Because the course will be conducted entirely online, you will not be able to participate (much less pass) if you can't access the Internet regularly. If you don't have a computer at home and/or work that allows you to get online, you will need to make use of USF's computer labs (or other public access terminals) in order to complete the course.
In particular, in order to make full use of the course website, you will need a web browser that supports frames, Java, and Javascript. Recent versions (e.g., 3.0 or later) of both Netscape and Internet Explorer should work fine, as should the official release of Opera 3.60 (but not the beta version). Other browsers, however, may not support all of the site's features or they may not allow you to access the site at all.
 |
Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital |  |
Clifford Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil |
The non-book readings listed on the syllabus are all required. Those that aren't located online (either on the course's website itself or accessible via links from the site) can be found in hard copy format at the reserve desk in the main USF Library and in digital format on the USF Virtual Library website.
Your final grade will be based on the following schedule:
| Attendance | 5% | |
| Participation | 10% | |
| Discussion Board participation | 20% | |
| Paper #1 (on Negroponte/Stoll) | 15% | |
| Paper #2 (on online "communities") | 20% | |
| Take-home final exam | 30% |
Further details on each of these items can be found below.
While the online nature of the course means that we won't be meeting face-to-face as a group after the first day, we will hold semi-regular (e.g., roughly every 2-3 days) class meetings online throughout the session. A full schedule of these meetings can be found at the end of the syllabus.
These meetings are not optional. Attendance will be taken at the start of each one, with absences, late arrivals, and early departures all having a negative impact on the attendance portion of your grade. That being said, I recognize that our meeting schedule may create unavoidable conflicts with other courses and obligations on your time. As a result, you are allowed to miss up to two of our online meetings without points being deducted from either the attendance or participation portions of your grade.
Our online meetings will be conducted more like seminar discussions than like formal lectures, and your participation grade will be based on both the quantity and quality of your contributions to our "live," online discussions. If you're simply logging in and taking notes on what the rest of the group is saying, your participation grade will suffer. Because in a virtual classroom, no one can tell if your extended silence means that you're paying incredibly close attention to what everyone else is saying or that you've left your computer running and gone down to the corner for a newspaper. So show up prepared to ask questions, to make arguments about the readings, and to engage in active discussion about the issues at hand.
Note that you are responsible for material covered in any meetings you miss -- whether your absence is excused or not -- and that unexcused absences will have a negative impact on both your attendance and participation grades (after all, if you're absent, you can't very well participate).
The primary purpose of the Discussion Board is to provide an informal space that's always available for discussion of the issues raised by the assigned readings and in our class meetings. Because discussions of this sort tend to be freeform in nature, there is no easy-to-summarize formula for assessing your Discussion Board grade. The minimum contribution to receive a passing grade, however, will be ten substantial (i.e., more than a paragraph long) posts spread out over the course of the session. A more detailed explanation of how this portion of your grade will be calculated is available on a separate handout.
There are two further rules to keep in mind with respect to the Discussion Board portion of the course:
- You must make your first on-topic post to the Discussion Board by noon on 17 May. The penalty for missing this deadline will be a grade point for every day or fraction thereof that you're late (e.g., not posting for the first time until 2 pm on 20 May will mean that the best you can do for this portion of your grade is a 16 out of 20).
- Over the course of the session, I will place at least ten "mini-lectures" on the course website (under the "Course Documents" heading). You are required to respond to each of at least five of those mini-lectures with a post to the Discussion Board (i.e., one post/mini-lecture, as opposed to one post that responds to five mini-lectures at once). The applicable penalty here (should it apply) will be a grade point for every post short of five that you fall (e.g., making only three mini-lecture posts will mean that your maximum Discussion Board grade will be an 18 out of 20).
Paper #1 (15%) -- 4-5 pages -- due Tue, 1 June
This paper requires you to write a critical response to the Negroponte and Stoll books. In particular, your paper should present a thoughtful and well-written argument as to which of these two books you feel provides the most accurate picture of the Internet's impact on society. More information about this assignment is available on a separate handout.
Paper #2 (20%) -- 4-5 pages -- due Tue, 15 June
This paper will be based on the time you will spend over the first five weeks of the session involved in an online environment of your choosing. The actual paper you write will require you to assess the quality of the "community life" in the environment you've chosen and, drawing on both your experiences and our readings, to make an argument about the potential for "real" community life to be created and maintained online. More information about this assignment is available on a separate handout.
Take-home final exam (30%) -- 9-12 pages total -- due Mon, 21 June
Your completed final will consist of three 3-4 page essays responding to posted questions related to major course issues. The exam will be posted to the course website no later than noon on 14 June. More information about the exam will be made available later in the session.
General rules
- Your written work must be typed and double-spaced. The page lengths listed below are based on an average of 250 words/page and should be considered estimates of how much you'll need to write to complete the assignments well. I will not automatically penalize shorter papers, but it's highly unlikely that you will be able to do "A" work if your papers are shorter than the suggested length. Also note that fudging margins and font sizes to make your papers look longer will not help your grade -- so concentrate on writing good papers, not what appear to be long ones.
- Both papers and the take-home final are due by noon on the dates listed. Late work will generally not be accepted except in cases of genuine emergency. In the event that I do accept late work, I reserve the right to reduce its grade in direct proportion to its lateness. The minimum penalty in all such cases will be a full letter grade.
- As a safety precaution, you should always keep at least a hard copy -- if not a hard copy and a disk copy -- of any written work you hand in.
- Submitting your work in a proper format is absolutely crucial: I can't grade your work if I can't read
it. In descending order of preference, the acceptable formats for your papers and your exam are as follows:
- WordPerfect 8.0 (or earlier)
- Word 97 (or earlier)
- RTF (Rich Text Format -- most current word processing software should allow you to save your work as an RTF file)
- HTML
- ASCII/plaintext
- In descending order of preference, the acceptable delivery methods for your papers and your exam are as
follows:
- The "Student Drop Box" available on the course website
- Via e-mail (preferably as a file attachment, but ASCII text is acceptable)
- Note that all the options above involve you turning in your work in digital format. I reserve the right not to accept work that fails to meet the formatting/delivery rules above, and to penalize any such work I do happen to accept no less than a full letter grade. [N.B.: I will accept your work in "hard copy" format as a last resort only. Should it become necessary for you to turn in your work this way, you must make explicit arrangements with me in advance, and all your deadlines will remain the same.]
I don't expect us to always agree with each other about the various issues at stake in this course. But I do expect us to be able to discuss and debate those issues in both "live" and "recorded" settings (e.g., our online class meetings and the Discussion Board, respectively). Which means that there may be times when our interactions will get a little heated . . .
. . . And, in cyberspace, heated conversations can all too quickly turn into vicious streams of insults and personal attacks (exchanges that are often referred to as "flame wars"). So while I want us to be able to argue with each other about the issues at stake, let me emphasize that whatever arguments we have should be about the issues and not about personalities. Passionate debate about the course material (e.g., "I'm outraged that Negroponte says what he does in chapter 6! This is an incredibly dangerous and morally irresponsible position to take because . . . ") is more than acceptable; personal attacks and gratuitous insults (e.g., "What an idiot you are for writing what you did about Stoll! Are you sure you're smart enough to be in college?"), on the other hand, are unacceptable and will not be tolerated. Y'all don't have to agree with each other (or with the readings, or even with me), but you do have to respect each other.
- I will hold "virtual" office hours (using the course website's chat feature) from 11:30a-12n prior to every scheduled class meeting (except for 26 May). If those times are inconvenient for you, or if you want/need to meet with me face to face, I will be happy to make such arrangements with you.
- I've provided my home phone number on the front page of the syllabus, which should be a much more reliable way to find me than trying to call me on campus. Do not, however, call me at home before 10 am or after 10 pm.
- In keeping with the University Policy on Religious Observances, students who anticipate time conflicts with any of the course requirements due to a major religious observance must provide notice to me in writing by 14 May.
- The purchase and/or sale of written notes of our class meetings is strictly prohibited.
N.B.: This is the revised schedule, as of 13 May. Except for 11 May (our "in person" meeting) and 21 June (the due date for the final exam), the dates listed below are the dates for our online class meetings, all of which will take place from 12n-3p. The listed readings should all be done in advance of the corresponding meetings.
| Tue, 11 May | no reading |
| Sat, 13 May | Being Digital, pp. 3-85 |
| Mon, 17 May | no class meeting |
| deadline for making your first discussion board post | |
| Tue, 18 May | Being Digital, pp. 89-195 |
| Sat, 22 May | Being Digital, pp. 196-240 |
| Silicon Snake Oil, pp. 1-89 | |
| Tue, 25 May | Silicon Snake Oil, pp. 90-173 |
| [N.B.: You should finish Silicon Snake Oil at some point between the 25th and writing the paper due on June 1, but we won't have a formal meeting on it, unless we wind up having some "bleedover" discussion about it on the 1st.] |
| Tue, 1 June | paper #1 due |
| Cynthia L. Selfe and Richard J. Selfe, Jr., "The Politics of the Interface: Power and Its Exercise in Electronic Contact Zones" (1994) | |
| Steven Johnson, "Windows" (1997) | |
| Steven Johnson, "Links" (1997) | |
| Harper's forum, "What Are We Doing On-Line?" (1995) | |
| Thu, 3 June | Steven G. Jones, "Understanding Community in the Information Age" (1995) |
| Shawn P. Wilbur, "An Archaeology of Cyberspaces: Virtuality, Community, Identity" (1997) | |
| Beth E. Kolko, "Building a World With Words: The Narrative Reality of Virtual Communities" (1995) |
| Tue, 8 June | Shannon McRae, "Coming Apart at the Seams: Sex, Text and the Virtual Body" (1996) |
| Stephanie Brail, "The Price of Admission: Harassment and Free Speech in the Wild, Wild West" (1996) | |
| Donna M. Riley, "Sex, Fear and Condescension on Campus: Cybercensorship at Carnegie Mellon" (1996) | |
| Thu, 10 June | Lisa Nakamura, "‘Where Do You Want to Go Today?': Cybernetic Tourism, the Internet, and Transnationality" (1999) |
| Tara McPherson, "I'll Take My Stand in Dixie-Net: White Guys, the South, and Cyberspace" (1999) | |
| Jonathan Sterne, "The Computer Race Meets Computer Classes: How Computers in Schools Helped Shape the Racial Topography of the Internet" (1999) |
| Sat, 12 June | William Wresch, "Information Rich, Information Poor" (1996) |
| William Wresch, "Information Exiles" (1996) | |
| Richard Civille, "The Internet and the Poor" (1995) | |
| The Harvard Conference on the Internet and Society, "Universal Access" (1997) |
| Tue, 15 June | paper #2 due |
| John Perry Barlow, "Selling Wine Without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net" (1996) | |
| Esther Dyson, "Intellectual Property" (1998) | |
| Thu, 17 June | The Harvard Conference on the Internet and Society, "Content Control on the Internet" (1997) |
| Jonathan Wallace and Mark Mangan, "Bomb Speech" (1996) | |
| Reno v. ACLU (1997) |
| Mon, 21 June | final deadline for discussion board posts |
| take-home final due |