TR 5:30-6:45, Room: JH A107
Globalization, increasingly enabled by information technology, changes how we work, what we buy, and who we know. New digital technology touches people working eighty-hour weeks in China and others receiving free state-of-the-art drugs in Africa. Learn about the past, present and future of globalization from an information technology perspective, and what it means for you, your career, and your community.
You must attend class, short of sickness or unavoidable family emergencies. If you need to miss a session, I need an email explanation prior to the session. If that's impossible and it's for medical reasons, I will need a doctor's certificate within a week. I do not need to know the medical details, but a doctor must sign it. More than two unexcused absences will result in a reduction of your final grade.
Students will break into discussion teams of four on discussion days. Each team will be responsible for choosing a topic or question, defending its choice against the rest of the class, and leading discussion on that topic or question. Each team should come to class with prior research in hand to support their points or arguments. The class as a whole will choose discussion topics as well as assignment topics (subject to approval).
Students will be asked to make short oral presentations (5-10 minutes), either formally or as part of discussion, throughout the term. Each group together, and each individual student separately, will have to make at least one oral presentation each. Depending on class size, we may rotate through class more than once.
After the first one to two weeks of introduction and settling down into groups, class will go roughly as follows: on thursdays, I, or a guest lecturer, will set the context for the following tuesday's discussion, then student groups will meet to choose discussion questions based on the presentation. The class will then choose a discussion question from the set produced by the student groups. Over the weekend, students will research that question for general discussion on the following tuesday. Each group must bring their printed research to class on tuesday to back up any points they make, then lead class discussion on those points. I will be helping to raise questions and guiding discussion, but primarily tuesday's discussion should be student-led and student-motivated. Students who take especial lead or continually generate questions that lead to intense or interesting class discussions will do well on class participation grades. Students who sit back and say nothing, or who show repeated evidence of being unprepared, will be penalized.
This seminar is intended to be fun and eye-opening, but to make that work also requires some weekly work on your part to keep the discussions lively and (largely) factual. Emotions and knee-jerk reactions are ok if they inspire debate and then lead to some definite conclusion, especially if by the person initiating the emotion-laden statement, but facts and analysis to back emotion up are better. This seminar is more about what is than what we feel about it. Do not assume that continual unpreparedness will lead to a passing grade.
Here is a more detailed grading rubric.
You will be asked to print this off and attach it to the front of each of your essays. Pay careful attention to each topic area or style issue mentioend in it, I will be using those to help communicate why you got the grade you did.Students sometimes need special help learning how to write essays. This seminar can't provide that beyond the session presentation on how to write an essay for this class, plus reminders and feedback on assignments after grading. Students who need to brush up on their writing skills should take advantage of the university writing center to improve their essay writing skills.
You are encouraged to research any topic as widely as you are able, especially from the web. However you must exercise care with websites. Many are untrustworthy (this will be explained in class) and you must learn to recognize what can and what can't be trusted. A website is not like a refereed and edited book or paper. Further, obvious cut-and-paste from web sources will be heavily penalized, and may result in outright failure. Remember that google can be used two ways---for students to retrieve stuff or for professors to check submitted stuff for originality.