Course Schedule: Fall 2008

Three hours of lecture and one hour of laboratory per week. Course must be completed for a letter grade to fulfill degree requirement. Technological foundations for computing and communications: computer architecture, operating systems, networking, middleware, security. Programming paradigms: object oriented-design, design and analysis of algorithms, data structures, formal languages. Distributed-system architectures and models, inter-process communications, concurrency, system performance.

This course covers the practical and theoretical issues associated with computer-mediated communication (CMC) systems. CMC includes many different types of technologies such as email, newsgroups, chat, and online games. We will focus on the analysis of CMC practices, the social structures that emerge when people use these applications, and the design and implementation issues associated with constructing CMC technologies.

We will primarily take a social scientific approach to computer-mediated communication (including research from psychology, social psychology, economics, and sociology). We will investigate questions such as: How do we represent identity and perceive others in CMC environments? How are interfaces and visualizations used in CMC to help make sense of relationships? Why do some Wikis "succeed" while others do not? How is the production of open source software such as Linux similar to (and different from) a social movement? Why are reputations useful in some online environments, and not in others? Can we really develop meaningful relationships and perhaps even love-purely through CMC?

This course was previously offered as INFO 290-12.

Three hours of lecture per week. This course will provide an overview of the intellectual property laws with which information managers need to be familiar. It will start with a consideration of trade secrecy law that information technology and other firms routinely use to protect commercially valuable information. It will then consider the role that copyright law plays in the legal protection of information products and services. Although patents for many years rarely were available to protect information innovations, patents on such innovations are becoming increasingly common. As a consequence, it is necessary to consider standards of patentability and the scope of protection that patent affords to innovators. Trademark law allows firms to protect words or symbols used to identify their goods or services and to distinguish them from the goods and services of other producers. It offers significant protection to producers of information products and services. Because so many firms license intellectual property rights, some coverage of licensing issues is also important. Much of the course will concern the legal protection of computer software and databases, but it will also explore some intellectual property issues arising in cyberspace.

This course is a survey of Web technologies, ranging from the basic technologies underlying the Web (URI, HTTP, HTML) to more advanced technologies being used in the context of Web engineering, for example structured data formats and Web programming frameworks. The goal of this course is provide an overview of the technical issues surrounding the Web today, and to provide a solid and comprehensive perspective of the Web's constantly evolving landscape. Because of the large number of technologies covered in this course, only a fraction of them will be discussed and described in greater detail. The main goal of the course thus is an understanding of the interdependencies and connections of Web technologies, and of their capabilities and limitations. Implementing Web-based applications today can be done in a multitude of ways, and this course provides guidelines and best practices which technologies to choose, and how to use them.

This course introduces students to the fundamentals of developing information service consulting and project management. The course focuses on ways to apply theoretical and conceptual knowledge to real world problem solving and project development. The course will explore ways to tailor project management strategies for different contexts, emphasizing approaches for smaller, entrepreneurial settings. Students will work in small teams on real projects that will deployed and maintained by the University or other organizations. Guest lecturers will share their experiences on everything from working with clients, ethnographic and other approaches toward understanding user and stakeholder needs, proposing and planning projects, and managing the chaos of project revisions, course corrections, and requirements changes. Students are strongly encouraged to see projects through development and completion by also taking the Spring semester part of this course.

Note: Students may take both the fall and spring clinic courses once each for credit.

Designing Rural Computing Applications - This class will investigate design methods for developing rural computing applications. The class will begin with a focus on participatory and value-sensitive design methods, and how they can be adapted for new cultures and social settings. We will also cover recent experiments in rural UI design, and what has been learned from them. We will conclude by discussing appropriate methods for design education in a rural computing context.

NOTE: Center of New Media students must add themselves to the INFO 290-08 wait list in order to register for this course.

Now offered as Info 286.