Overview of Class Projects: Students will be divided into groups for the class project, based on their interests.  The groups may look at the current and future impact of cyberspace on a social institution such as the family, religion, government, education, economics.  Or they may be more focused, e.g., looking at the use of cyberspace in electoral politics in the United States or by jihadist organizations or for medical records or book publishing or higher education or just about any other organized social activity.  A group might also want to focus on more technical issues such as the future of artificial intelligence, attempts to develop computer psychotherapists, the open source software movement, or Wikipedia.  Groups will be formed in class on September 6 and will depend on the interests of the students.  Each group should have five to ten participants.

Groups will work together online over the semester, as well as meeting during our four classroom sessions.  They will be expected to prepare a coherent presentation to the class that is more than the sum of its parts.  Each student will prepare and post three project WEB pages on the internet: 

1. A Table of Contents page listing the names of each of the students and the titles of their presentation, with a hyperlink to each of their presentations.  The presentations should be listen in an order that makes sense,e.g, the first might be an introduction and overview, the last might be a summary and conlcusions, while the others might be specific examples.  Or some might look at the past, some at present practices and some at future possibilities.
   
2. 
   
3. A presemtation (using the Google Documents Presentation tool) analyzing the future of the topic using one or more of the Methods and Approaches of Future Studies. This should be 5 to 10 slides with illustrations and to any available futurological writings.  

We will use Google Documents to prepare and publish the WEB pages, although anyone who is familiar with other web publishing software is welcome to use it instead. 

1.  Individual Home Pages were published the first week.  They can be found here. 

2.  Group Project Pages with Tables of Contents were due September 18.  They are also available here.   Please check the comments I made on each proposal and take them into account in preparing the Individual Project Pages. 
                The (incomplete) Table of Contents page for the Internet and Electronic Publishing group can serve as a model.

3.  The Individual Project pages are due by 5 p.m. on October 25.  This should be a page with illustrations and hyperlinks illustrating something about the impact of cyberspace on some social institution.  It is often useful to organize the page around three specific examples.  For example, a group focusing on Cyberspace and Higher Education might describe programs at three instutitions that are at the cutting edge in this field such as MIT, Drexel and The University of Phoenix.  This should be about 500 words of text with illustrations and hyperlinks.  The projects will be graded for writing, layout and quality of design and presentation.  Guidelines are in the reading "Writing for the Web" which is in our Sakai site in the Resources folder.  The general principles of powerful writing we covered in Week Five should be follows.

This paper should have some information that would be interesting and useful to students in this class.  Do not just write things that everybody knows such as as "hybrid internet classes combine internet and classroom learning."  Give, for example, a report three hybrid internet classes (other than mine) and their strengths and weaknesses. 

A sample paper by Fulano de Tal is available here.  Please use this as a model.  Pay particular attention to the citation of sources.  This should be done with hyperlinks within the text and with references at the end, as shown in the example.  Links should be embedded in the document (use the symbol that looks like an infinity symbol). 

This paper must be your own writing, all papers will be scanned by Turnitin, a plagiarism checking service.  All sources must be cited and any quotations must be in quote marks.  See the Sociology Department's Plagiarism Policy. 

The papers should be submitted in several ways:

1. It should be shared with tedgoertzel@gmail.com using Google Documents.  This will enable me to check out the links.
   
2. It should be published as a WEB page on the Internet using Google Documents.  This is on the "Share" menu.
   
3. There should be a link to the paper from your Group Project Page.
   
4. It should be saved  pdf format and submitted to the "dropbox" on our SAKAI site by the by 5 p.m. on October 25.  20% will be deducted for each day that the paper is late.  Points will also be deducted for any format other than pdf.  I will use these for grading and for establishing when the paper was turned in (they cannot be modified after they are submitted).  To save a Google document in pdf format, simply open the file, click on file/download file as.../PDF.  Save that file on your computer in a folder where you can find it.  Then open SAKAI, open our course, click on "dropbox" and follow the instructions.  Make sure SAKAI tells you that your assignment has been submitted.  You can receive an email confirming submission.  Later you will find the grade and my comments in the dropbox.
   

Work Schedule for Class Projects:

4.  Future Scenarios are due by 5 p.m. on November 8. 

Write 200 words about life on earth after "the Transition" as portrayed in The Big Questions by Ben Goertzel and Stephan Bugaj (in Sakai/resources).  You should imitate the style of the introductory paragraph of The Big Questions, reproduced below.  You should focus on one aspect of social life.  It may be, but need not be, the same topic you wrote about for the last paper, e.g., social networking, video gaming, education, security, the media, childhood.  You should mention the role of The Guardian as the super-human Artificial Intelligence program that dominates life after the transition.

Life on Earth had been generally positive since the Transition: war, famine, aging and disease were things of the long past. A complex system of technological restrictions imposed by a sentient global computer network, created at the time of the Transition, prevented the various risks earlier futurologists had foreseen as potentially accompanying the advent of advanced nano-bio-info-cogno capabilities. Rogue wireheading was avoided via restrictions on mind-altering technologies, those that were available being carefully controlled by The Guardian. Most humans happily occupied themselves via social and sensory pleasures, but a significant subset also enjoyed more intellectual pursuits: mathematics, science, literature, art. A small minority, on the other hand, chafed at the restrictions placed on them and, for various reasons, wished that the advanced technologies that had enabled the Transition had been used for purposes more ambitious than the creation of a carefully-controlled human utopia. Post-Transition society tolerated this level of malcontentment due to the general value it placed on freedom of thought; and also because the overall socio-technological system in place was so powerful and robust as to render the odds of this malcontentment having any practical impact almost vanishingly small....

There are two steps to this assignment:

        A.  Post your 200 words as a "new topic" in the Discussion List on SAKAI by 5 p.m. on November 8.  I suggest you write it first in a word processor, spell check it, then paste it in.  You may need to use Control-V to paste into the box.
        B.  Post replies to at least three of the other students' topics by November 12.  You may also reply to Ben and Stephan's original statement which I have posted.