Caveat

General Information

There will be no exams in this course. Your grades will be based on your written and oral presentations and papers.

Just for reference at the beginning of the semester: You should by now all have gone through English 101 and 102, and thus I can now assume that can all write with correct syntax, grammar, and spelling. I will therefore require correct English in order for you to get full marks on written assignments. Just because you know how to present written material with correct English does not mean that the content of that material is worth reading, but it's a sure bet that the content will be viewed with some skepticism if the presentation is not that of a literate person.

The final exam time is Friday, 4 May 2007, at 9:00 am.

The grading scheme is as follows.

General Assignments

Due date: Ongoing throughout the semester

There are two general assignments that you have to do over the entire semester. Together, these two assignments will account for 10% of your grade.

General Assignment One

The first of these general assignments is modelled after the practice of my high school civics teacher. You are required during this semester to keep track of current events that relate to professional issues in computing. These can come from the newspaper, from trade magazines, from regular magazines (ranging from Time to Wired), from slashdot or similar web sources, or news digests or announcements (provided you can cite the source of your material). Frankly, I don't much care about the source of the material.

Every class period I will ask two of you to relate to the class one such current event and why it is an event relevant to this class. For example, an ordinary bankruptcy of a computer company is not relevant. The possible bankruptcy of SCO due to issues with its intellectual property lawsuit over Linux is relevant.

You are encouraged to come to each class with at least two such current events; if you are the second person called upon in a given class, and the first person mentions the one such that you had noted, then you will get zero for this part of the assignment. Since I won't ask more than two people in a given class, you don't need to have more than two. If you're lucky, you can even save up something for a week or so, provided no one else uses it.

I reserve the right to declare your "submission" to be either stale news or not really relevant to the class.

If you happen not to be in class the day I happen to choose your name at random for this assignment, you will receive a zero for this assignment.

General Assignment Two

The second general assignment is that we have a blog for this course, and since this class in part is to get you to do oral and written presentations, you are expected to submit entries to the blog over the course of the semester. What I will do is to point to current events entries from the web, and I will offer some initial comments. You are expected to chime in with some cogent observations of your own. Over the course of the semester, I will insist on at least four such cogent observations from each of you.

Presentation

This assignment counts 30% of your grade for this course.

The presentation times are indicated on the online schedule for this course.

In groups of (probably) four, you will be assigned (or will choose, provided you act early enough to be able to choose) to present the material in one of the chapters of the text. You will be asked to summarize the chapter (this part is easy) as well as to offer some commentary and analysis on that chapter's material (this part is harder, because you have to say something different from what is presented for you in the text). I will be happy to discuss with the various groups how to look at the material in each chapter. I am not insistent on a complete coverage of the chapter--there is lots of material, and if you can say something genuinely sensible about one part of the chapter but must skip other parts in order to have time, that's ok.

Resume and Career Plan

This assignment counts 15% of your grade for this course.

This assignment is to be submitted electronically to me by class time on 22 March.

The first part of your assignment is to prepare a resume, based on information about resumes found in reputable sources (such as the university Career Center), and to prepare a two page summary of what you might expect your career path to be for the next ten years. What is important in the first part is that you get a good resume prepared. What is important in the second part is that you look beyond the first job to your second or third job and where you want to be going.

Professional Analysis

This assignment counts 15% of your grade for this course.

This assignment is to be submitted electronically to me by class time on 3 April.

You are to conduct an analysis of that which would be provided to you if you were to become a member of a relevant professional society. Some such societies include the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Association for Information Technology Professionals (AITP), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and similar societies.

Your assignment is to investigate (perhaps based on their websites) what one of these organizations have to offer and why one would find them helpful. This assignment should be written, at least two pages long in a reasonable type size, and most importantly must contain more "analysis" than a simple laundry list of the bullet points on the website.

Case Study

This assignment counts 30% of your grade for this course.

This assignment is to be submitted to me electronically by class time on 12 April.