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.

There will be no final exam in this course. The nominal final exam time is Wednesday, 29 April 2009, at 2:00 am.

The (tentative) grading scheme is as follows.

General Assignment

Due date: Ongoing throughout the semester

There is one general assignment that you have to do over the entire semester. This assignment will account for 5% of your grade.

This assignment 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.

Presentation

This assignment counts 40% of your grade for this course.

The presentation times are indicated on the online schedule for this course. Students will be given a choice of topics to "request" as part of a team of two students, and then will be assigned a topic, matching as best possible their preferences.

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 2 February 2009

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. Forty working years, at 50 weeks per year, 40 hours per week, is 80,000 working hours (I assume you can do the math to verify this). It is important (for most people) that the last work week of their lives is somewhat different from the first week, and the goal in this assignment is to have you think about what the differences might be.

Case Study

This assignment counts 40% of your grade for this course.

This assignment is to be submitted to me electronically by class time on 19 March 2009. This will be paper, of at least ten pages with reasonable margins, type size, and spacing, with references. We will provide you with a list of possible topics; if you feel strongly about yet a different topic and can convince us that it is appropriate, we will allow that as your topic.