At the end of the term, your course-evaluation form will say the following: Prof. Rogaway’s goal is to increase your inclination to think about, and act upon, the ethical implications of your personal and professional choices, and our collective work as technologists. He’d also like you to read a lot, to write a fair amount, and to become more comfortable participating in oral discussions and giving an oral presentation.
Even with this, many people still want to take this class with me; we are currently about 125% over-enrolled. Because this is an intimate, discussion-based class, I can’t just admit everyone. So I ask that, if you are going to drop, please figure this out as soon as possible, so that we can give some certainty to people on the waiting list sooner rather than later. While the deadline for dropping is the tenth day of instruction (April 12), I would request that you do your very best to figure this out by Wednesday, April 3, and definitely by Friday, April 5. I will assume that anyone missing week-1 classes or assignments is going to be dropping (unless they have spoken to be about this in advance and I have agreed).
Waitlisted students will not be admitted directly from the waiting list, but by PTA number.
Each day, you must bring that day’s reading(s) to class. Bring it either as a hardcopy or on a tablet or e-reader. (You may not use a conventional laptop or smart phone during class.) You will want to mark up readings as you read them.
Students often don’t understand or remember readings. They will say that they read the piece, and I believe them, yet they can’t answer questions about the reading that a person who had done the reading should be able to answer. While a few readings are genuinely hard, possibly beyond some student’s reading abilities, I think the main problem, at least for native speakers, is that people read when they are are distracted. It won’t work. Separate yourself from whatever might be distracting you. Look up words you don’t know. (school teachers provide terrible advise if they tell students to skip over unfamiliar words and to guess their meaning from the surrounding context). Read like it matters. The media on which you read also matters: trying to read a challenging piece on a smartphone is insane. A monitor might not be much better.
When you read, make sure you know the author’s name and at least a tiny bit about who s/he is. Know roughly when the piece you’re reading was written. Make sure you genuinely understand the ideas the author is saying, and what his/her point of view is. No offense, but I’m not real interested in your opinion on a topic if you’ve not demonstrated an understanding of the author’s.
If we watch a film together, or I ask you to this on your own, give it just as much attention as you would a close reading. Don’t multitask.
If you’re used to teachers who ignore “low-level” issues, perhaps telling you that your ideas are all that matters, forget it. First of all, it’s just not true; good ideas are inextricably tied to good expression of them. Indeed the notion that there is meaningful distinction between good ideas and good expression of them is pretty suspect. Second, if you’re capable of good writing, then it’s kind of rude to subject a busy person—Zane or me!—to bad writing. And rudeness and ethics are, if not siblings, at least close cousins.
But if neither of these two reasons resonate with you, feel free to consider it part of my idiosyncratic character that I get distracted by bad writing and bad typesetting to such an extent that I will be unable to attend to whatever you think is the content. When I see a page of ugly or sloppy prose, it is almost impossible for me to see in it anything else.
All written assignments done outside of class must be typeset and submitted as pdf documents. While scholarly work in academia should normally be done in LaTeX, it’s fine to turn in softcopy produced by Word or the like.
Your typesetting must use justified text (no ragged-right margins) and may not use a monospaced or sans-serif font (e.g., Courier or Arial). Work that violates this request will not be graded.
The sort of things that drive me crazy include: typewriter quotes ("this" instead of “this”) and typewriter apostrophes (Rogaway's class instead of Rogaway’s class); wrong dash lengths (if you never noticed the difference between an em-dash, en-dash, and hyphen, it is past time you did); confusion of i.e. and e.g.; confusion of that and which; missing spaces or extra spaces; references that are nothing but a URL; calling authors or other famous people by their first names, as though they were personal friends of yours.
Please put your name and section number at the top of any written work. If an assignment comes with a length requirement expressed in words, include the word count above. The count should exclude references.
For a discussion class like ours, coming late is disruptive; please arrive on-time. For purposes of marking attendance, you are counted as half here if you arrive late.
Similarly, you may not use a conventional laptop in class. E-readers and tablets are fine, or laptops folded flat like a tablet, as long as these devices are used only for displaying the reading we are discussing or, perhaps, scribbling a few notes on them with a stylus.
Please don’t wear scented products to our class or to my office hours. One person’s nice smell is another person’s toxin. For me, most scented products seem like asthma-inducing poisons.
Please don’t sleep in class, read the newspaper, or do the hundred other things like that that are obviously rude. This is not a lecture hall of 200 people; this is an intimate class where we aim to interact and get to know one another.
Please listen closely when other people speak. Be polite, even when you strongly disagree with something said. Give everyone a chance to talk. Sometimes this means leaving a longer “whitespace” than you are used to. Don’t monopolize, but do speak up.
We will sometimes discuss contentious, emotional, or personal topics. If you feel inclined to express a political opinion, to say something politically incorrect, to use profanity, to harshly criticize a professor or public figure, to reveal a personal fact or story, and so on—go right ahead. Consider our class a safe place for engaging in free speech. To make this work, please cut others some slack if they say something that offends you. Finally, don’t reveal who said what when engaging in discourse with others (unless, of course, they give permission). This is known as the Chatham House Rule, and we will follow it.
If you know you will miss some class, please let me know in advance.
Do make sure you are familiar with UCD’s rules on academic misconduct. This section mentions a few things that are different, or that I wish to emphasize.
All writing you do must be entirely yours. You may ask a friend or a writing instructor to proofread your work and make suggestions, but it shouldn’t go beyond that, and even that should be acknowledged. Your presentation must likewise must be entirely your own work (you may not rework some related talk that you find). Acknowledge all ideas and quotations; use proper referencing. Obviously you may not purchase your term paper or presentation. All materials you significantly use must be referenced. (Of course you can, and even should, talk to people about what we are reading or talking about.)
For your final project, if you have done a related project before, or if you will use your project for some overlapping class, you need to discuss that possibility with me. For a book-based project, you need to disclose when you request the book if you have already read some or all of it.
It is an instance of academic misconduct to ask or tell someone in the other section about whether or not there was a quiz, or what it is on. If I pass around a sign-in sheet, it’s academic misconduct to sign-in for someone else, or to ask someone to do this for you. It’s an instance of academic misconduct to claim that you missed a class because of an illness if you weren’t sick. It is academic misconduct to sign in on a sign-in sheet and then leave early, without providing notification to me that you weren’t present for all of class. It is academic misconduct to use a cellphone in class, including the ten minutes before class begins. If some emergency arises such that you must consult a phone, quietly excuse yourself from class.
Cheat-implies-F policy: If you engage in any form of academic misconduct in this class, either by your own admission or SJA finding, I will assign you an F grade in the class. By taking this class with me, you are agreeing to this policy.
While I myself think that an F course grade is a minor penalty relative to the seriousness of academic misconduct, the cheat-implies-F policy is more draconian than what often used to happen around campus, which was only to assign an F or zero grade for the particular work item where misconduct occurred. I believe this is changing, within CS and across campus, so that students can expect to fail a class, among other penalties, if they violate expectations on academic conduct.
The class is a rather unusual opportunity: where else are you invited to stop, step back, and explore the (often grave) ethical issues that we face as human beings and as creators of technological wizardry? And you get to do this with someone who is not only a serious scientist, but who actually cares about these things. I myself never got to take a class like this. I wish I had. I suspect my own life’s path would have changed.
I don’t see the topic of this course as “merely” or entirely “academic”. I have no patience for moral philosophy stripped of the imperative to actually act and to care. My class deliberately does not stay within the traditional confines of computer ethics. If you’ve come expecting some tedious prof to implore you not to use file-sharing networks to get your music, or whatever else you might imagine to be the ethical issues of interest to people in a CS department, forget it; as you all must know, that is not where our ethical or societal problems lie. What I myself would like is for both of us to come out of the course not just a little more knowledgeable, but a little better as human beings. A little wiser and more socially aware. That’s a lot to hope for from a 10-week class, but let us make it so.