min	Persona Server	Persona Server: An Environment for Building Digital Personas and a review of Other Persona Projects
20 min	Edgar & Jim	Tribes Project
15 min	John Caron	Design for the FAQ Organizer Application

70 minutes total

Presentations should include:

• what is the focus of your project?
• what is the motivation for your project? i.e., why is it important or interesting
• related scholarly work / research / products
• what did you do?
• what did you learn?
• what would you add or do differently if you had more time?

DUE On Monday, Nov. 29, everyone should hand in to me at the beginning of class a draft of their final report. I will return it to you on wednesday with comments.

The final versions of your report are due by 5pm, Monday, December 13. You can put them in my mailbox on the 7th floor in the cs office. The cs office closes promptly at 5pm.

Details on the final report: I expect a scholarly, research report of between 8 and 10 pages long, with abstract (about 150 words), keywords, references (author-date format), etc. You should use the model articles you picked earlier as a guide for this style of writing and genre of document. If you are doing an systems project (e.g., XML or persona), then you may have fewer primary sources for your references (6ish). If you are doing an empirical study or designing an empirical study (like Mark or Edgar and Jim), then you will have more primary sources (10ish). If you are doing a literature review (like John), then you will have 20-30 sources.

You must return all borrowed books to receive a grade in this class. The following people have borrowed books:
Jim Fronzak and Edgar Roman: Hertz - Joystick Nation; Turkle - Identity in the Age of the Internet (Returned)
Mark Bodmer: Sapsford & Jupp - Data Collection and Analysis (Returned)

Our class-constructed Idreams digital library is now available.

DUE: Initial Project Plans. The plan guidelines are available.

---

Course Calendar for Fall 1999

Week of Aug 23

Monday, Aug 23

• Introductions

• General Plans
  Stefik's book and then readings of interest
  Mondays versus Wednesdays
  D3E and ROADS
  Assessment: Participation (30%) and Projects (70%)

• Assignments for Wednesday:
  (1) Internet Dreams (up to page 33), including:
  * Introduction (Mark Stefik)
  * As We May Think (Vannevar Bush)
  * Libraries of the Future (J.C.R. Licklider)

  (2) Email to me your contact info: name, affiliation, email, home page, areas of interests in HTML format

• Optional reading: Full version of As We May Think
• More information on Licklider is available.
• Transcript from a chat with Mark Stefik about his book "Internet Dreams"

Wednesday, August 25

• About Bush and Licklider
• Discussion of readings
• Assignments for next monday (Aug 30):
  Internet Dreams (up to page 66), including:
  * The World of Knowbots (Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf)
  * Communication as the Root of Scientific Progress (Joshua Lederberg)
  * What is the Role of Libraries in the Information Economy (John Browning)

• Optional reading: Published version of Communication as the Root of Scientific Progress
• More information on Lederberg is available.
• Full text of Bush's report, Science, The Endless Frontier, is available courtesy of some good folks at the University of Minnesota.

• Some digital library, ejournal/emag, and museum links to consider:
  The ACM Digital Library
  D-lib Magazine
  The New Zealand Digital Library
  The Atlantic Monthly Unbound
  The Library of Congress
  Wired
  The Louvre Museum

• Interesting article about long term effects of Internet use in households - The HomeNet Study

Monday, Aug 30

• About Lederberg (by Tim), Kahn (by Gabe), and Cerf (by Bret)
• Discussion of readings
• More on the projects
• Assignment for next Monday (Sept 1):
  Find a site that relates to the readings and issues we have been discussing in class that you think should appear in our shared class library. Record the template information for your site and bring it to class on wednesday - both hard copy and soft copy.
• Assignments for next wednesday (Sept 8):
  Internet Dreams (up to page 82), including:
  * Technological Revolutions and the Gutenberg Myth (Scott Cook)

Wednesday, September 1

• ROADS seminar

Monday, Sep 6 - Holiday, No Class.

Wednesday, Sep 8

• Projects should be selected!

• The HP Vision Video: 1995 - another conception of knowbots and living and working in the wired world
• Discussion of readings

• Assignments for next wednesday (Sept 15):
  Internet Dreams (up to page 107), including:
  * Libraries Are More then Information: Situational Aspects of Electronic Libraries (Vicky Reich and Mark Weiser)
  * The Electronic Capture and Dissemination of the Cultural Practice of Tibetan Thangka Painting (Ranjit Makkuni)
  Handout - Frontiers in Electronic Media (by Kim Veltman), published in interactions, july+august, 1997.
  Handout - Heroic Measures: Reflections on the Possibility and Purpose of Digital Preservation (by David Levy), published in the Proceedings of Digital Libraries '98

Week of Sep 13

Monday, Sep 13

We will have a special guest appearance. Jonathan Ostwald will present and demonstrate 'Dynasites' - a web-based system for supporting communication and organizational learning in research teams. This presentation will last approximately 45minutes. This system demonstrates some of the ideas in our readings, particularly the Licklider and Lederberg articles. For those of you in Gerry's project, this is one of the systems that your Knowledge Interchange mechanism will try to support.

For the final 30 minutes of class, we will discuss projects and break into our teams to begin a little planning.

I will also hand out another article on digital preservation techniques for Wednesday. I apologize for handing this out so late.

Wednesday, Sep 15

We will focus our discussions around the theme of digital preservation, looking at it from technical, social, and cultural perspectives. In preparation, read (as we discussed on Wednesday):

• Idreams text, Makkuni article, pages 95 - 107
• Veltman Article, Frontiers in Electronic Media, in Interactions magazine, supplemental handout
• Levy, Heroic Measures, to be handed out on Monday

Note: The Reich and Weiser article in the Idreams text is optional but still well worth reading! (and it is very short)

If you didn't get the Veltman article last Wednesday, I'll bring more on Monday or you can download it from the ACM Digital Library.

Other announcements:

Also, Mick Khoo has located an opportunity for students to get paid $50 to participate in a digital library focus group on campus. The library is www.netlibrary.com and provides a mixture of for free and for pay services. They could certainly use some informed opinions from people like you all.

Monday, September 20

No formal class meeting - Use this class session for project meetings.

Wednesday, Sep 22

• DUE: One page project plans
• Discussion of readings: our theme this week is 'social informatics' and its implications for internet applications design and use
• Readings: Kling, What is Social Informatics and Why Does it Matter?

Monday, Sep 27

• Show and Tell Session: It is time to start applying some of the new ideas, theories, and themes we have been reading about to understand and analyze existing internet applications and services. Gabe & Michael H., Ahmed, Edgar, and Peter will begin this process by discussing some interesting sites they have found.

  To the presenters: please enter these sites into our ROADS library to help interested folks explore these sites on their own outside of class.

• Project Meetings: Starting today, the last half hour of every monday will be reserved for project team meetings. For those of you working on individual projects, I will be available during this session to meet with you individually as needed. Mark B. has reserved today's slot.

Wednesday, Sep 29

• Introduction to thinking about "communities" and "virtual communities". Tammy presented 5 definitions - available on slide1 and slide2.
• Discussion of readings: read up to page 171 in Internet Dreams, section 2 on the electronic mail metaphor, including:
  • Some consequences of electronic groups (Sproul and Farah)
  • Netiquette 101 (Machado)
  • The MPC Adventures (Conway)
  • Digital Communications and the Conduct of Science (Lederberg)

Concerning projects:
There is a lot of overlap between some of the projects in key areas such as XML or virtual communities. This is good; we can learn from each other! Each project team should be sure to enter into our ROADS library any online resources that are useful to your project so that your other team members and other teams can also benefit.

Monday, Oct 4

• Edgar will present a medical digital library to us
• We will watch and discuss the Starfire video - Sun's vision video
• Project team meetings (last 30 minutes)

Wednesday, Oct 6

• Discussion of readings: Communities and Virtual Communities
  4 readings on the value of 'community' and virtual communities
  • Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital
    http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/journal_of_democracy/v006/6.1putnam.html
  • Kicking in Groups (a rebuttal to Bowling Alone, by Nicholas Lemann)
    http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96apr/kicking/kicking.htm
  • Are Newsgroups Virtual Communities? (by Theresa Roberts)
    Published in CHI 98 (in the ACM digital library)
  • Empathic Communities: Reaching out across the web (by Jenny Preece)
    Published in interactions (in the ACM digital library)

Week of Oct 11

Monday, Oct 11

• Tammy will talk about a introductory computer science distance learning course she worked on at The Open University: M206 An Object-oriented approach.
• Bret is going to demo the online environment for his distance learning Introductory Business Course. He will also discuss his experiences so far this semester being a student on the course.

Wednesday, Oct 13

• Discussion of readings: Using the internet in education. We have two 'opposing pairs' of articles to discuss:
• Pair 1: high-tech versus low-tech approaches
  • Experiences in Teaching Middle East Politics via Internet-based Role-Play Simulations (available at: http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/98/11)
  • Investigating the Capture, Integration and Access Problem of Ubiquitous Computing in an Educational Setting (available in the ACM digital library)
• Pair 2: Two studies about using the internet to support distance learning with quite different findings
  • Students' Frustration with a Web-based Distance Education Course: A Taboo Topic in the Discourse
  • Innovations in large-scale supported distance teaching: transformation for the Internet, not just translation

Week of Oct 18

Monday, Oct 18

Project Milestone #1 - Schedule Checkpoint Meetings with Tammy this week.

Just a reminder of where we are going for the next few weeks. We are officially moving into discussions of the open source movement, copyright, and e-commerce. I envision the readings for this section taking about three wednesday sessions.

Today, we will kick off this new topic with some relevant Show & Tells:

• I will share some of the highlights of Udi Manber's talk about Yahoo! which has clearly built on the shoulder of the open source community.
• John Caron will discuss and demo different 'technical support communities' that exist on the web such as expert.com.
• Gabe Johnson will discuss and demo slashdot - the web publication for nerds and a good place to begin thinking about 'hacker culture'.

Wednesday, Oct 20

For this Wednesday (oct. 20), we will discuss two readings by Eric Raymond related to Open Source - Culture, Incentives, and Economic Models

• The Cathedral and the Bazaar
• Homesteading the Noosphere

If you don't have copies already, you can download them from the web. Go to the Idreams Digital Library and search on 'Raymond'. He has created a special homepage for the Cathedral paper which I have put in our DL. Noosphere can be downloaded by going to his home page (also in our DL), and clicking on 'writings'.

Week of Oct 25

Monday, Oct 25

• John Caron - Halloween Documents (leaked Microsoft emails analyzing the open source movement)
• Greg Baumgartel - Present the results of his comparison of NT and Linux from a features and usability perspective

Wednesday, October 27

No class today. For the following week, class resumes as usual on the following Monday. We now begin transition to e-commerce, first considering the business models in open source.

Week of Nov 1

Monday Nov. 1
Tammy - Highlights of the 10th WWW Survey, with special emphasis on the
uptake and spread of e-commerce

Mick Khoo - About Bots. Are they intelligent? Mick will share several sites
he has discovered which both discuss bots and discuss ways to test their
intelligence.

Wednesday, Nov. 3
Discuss Readings

• Eric Raymond - The Magic Cauldron
• Richard Stallman - Why Software Should Be Free?
• Internet Dreams - Begin Ecommerce section - pages 175 - 218

Week of Nov 8

Monday, Nov. 8

Gary Love will talk about electronic books. Gary has examined three different books and will share his findings with us.

Wednesday, Nov. 10

We will discuss readings as we usually do:

• Who will own your next good idea? by Charles Mann (a 'must read' according to Bill Joy!)
• Mark Stefik's 'letting loose the light' in the Internet Dreams book. This is the last chapter in the e-commerce section.
• We may also consider the Fillmore chapter (Slaves of a New Machine) which we read last week but didn't get a chance to discuss.

Week of Nov 15

Monday, Nov 15

• Gerhard Fischer will come and describe his class for next semester.
• Bret Halford will demo Active World's - a virtual reality chat room
• Aaron Martin will present some open source software for creating virtual communities and show us some of the sites/communities using this software.
• I will also talk briefly about the project presentations and final reports due on Nov29 / dec. 1

Wednesday, Nov 17
Discussion of readings: Section 4 of the Internet Dreams book (on virtual
worlds)

be sure to read:

• pages 257-326 (intro, curtis, dibbel, collins articles)

if you still have time and energy:

• the collaboratory articles (stefik&brown, wulf)

and if even that isn't enough for you:

• the online dream group article (viglizzo)

• Two on virtual environments from the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, getting at the how RL spills over into VL and vice versa:
  • Cyborg's Dilemma, by Frank Biocca
  • Impression Formation in Cyberspace, by David Jacobson
• Two on entertainment, from Wired:
  • The Pleasure Binge, by Michael Wolf
  • MyHollywood!, by Rob Kenner
• The final reading, which I actually didn't yet distribute is:
  • Travels in Hyperreality, by Umberto Eco

The Eco article is a critique of the link between virtuality and american popular culture that he wrote in 1975. Definitely tongue-in-cheek but definitely insightful at the same time. As such this article bridges between the two groups. As Eco points out, the American fascination with virtuality has been around awhile; it isn't just a new VR or web thing.

I know this is a lot of reading so we are dividing it up. Some of you are taking charge of reading the Virtual Environments readings (Greg, Jim, for example) and some the entertainment reading (e.g., Baht). Please read one group or the other thoroughly and skim the other group. Consider the Hyperreality article to fall in both groups. Copies of all of these readings are in my mailbox on the 7th floor in the computer science office.

Concerning your final project report - the plan is for everyone to do well so I am introducing a review round into the final report. This is *not* optional. On Monday, Nov. 29, everyone should hand in to me at the beginning of class a draft of their final report. I will return it to you on wednesday with comments.

The final versions of your report are due by 5pm, Monday, December 13. You can put them in my mailbox.

Details on the final report: I expect a scholarly, research report of between 8 and 10 pages long, with abstract, keywords, references, etc. You should use the model articles you picked earlier as a guide for this style of writing and genre of document. If you are doing a systems project (e.g., XML or persona), then you may have fewer primary sources for your references (6ish). If you are doing an empirical study or designing an empirical study (like Mark or Edgar and Jim), then you will have more primary sources (10ish). If you are doing a literature review (like John), then you will have 1000s of sources (well maybe not quite that many) ;-)

If you are unsure about any of this or need some advice, talk to me! Or speak to me in class on Monday.

Here is the presentation schedule:
Monday, Nov. 29
25 XML Group
15 Tim Greenfield
15 Mark Bodmer
15 Gary Love
70 minutes total

Wednesday, Dec. 1
20 Persona Server
20 Edgar & Jim
15 Mick Khoo
15 John Caron
70 minutes total

Presentations should include:

• what is the focus of your project?
• what is the motivation for your project? i.e., why is is important or interesting
• related scholarly work / research / products
• what did you do?
• what did you learn?
• what would you add or do differently if you had more time?

On Monday, Nov. 29, everyone should hand in to me at the beginning of class a draft of their final report. I will return it to you on wednesday with comments.