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LBSC 708T/INFM 718T - Transformational Information Technologies
Spring 2007 - Section 0101
Preparing for Team-Led Sessions


General Information

All students will work in one of four teams (each team containing no more than 5 members), alternating responsibilities for leading the class discussion between the four teams. Teams will be formed by the instructor during the first class session and will normally remain stable throughout the semester (exception: any team that shrinks to 3 members will be augmented from a 5-member team if a 5-member team still exists).

Team Roles

Roles will rotate among the members of a team over the course of the semester as follows:
Narrator.
The narrator will lead the preparation effort before the session. This includes constructing the conceptual framework for the session, selecting appropriate learning methods, and coordinating the preparation for presentations and other activities, and inviting outside participants. During the session, the narrator will will coordinate presentations by group members, manage the other learning activities designed by the group, moderate the ensuing discussion, and manage the schedule to ensure a balanced treatment of the intended content.
Research Director
The research director will assist the narrator by coordinating the research effort. The principal responsibilities of the research director are to iteratively identify the material that needs to be read, to arrange for someone on the team to read it, to manage the process by which the required information gets to the narrator and the presenters, and to identify outside experts that might be invited to participate in the session.
Researcher
Teams will prepare for their sessions by consulting books, journal articles, conference papers, and electronic resources and (in some cases) by consulting with subject matter experts. Accomplishing this will require that everyone on the team contribute to these activities.
Presenter
Teams may elect to include lecture-style presentations to provide background, describe the evolution of a technology, and to suggest new insights for inclusion our developing analytic framework. These presentations may be given by any member of the team.
Each team member must serve at least once as team leader or narrator, and it will be common for students to fill each of those roles once. All members of the team (including the narrator and the research director) will contribute to the team's research. It is not required (nor even generally desired) that all members serve as presenters during a particular session, but each team member should serve as a presenter at least once during the course of the semester.

Preparing for a Session

Teams will have at least three weeks to prepare for their session. The narrator and research director are required to meet with the instructor twice during that period to help guide their preparation.

No more than 50% of class time may be used for formal presentations. Activities other than presentations may include brainstorming, structured critiques, small-group activities with reports back to the full group, hand-on experience with historic or current technologies, and other similar activities. Teams may elect to invite a subject matter expert to join their discussions and other activities, either in person or by teleconference. Formal presentations by subject matter experts should not normally be scheduled, however.

The equivalent of two readings (typically 20-40 pages) should be assigned each week for members of the "off" teams to read. These readings must be assigned at least one full week in advance by the "on" team's narrator, and provisions for distribution must be made before the class preceding the presentation. For the team's second and third presentations, assigning required readings two weeks in advance would be desirable.

Types of Sessions

Each team will lead three sessions. The focus of the team's first session should be on (1) understanding the historical evolution of the assigned foundational information technology, (2) further elaborating the framework for analysis and synthesis that we will be developing, and (3) learning how to prepare for and conduct a class session. The focus of the second session should be on (1) understanding the historical evolution and present state of a rapidly evolving technology, and (2) further elaborating the framework. The team will choose their own focus for the third section in consultation with the instructor.

Some Initial Readings for Foundational Information Technologies

Transportation
Richard John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse, Harvard University Press, 1995.
Telecommunications Before the Internet
Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet, Walker Publishing, 1998.
Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, University of California Press, 1992.
Computing
Michael A. Hilzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, Collins, 1999.
Internet
Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay up Late: The Origins of the Internet, Simon and Schuster, 1996.
Gary William Flake, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Imminent Internet Singularity, ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Arlington, VA, 2006.
Additional suggestions from Ken Fleischmann:

Some Initial Readings for Rapidly Evolving Technologies

Search
Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is selling Less of More, Hyperion, 2006.
Encryption
Ronald L Rivest, "The Case Against Regulating Encryption Technology," Scientific American, October, 1998, pages 116-117. Rivest's Turing Award lecture provides some additional context on his work.
Translation
David A. Evans, "From R&D to Practice: Challenges to Multilingual Information Access in the Real World", SIGIR Workshop on New Directions in Multilingual Information Access, Seattle, 1996.
Additional suggestions form Ken Fleischmann:
Speech Processing
Steve Renals, Jerry Goldman et al., EU-US Working Group on Spoken Word Audio Collections, 2003.

Team-Selected Topics

Teams may choose any future-oriented topic, large or small, for their third session. Examples of possible topics include:
Doug Oard