New course opens
Using Computer-Aided Thematic Analysis (CATA), I organized over 300 transcripts, interview and lecture podcasts and video clips into groups for each of the weeks in the course.
As the spring 2011 semester opens in the School of Business and Management at Norwich University, I’m pleased to announce the availability of materials for a completely revised version of IS407, “Politics of Cyberspace.”
The course description begins with this summary:
“As computing and networking technologies increasingly pervade the worlds of business, government, science, law enforcement, the military and entertainment, political and policy considerations also increase in importance as the Internet reaches an ever-greater portion of humanity. Highly controversial subjects involving government actions, legal theory, ethical judgements, international relations, and economic analysis are introduced with reference not only to historical developments of the last several decades but also to recent news reports. The course assumes only a rudimentary familiarity with the basic concepts and terminology of modern Internet usage and computing and is not a technology-focused course. This course offers students from all majors the opportunity to explore policy issues in greater depth than in technology-oriented courses they may have taken. Information-technology courses are not a prerequisite and students from all majors are welcome.”
Prerequisites: none. Open only to juniors and seniors. (3 Credits)
The topics shown in the syllabus this year are as follows:
• History and geography of cyberspace
• Governance of cyberspace and Net Neutrality
• The Digital Divide
• Virtual worlds (massively multiplayer online role-playing games and net-based meeting places)
• Evolving concepts of privacy in the age of social networks
• Employer and school reactions to private commentary posted on the ‘Net
• Intellectual property laws and the evolution of entertainment
• Disintermediation and the future of newspapers, magazines, music and film
• Censorship around the world
• The implications of the WikiLeaks incident and U.S. government responses
• Economic cybercrimes and information warfare
• Artificial intelligence and the ‘Net.
Using Computer-Aided Thematic Analysis™ (CATA™), I organized over 300 transcripts, interview and lecture podcasts and video clips into groups for each of the weeks in the course. The files containing all the links are available for download as week-specific lists in HTM or DOCX and also in a comprehensive listing for the entire course. I hope readers will find value in these resources, which I have posted for free (non-commercial) public use. Feel free to use them for any educational purpose that does not require participants to pay anything specific for such use (so use in a formal course at a school, a non-profit conference, or in an enterprise is fine, but using the materials in a seminar where participants have to pay a profit-making group to get in is not).
In the next article in this series, I’ll introduce the topics in the syllabus.
