CSCC355: Project 1
Due 01/27/2005

Due to the restricted time schedule for Winter Session I have decided that this will be the only project for the semester - Make it count it is worth 25% of your grade!

Choose one of these two topics and write a 3-4 page report. That's about 1000-1200 words.

I'd expect that you'd spend about an hour thinking about the topic, about 2-3 hours doing research, and a couple of hours writing up your thoughts.

Include a works cited page. (No, that doesn't count towards the length--besides, the length is supposed to give you a guideline for the scope of your report not be an exact measure.) You may use any style guide that you wish to construct the works cited page and to refer to specific parts of those works in your report. Important things to include: all sources--Author, title, date; online sources--URL, date viewed, author/information affiliation (E.g., if it were one of my web pages, you'd include University of Delaware.); articles--book or journal where found, basic publication information (date, volume (journals), page numbers, etc.). Just be consistent in your method of citation. For more information on citations see Virtual Reference Desk: Citation Styles at the University of Delaware's Library Web site.

Consult at least one source beyond those assigned as readings for this class. Many of you will want to consult more than that.

I will not take off for the first couple of spelling and grammatical mistakes. But I will take off points if your writing is so bad as to confuse me so that I don't understand what they heck you are writing. I will also take off points if your report is so full of typos and errors as to be distracting.

The research aspect of the assignment will be worth up to 30 points. The "correct use of English" component will be worth up to 20 points.

The remaining 50 points will be my judgment of what you write. I'll be looking at your logic--do not just rely on the power of your personality and your assertions to carry home the point.

Please submit it to me the old-fashioned way--on paper, double-spaced is preferred. A title page is not needed. But  include name, date, class, etc. in the upper right hand corner of page 1 and do put your name and the page number on each subsequent page.

Here are your choices:

Choice 1: How would you educate a college campus about responsible computing issues

Case Background

You work in IT at a mid-major, Mid-Atlantic University with about 25,000 students (about 13,000 full-time undergrads of whom about 7,500 live in dorms), campuses in three counties, fast connections to the Internet from the university--but a limited budget for purchasing MORE bandwidth.

Given that your university encourages academic freedom, the administration does not feel it is appropriate to dictate what computing environment will work for all students, faculty, and staff--for example, your university does not require that all students buy the same computer hardware and software. It doesn't even require its students to buy a computer. Therefore, you can't easily "push" software out to the mixture of Mac, Linux, Win2K, WinXP, Win98, and WinME systems in your residence halls. Further, your university's policy is to encourage students, faculty, and staff to become independent computer users as opposed to becoming "dependent consumers of computing services."

Your university needs to limit its liability for student and staff violations of the laws of your state and of the United States--including the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and other copyright laws. However, your university is loathe to ban specific software from campus, in large part because your university's experience with placing "bans" and "port restrictions" upon its students is that doing so leads students to find ways to circumvent those bans. Your university does not have the financial and staff resources to get trapped in an on-going cycle of enforcement and modifications to enforcement procedures based on student-circumvention of enforcement measures.

Your university is willing to make a major effort to educate its students, enforce copyright laws, protect the integrity of its network, get its users to buy into the program, and make sure its users understand the consequences of violating university policies and/or applicable state, local, or federal laws.

Specifically, your university has these concerns:

  1. The university must, by law, cooperate with investigations about copyright infringements that use its network. The university counsel points out that this is true for all laws of the land, not just copyright. But he also points out that the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA offer a way that the university can limit its liability under the law.
  2. P2P file-sharing takes up an inordinate amount of your campus network's bandwidth. Because your university has a fast connection to the Internet, you notice a larger "upstream" component--that is, people on the Internet taking advantage of your university's network to download material FROM your students. To complicate matters, your university's network connection is so fast that bandwidth-shaping software, software that makes known P2P traffic have a lower priority over the network, is no longer effective. In short, P2P is interfering with students' ability to do their schoolwork and sometimes interferes with faculty and staff use of the network, too.
  3. Because being on a network with thousands of computers makes each computer a potentially-infected and a potentially-infecting computer, you have to make sure that your users keep their anti-virus and operating system software current. In addition, your users need to be aware of the dangers posed by using P2P software re: exposing their computers to possible break-ins, viruses, and "spyware." Further, most students are unaware that they can and should configure P2P software to minimize its impact on their own computers' performance and on your network's performance.
  4. Spyware and stupidity. Too many of your students, faculty, and staff click on "free offers"--thereby downloading spyware and other software that slow down their computers.
  5. Students are learning "bad computing behaviors" that will not fly when they enter corporate America.

The Assignment

Your mission: Propose a plan to educate this university's computing users, in particular, its students, so as to change their computing behavior.

What kind of campaign would you implement? What steps would you take towards implementing a campaign? Whom would you involve in the development of the campaign? How would you communicate the penalties and consequences for violations? (What works with you and your friends?)

Specific goals of your proposed campaign:

You may comment on the sufficiency of advertising and user education to address the problem and briefly describe some technological things you might try; however, do not go overboard--your mandate is to focus on user education, advertising, and other relatively inexpensive ways to improve the situation.

Feel free to use and cite resources you find on the Internet or in the textbooks or in other sources. Some of these web resources may be helpful to you as your prepare your answer.

I have heard many students talk about their dislike of computing policies at the university - so here is your chance to write what you think would be fair - Just remember to validate your answers logically!

Choice 2: How would you change part of the law?

We've talked about policy vacuums and conceptual muddles--in plain English, how the laws of the land often don't anticipate some of the new situations technology brings about or some of the ways in which technology changes existing situations.

In our readings, we've seen that a combination of the laws and social norms influences people's behavior. We learned about the social contract under which our society operates, the little things we give up in order to reap the benefits of being part of a society. As part of that discussion, most of authors we read came to the conclusion that we have an ethical duty to obey "just laws."

Suppose that you are working for a legislator who is shopping around for a "high tech issue" that he can use to make a name for himself. Which law would you suggest that he tackle?

The assignment

Select one part of one set of laws and propose a change. Keep the focus narrow--politicians and our media outlets don't do well with "omnibus overhauls" of the law. For example, don't talk about reforming everything in the range of the US copyright laws; instead, look at one narrow area (e.g., the licensing of MP3 downloads, or the rampant downloading of unlicensed MP3s) and propose a change in the law or in the marketplace that that law is intended to govern.

Since your audience is a legislator, keep it short--under 1200 words if you can.