Basics
Many of you are not turning in assignments.
Some of you then get back to me to say that you just forgot, or you cannot remember.
I will not accept as an excuse that the dropbox system failed unless you have for
me to see a printout of the web page, properly timestamped, that says that the
dropbox has accepted your submission.
The basic rules of the game are these.
You have an initial Assignment 1 just to test the dropbox system.
Assignment 2 is for you to produce a paper version and an online version of a resume.
You are then to produce three additional "documents" during the semester.
Each of these four assignments (numbers 2 through 5) will count 1/4 of your grade.
I expect you to attend class.
I will take attendance, although not at every class.
For every three (3) unexcused absences, your grade will be lowered
by one full letter.
The judgement as to accepting the excuse is mine.
Illness, family emergencies, and such are excusable.
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Assignment One must be turned in by 5:00pm, Eastern time, 9 September 2008.
This does not count for credit; its purpose is to allow me to verify that
you do not have problems with the dropbox.
If you do not turn this assignment in, I will send you one email and will
ask you in class if you have had problems.
If I cannot get you by email, and if I cannot get you in class at the time that
I ask, then I will assume you do not have problems.
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Assignment Two must be turned in by 5:00pm, Eastern time, 29 September 2008.
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The due date for Assignment Three is by
5:00pm, Eastern time, 24 October 2008.
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The due date for Assignment Four is by
5:00pm, Eastern time, 14 November 2008. (NEW DEADLINE)
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The tentative due date for Assignment Five is by
5:00pm, Eastern time, 1 December 2008.
The penalty for a late assignment will be loss of 10% of the total value
for every 24 hours or fraction thereof that the assignment is late.
In general, there is very little that should prevent you from being able to get an
A grade in this class.
We don't ask much of you, but we do ask that you fulfill these minimal expectations.
Please be advised that without exception the two reasons for a student's getting a
grade lower than an A in this class last semester were a) not turning in an assignment;
b) turning in an assignment of length shorter than required.
If you turn in a brilliant essay that is three pages long, and I have asked for
an essay five pages long, you will get exactly 3/5 of a perfect grade for that assignment.
For Assignments Three through Five:
By "document" is meant a written paper of at least five pages in length,
double spaced, 10 or 12 point font, with standard margins.
Use of the standard Microsoft tools is always acceptable.
Other tools are acceptable, BUT students wishing to use something other than
Microsoft or OpenOffice are highly advised to send me a sample first to make sure that we
won't have a format compatibility problem when the final assignment is handed in.
It is your responsibility to make sure that I can read/display your document, not
my responsibility to be able to read whatever you send me.
Last year there were a number of students who had not purchased the full Microsoft
Office suite and were using only the Works package.
That's ok, BUT I would strongly encourage you to download and use instead the
Open Office package that is open source software and works just fine.
Open Office is available from
the website
and comes complete with a spreadsheet, powerpoint imitator, etc.
For convenience and consistency, I would ask that you save as dot doc format and
not odf.
NOTE: Most of these topics require you to have a personal answer to a philosophical
or a personal question.
Obviously, there are relatively few truly incorrect answers to such a question.
(An exception might be made if in response to "why are studying computing?" your
answer is that you hate technology and you want to become a forest ranger, but I suspect
you get the point.)
Your grade will come, therefore, not from the actual answer you give but from the
way in which you present the answer.
You are allowed to think out of the box.
You are allowed to be different, even fanciful about what you think computing might
look like during your career.
That's ok.
What is not ok is to have no interest in what computing might look like during your career.
If that's the case, you're probably in the wrong major.
WRITING RUBRICS:
You are expected to write papers in this class.
You will be graded on how well you present an argument or arguments in your papers,
or how well you make the case for something.
Some guidance on writing can be found in various writing rubrics and on the USC
English 101/102 web pages.
One clear and concise rubric can be found
here,
and I will be following this as a grading guideline.
The web pages for the USC First Year English courses are
here,
and there is guidance on grading of written work under the "Grades" item.
See especially the descriptions of papers that merit A, B, C, D, and F grades.
Assignment 1
Assignment One
Due 5pm Eastern time Monday 9 September 2008
Students have sometimes come to me with complaints that they were unable to
get the dropbox system in the department to work.
By 5pm Monday 9 September 2008
you are to submit something to the dropbox for this class.
You may submit ANYTHING.
I suggest a simple text document with your name on it and the date.
I will check the dropboxes and will let you know if your submission has been
successful.
Assignment 2
Assignment Two
Due 5pm Monday 29 September 2008
PART 1:
You are required to register with the Career Center.
This is so you can start thinking about life beyond the classroom.
Go to the Career Center webpage, click on the JobMate link, and register through that process.
PART 2:
You are required to produce and turn in to the CSE dropbox a resume suitable for hard
copy printing on good paper.
You should consult the Career Center for guidance on format, etc.
PART 3:
In addition to Part 2,
you are required to produce and turn in to the CSE dropbox a web page as HTML.
You can consult any number of sources for this, including the faculty.
You might look at
this page,
which is what my resume might have looked like when I was in my first year of college.
You are free to download the page source and edit your information into this.
FERPA PRIVACY NOTIFICATION:
Under FERPA, you have a right to privacy, and we fully support that right.
Two of the relevant USC documents on your rights under FERPA can be found
here
and
here.
Other documents can be found by simply putting "ferpa" into the USC web page search box.
You will note that "we" have the right to disclose your name and email
addresses to your classmates in this course but not much more, should you
choose to keep personal information private.
For this class, you must turn in (electronically through the drop box) a
resume in a reasonable format and a web page as source HTML.
You need not include your "correct" personal information should you wish to
keep that private.
We will not put your web pages up on the web, and we will not distribute your
resumes or pages to others.
Neither parts 2 and 3 of this assignment need to be "correct", but both need to
be "believable".
If you come from Charleston and wish to say you come from Greenville, that's
perfectly ok.
If you had a summer job doing web design for a law firm and wish to say it was
systems administration for a retail store, that's ok and believable.
If you wish to change your home phone number from "202.456.1111" to a placeholder
string "XXX.XXX.XXXX", that's perfectly ok.
What's not ok is to invent totally unbelievable fiction, for example to change
your Columbia home phone number from 803.abc.defg to 202.456.1111.
Keep it reasonably realistic, but if you wish to stay private, that's perfectly ok.
We are interested in your ability to produce a reasonable document that can serve
you in the future, not in the information that would be contained in that document.
Your web page will not be graded heavily on "content" or on "eye candy".
Your resume should be done cleanly and look professional.
What is important about your web page is its existence, not its essence.
Since web pages are always changing, our assumption is that once you get one
started, it will gradually improve and change over time.
HTML tutorials on the web can be found by simply googling "html tutorial".
Some of the hits are:
If you want a very basic page to use as a template, you could go to my original
USC class web page for
CSCE 513.
That's about as plain vanilla a page as you can get.
Go to "view", then "page source" and you should get a window that looks like an edit window.
Save the source as a file, and then edit a copy of that file.
(Use a copy so you still have the original that is known to work just in case you really
screw things up.)
For those of you who use Firefox as your browser, the Firebug plugin can help with editing
HTML pages, although it's not perfect by any means.
Resume do's and don't's:
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Probably the most important thing to remember is that you do not want someone to ignore
your accomplishments because you have done something that should be irrelevant but that
makes you look bad.
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Absolutely proofread the thing until you are sure that there are no typos,
missing punctuation, spelling errors, or similar problems.
Read carefully to make sure that you have used parallel constructions in lists.
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Be absolutely certain that you have labelled your degree program correctly.
The three options from this department are
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A computer engineering major will receive the degree
"Bachelor of Science in Engineering" with a major in computer engineering.
In text you could write this as
"I will receive a Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree with a major in
computer engineering".
In bullet form you could write either
"Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree with a major in
computer engineering" or perhaps
"Bachelor of Science in Engineering (major: computer engineering)".
You could shorten "Bachelor of Science" to "BS" or "B.S."
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A computer science major will receive the degree
"Bachelor of Science in Computer Science" and you probably don't need to say anything
more or less than exactly this.
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A computer information systems major will receive the degree
"Bachelor of Science" with a major in computer information systems.
Follow the same construction as for computer engineering, but drop the "in Engineering" as
needed.
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You absolutely do not want to give the illusion of having padded your resume.
Topics for Assignment Three
Due 5pm Friday 24 October 2008.
Choose one of the following topics and write about it.
RULES:
This and the rest of the assignments for this class are intended to ask you to
think about a topic relevant to computing and to write about it.
The fact that the topics might be controversial or under political discussion is not
an excuse for failing to write about these as if the issues were settled.
You
must
cite sources for assertions you make, and you must be careful to distinguish between
settled fact, claims made (perhaps by an advocacy group), and your conclusions or
opinions about where the truth may lie.
You may not cite Wikipedia as an authoritative source, although you
are free to use Wikipedia to get pointers to more authoritative sources.
Keep in mind that in some academic disciplines it is considered professionally
unethical to cite material from a source unless one has in fact read the source;
that is, secondary citation is disallowed.
I really do not care what conclusions you make.
What I care about is that you make conclusions based on fact or at least on the
considered opinion as to where the truth may lie in between the differing
policy positions of one or more advocacy groups.
Let me try to clarify by use of the example of electronic voting machines.
You are free to use such sources as BlackBoxVoting to get pointers, but this
is clearly an advocacy group and cannot be used as an authoritative source.
News reports of such matters are also not authoritative, although you may use
them to get pointers to reports that are summarized in news reports.
The reports produced for the Secretaries of State for Ohio and California,
however, can be considered authoritative, as can the reports and professional
papers prepared for NIST.
Similarly, the
existence
of errors in New Jersey (see the Freedom to Tinker blog) from the primary
is not in doubt; those errors are documented in court records.
Conclusions about why those errors occurred cannot be considered authoritative,
however, because the analysis done by Felten and Appel at Princeton has been
so far withheld from public view.
Please remember
my earlier comment about this class.
It is almost impossible not to get an A in this class if you do all the work and
if you write an appropriate paper of the appropriate length.
The requirement is five pages in ordinary font with ordinary margins.
If you really do write five pages, and it makes sense, and it is properly
documented, and it is proper English, you will almost certainly get an A.
The goal is to make you think about the place of computing in the modern world
and by extension your own place in computing in the modern world.
The specifics of what you say are less important than the fact that you have thought
about what to say.
Topic 1
What attracted you to study computing?
In the immortal words of Admiral Stockdale, why are you here?
Topic 2
What do you think input and output devices will become in the next, say, 25 years?
What is likely to happen with implants, etc?
How might this be both good and bad?
Topic 3
Computing technology has made any number of things much better in our lives, including
the ability to get an encyclopedia on line, automated bank teller machines that work
around the world, more efficient cars, office equipment vastly
superior to old typewriters and mimeograph machines.
On the other hand, this also means that your credit card information can be obtained
either legally or illegally, and your identity can be stolen.
Discuss some positive and negative effects of modern computing, and suggest some
appropriate directions for mitigating the negative effects.
Topic 4
If you have read a book recently (even if fiction, perhaps Accelerando
or some similar book that presents either a utopian (or more likely dystopian) view
of technology and society in the future, you may write a book report about this.
If the book is a nonfiction advocacy book, then you should be circumspect in your
conclusions, just as you would be with news reports or other policy arguments.
Note that if you choose this option, then your choice of topic as well as your treatment
of the topic is going to factor into your grade, so unless it's an obviously relevant
topic, you might be well advised to check with me first.
Topic 5
Several states, including South Carolina, are on a collision with the federal government
about the RealID requirement for driver licenses.
What is the issue, and what are the underlying technical and/or privacy issues?
Topic 6
Go hit slashdot or some similar source for news items, investigate what's going on,
and write a commentary.
There is a steady stream of news about intellectual property, hacking and privacy,
and the magical devices or software currently being tested in the labs.
This technology will (if it eventually succeeds) become part of your professional lives.
What do you expect to see?
