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:
- Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy: Relfections on
the Internet, Business, and Society
- Mark Dery, Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture.
- Andrew L. Shapiro's The Control Revolution: How the Internet is
Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know.
- Vincent Mosco's
The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace.
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:
- David J. Hess, Science and Technology in a Multicultural
World: The Cultural Politics of Facts and Artifacts
- Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science,
Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance
- Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity
- Shiv Visvanathan, A Carnival for Science: Essays on Science,
Technology, and Development
- Ron Eglash, African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous
Design
- 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:
- Online Communities
- Preservation
- Data mining
- E-Commerce
- Ubiquitous computing and pervasive networks
- Peer-to-peer networks
- Open Source Software
- Geolocation
- Digital Humanities
- Brain-machine interfaces
- Virtual Reality (some suggested readings from Ken Fleischmann:)
- Synthetic Pleasures, motion picture directed by Iara Lee
- Ralph Schroeder, Possible Worlds: The Social Dynamics
of Virtual Reality Technology.
- Howard Rheingold, Virtual Reality
- William J. Mitchell, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the
Infobahn.
- Mark Slouka, War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech
Assault on Reality
- Benjamin Woolley, Virtual Worlds: A Journey in Hype and
Hyperreality
- Bioinformatics (with some suggested readings from Ken Fleischmann:)
- Joseph Dumit, Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and
Biomedical Identity
- Lisa Cartwright, "The Visible Man: The Male Criminal Subject as
Biomedical Norm," in The Cybercultures Reader
- Catherine Waldby, The Visible Human Project: Informatic
Bodies and Posthuman Medicine
Doug Oard