Course Description

This course explores key policy and legal debates surrounding information technology. Some of these debates include Internet censorship, copyright and the Napster case, personal and public privacy, standards setting, and universal access. The goal of the course is not to provide comprehensive coverage of IT policy and law. Instead, we will investigate a range of contemporary IT issues to gain a better understanding of the relationship between technology and society.

All technologies require complex apparatuses in order to work. Policy and law form one part of the social infrastructure that enables IT to work in certain ways (and deters it from working in others). We will ask

• •who participates in designing and regulating this social infrastructure,
• •what their values and motives are,
• •how these values get translated into policies and technologies,
• •how these translations shape future possibilities for technology and social practice, and
• •what alternatives exist?

Course Expectations

Attendance: This class will be conducted as a seminar with a focus on in-class discussion. Because of this format, you are expected to attend all classes for the full scheduled time. Excessive tardiness will be counted as an absence. Provided you hand in all due materials on time, you can miss up to 2 classes throughout the semester without penalty. Your final grade will go down by 5 points (out of 100) for each additional class missed. Please let me know in advance if you are planning on missing a class.

Reading: Complete all readings (and other assignments) prior to the class meeting for which they are scheduled. There is one book you must purchase for the course: The Hacker Ethic (2001) by Pekka Himanen. All other readings will be available on-line (either as web pages or through the library's electronic reserves). In some cases, I will distribute photocopied readings to you in class. See the course outline below for details.

Participation: Through communication ideas are formed, revised, borrowed, and developed. It is through argument, description, explanation, and improvisation - within a community - that individual learning flourishes. This course requires full participation (including active listening, facilitating, note-taking, and question-asking) to create an environment of open and shared learning. For (almost) every class session, students will present the readings for the day and initiate discussion.

Writing: Writing is one of the most productive forms of thinking. It is where you will generate ideas that become part of class discussions. There will be weekly writing assignments in response to the readings. For each of these assignments, write 2 typed pages in response to one article read that week. Choose the article you want to respond to and then turn that response in on the day corresponding to the reading assignment (Tuesday or Friday). Try your best to analyze the issue(s) raised in the article by utilizing the questions asked in the course description (above). These assignments will be graded on a pass / not-yet-pass basis. If you do not "pass," you will be given the option to revise until you do. If you don't turn something substantive in for the week, you will receive a "fail" for that assignment and will not be allowed to make it up. Passed assignments will receive 3 points; all others will receive 0. There will be one mid-term writing project and one final writing project in the course. No late writing assignments will be accepted.

Assignments

In addition to the weekly writing assignments described above, there will be two main projects/papers for the course.

• The mid-term will be a writing assignment of 7-8 pages based on The Hacker Ethic.
• The final project will be an in-depth analysis of an IT issue and your own policy solution to "the problem" as you define it. See the "Case-based learning" article in week one for a model of how to structure this project. The suggested page limit for this second project is 20 pages, but this will be broken down into several manageable writing stages. Alternative presentation formats are strongly encouraged (multi-media, web-design, video) but must be equally rigorous - consult with me well in advance if you choose an alternate format.

Grading

Final grades will be calculated as follows:
 

Participation	15%
10 Weekly Writing Responses (3pts each)	30%
Mid-term Project	20%
Final Project	35%

Academic Honesty

In order to avoid plagiarism, your papers must provide full citations for all references: direct quotes, summaries, or ideas. While you are encouraged to develop your thinking with your peers, you cannot use their material without citing it. Work from other courses will not be acceptable in this course. Allowing your writing to be copied by another student is also considered cheating. Please review the Rensselaer Student Handbook for complete guidelines on academic honesty. Note: Any instance of plagiarism or cheating can be grounds for failure of the entire course.

Gender-Fair Language

Language structures thought and action. Biases in language can (and do) naturalize inequities. Imprecise language also signifies un-interrogated values and sloppy thinking. For all of these reasons, the use of gender-fair language is expected in this course. For example, do not use words like "mankind" or "men" when referring to people in general; alternate between "she" and "he" instead of always using "he", or construct sentences in the plural instead of the singular so you can use "they" or "them" and avoid the problem altogether.

Course Schedule (subject to revision)

Week 1 Introduction
 

August 28	Student Biosketches
August 31	"The Organizational Kid." David Brooks. <http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/04/brooks-p1.htm>
	"Case-based learning for public policy making" Asian Development Bank Institute                             <http://www.adbi.org/TM/by%20parts/PART09.pdf>

Week 2 Framing IT Policy & Law (Weekly essay due)
 

September 4	"A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism For the Net?" James Boyle. <http://www.law.duke.edu/boylesite/intprop.htm>
September 7	"Speech: Impeach the Internet!" Viktor Mayer-Schonberger. (Handout) “Internet Groups Urge Public Participation” Susan Stellin (Handout)

Week 3 Intellectual Property I   (Weekly essay due)
 

September 11	Samuelson, Burk, Davis, Benkler, Froomkin, & O'Rourke articles (available from on-line class reserve: <http://www.lib.rpi.edu/cgi-bin/crsind.pl/STSS696301>)
September 14	"Court Rules That Internet Re-Posting Is Protected Speech" <http://www.eff.org/sc/Barrett_v_Clark/20010730_eff_ruling_pr.html>

Week 4 Intellectual Property II  (Weekly essay due)
 

September 18	"10 Big Myths about copyright explained" Brad Templeton. <http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html>
	"Strong Arm & Hammer" Virginia Eubanks. (review web page) <http://www.brillomag.net/>
	UCLA on-line institute review of The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) <http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/iclp/dmca1.htm>
September 21	Review cases against DMCA at <http://www.law.stanford.edu/cases/2600/> and <http://www.anti-dmca.org/>
Suggested Reading:	Digital Millenium Copyright Act (HR 2281). <http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=105_cong_bills&docid=f:h2281enr.txt.pdf>

Week 5 Digital and Analog Divides  (Weekly essay due)
 

September 25	"Thorough Americans: Minorities and the New Media" Jorge Reina Schement. <http://www.benton.org/Policy/Schement/Minorities/home.html>
September 28	"Native Americans and the Digital Divide" Rachel Anderson. <http://www.benton.org/DigitalBeat/db101499.html>
	"UNIVERSAL ACCESS TO E-MAIL Feasibility and Societal Implications" RAND Report (Summary). <http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR650/sum.html>
Suggested Reading:	"The Analog Divide: Technology Practices in Public Education" Torin Monahan. <http://www.rpi.edu/~monaht/papers/analog.htm>
	"Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer Age" American Association of University Women Educational Foundation <http://www.aauw.org/2000/techsavvy.html>

Week 6 Social Informatics & Infrastructure Design(Weekly essay due)
 

October 2	"What is Social Informatics and Why Does it Matter?" Rob Kling. <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january99/kling/01kling.html>
October 5	"Behind the Terminal: The Critical Role of Computing Infrastructure In Effective Information Systems' Development and Use" Rob Kling. <http://www-slis.lib.indiana.edu/kling/pubs/webinfra.html>

Week 7 Hacking Culture I
 

October 9	NO CLASS. MONDAY SCHEDULE.
	Read The Hacker Ethic by Pekka Himanen.
October 12	Film to be shown...

Week 8 Hacking Culture II
 

October 16	Finish The Hacker Ethic by Pekka Himanen.
October 19	Paper on The Hacker Ethic due.
	"One Half of a Manifesto" Jaron Lanier. <http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier/lanier_index.html>

Week 9 Privacy(Weekly essay due)
 

October 23	"Identity and Choice: The Implications of Market Power for the Technologies of Privacy" Philip E. Agre.  <http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/identity.html>
	(Last day for undergraduates to drop a course.)
October 26	"Protecting privacy in public? Surveillance technologies and the value of public places" Jason Patton. (from on-line class reserve)
	"Driving to the Panopticon" J.H. Reiman. (from on-line class reserve)
Suggested Reading:	"Hyperpanoptics as Commodity: The Case of the Parapolice" George S. Rigakos. <http://www.stmarys.ca/academic/arts/sociology/george/CanJSoc.htm>

Week 10 Standards(Weekly essay due)
 

October 30	"Why the DTV Transition will Fail" Bruce Johnson. (from on-line class reserve)
	"Internet Domain Names: Whose Domain Is This?" Robert Shaw.  <http://people.itu.int/~shaw/docs/dns.html>
November 2	Film to be shown...

Week 11 Information and Globalization I(Weekly essay due)
 

November 6	Keohane and Nye article (available from on-line class reserve: <http://www.lib.rpi.edu/cgi-bin/crsind.pl/STSS696301>)
November 9	Price article (from on-line class reserve).

Week 12 Information and Globalization II(Weekly essay due)
 

November 13	"A Tower of Babel on the internet? The World Bank's Development Gateway" Alex Wilks. <http://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/topic/knowledgebank/k2301_babel.html>
	“Globalization: The Third Wave” Roberto Verzola. <http://www.igc.org/trac/feature/microsoft/globalization/verzola.html>
November 16	"Development, Democracy, and the Village Telephone" Sam Pitroda. (from on-line class reserve)
	"Hypercapital" David Golumbia (1996). <http://www.mindspring.com/~dgolumbi/docs/hycap/hypercapital.html>

Week 13 Information Representation(Weekly essay due)
 

November 20	"Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with eyes and hands" Bruno Latour (from on-line class reserve)
	THANKSGIVING RECESS BEGINS AFTER LAST CLASS

Week 14 Student Presentations
 

November 27	Student Presentations
November 30	Student Presentations

Week 15 Student Presentations
 

December 4	Student Presentations
December 7	Final Projects Due