Evangelists: Eni Mustafaraj, Lyn Turbak

WHAT IS CS114 ABOUT?

First of all, this course received the Apgar Award for teaching excellence in 2009-10, the first time it was taught. Taking the course in the Fall 2010 you get a chance to enjoy this class without feeling like guinea pigs ;-)

Official Description:
As more and more people use the technologies and services made available from Computer Science, online environments like Facebook, Second Life, MySpace, Wikipedia, blogs, and open source development communities, have been flourishing. It is becoming clear that problems existing in our real world transfer and get amplified in the virtual world created by the highly interconnected and ubiquitous computing. This course with start by studying the structure of the traditional Web and its recent successor, the Social Web, and will focus on issues of virtual identity, personal and group privacy, trust evaluation and propagation, online security, critical thinking, online propaganda, googlearchy, fraud and manipulation, restricted resources, class differences, self-perception, and decision-making.

The course satisfies the Mathematical Modeling (MM) distribution requirement.

There is a required book for the course: Blown to Bits by Abelson, Leeden and Lewis. In addition to the online copy, you can find hard copies of the book at the bookstore.