The Social Impact of Computing, as Seen from CSc 473 in Fall, 2007

Started 9.9.2007. This is a thread that will run through the course. I will give brief--from a few minutes to maybe 20 minutes--mini-lectures on topics. You will suggest URLs of interesting news reports. And you will each write an essay, I am thinking, with the following guidelines:

I will suggest topics. The first one: How did FaceBook get started at Harvard? Why did it grow so incredibly rapidly? If those students had been at California State Northridge, or Ohio State, or City College of New York, could they have done the same thing? (I'm serious, and I think the answer is yes.)
You pick a topic, and there will be a fair number of others.
You write what I call a top-level outline. One page in Word, absolute max. Half a page on a piece of paper that you scribbled on during your subway ride to school. Get my approval on that.
Write your essay. Let me see a draft.
Submit your essay, as a "floating homework." Counts the same as any other homework. But, ahem, I really want you to try this, so the policy of discarding your lowest homework does not apply. If you don't submit this homework, you have lost 1/N of the 25% of your grade that is based on HW, where N is presumably about 6 or 7.
You will be graded both on English (sentence and paragraph clarity, punctuation, etc.) and on the effectiveness of your argument, as to logic, supporting "data," perhaps the command you show of other points of view.
The deadline for submission of the final paper will be announced later, but I'm thinking that it will be before the big push to get the final projects done. Maybe the week after Thanksgiving? Subject to change.

Added 10.14.2007: This one is Dr. Chen's call. It would be for me to grade, and I don't know whether I'm going to be able to grade your essays or not. On hold until you hear more.

Moved from homepage 9.9.2007: The next three paragraphs were formerly on my homepage, which had gotten cluttered.

The impact of the Internet on everyday life is to be seen everywhere and discussed likewise. In CSc 473 we will be looking at the technical aspects of this interaction, and trying to get some experience with implementing it. Two samples:

I The Web is Killing Newspapers. Boring! Old news. Flash! Newspapers are fighting back--using the Web! Developing story . . . more.

II. The Web Is Killing Brick-and-Mortar Stores . . .more.

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