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  WHAT IS CS114 ABOUT?
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
 
 

 

Course Mind Map

This is the course's MindMap, containing in color-coded blocks the issues that we will address. To see the order in which we will cover them, click on the image.

NEWS: CS114 was discussed in a W.C. News Resease and at Boston.com News Release.

 

TENTATIVE SCHEDULE

(9/9)
Lab 0 - Basics

(9/10)
0. Course Overview

(9/14)
1. The Privacy-less era (Human 2.0)
Digital footprints

(9/16)
Lab 1.

(9/17)
2. The Privacy-less era (Human 2.0)
Location detection
RFIDs: "Living campus" and Your pizza's Web page

(9/21)
3. The Social Web era (The fun and fear of...)
Online Social Networks
Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, ...

(9/23)
Lab 2.

(9/24)
4. The computer era (Representation of...)
characters and Unicode
computer programs

(9/28)
5. The computer era (Representation of...)
image, colors and movie representations
JPEGs, (no GIFs) and MPEGs
image alteration

(9/30)
Lab 3.

(10/1)
6. The Web era (Communicating through...)
Static pages
HTML, CSS, XML

(10/5)
7. The Web era (Communicating through...)
Dynamic pages
XHTML, CSS, XML, Javascript, AJAX,

(10/7)
Lab 4.

(10/8)
8. The computer era (Representation of...)
Location
URLs, IP addresses, servers, clients
(not to be confused with GPS location)

(10/14 - MONDAY SCHEDULE)
9. The Web era (Communicating through...)
Protocols
HTTP, TCP/IP, packets
Web vs. USPS

(NO LAB - FALL BREAK)

(10/15)
10. The Web era (Communicating through...)
Mobile devices
iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, etc.

(10/19)
11. The Social Web era (The fun and fear of...)
Finding information
The size and shape of the Web
Power-laws and exponential growth

(10/21)
Lab 5.

(10/22)
12. The Social Web era (The fun and fear of...)
Finding information
Search Engines
Crawling and indexing
Querying the SEs

(10/26)
13. The Social Web era (The fun and fear of...)
Finding information
Information Reliability
Digital libraries
Wikipedia
Web Spam

(10/28)
Lab 6.

(10/29)
14. The Social Web era (The fun and fear of...)
Private communications
HTPPS, cookies, certificates

(11/2)
15. The Social Web era (The fun and fear of...)
Private communications
Cryptography

(11/4)
Lab 7.

(11/5)
16. The Social Web era (The fun and fear of...)
Private communications
Cryptography
Public-key

(11/9)
17. The Social Web era (The fun and fear of...)
Private communications
e-Voting

(11/11)
Lab 8.

(11/12)
18. The computer era (Representation of...)
sound and music
MP3s
the indestructible bit: easy of copying
the manipulatable bit: ease of altering
digital rights ownership

(11/16)
19. The Web era (Communicating through...)
P2P technologies
Napster, Kazaa, BitTorrent

Assignments:
Weekly Quizzes to help students keep up with the reading
A project at the end to research and present a poster on an issue related to the subjects we discussed in class

 

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