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Ask Slashdot: High-School Suitable Books On How Computers Affect Society?
An anonymous reader writes "We are teaching an introductory class in computer science for high school students. We have the technical aspects of the course covered, there is a lot of information on the internet on designing that aspect of the class. We also want to cover some aspects of how computers affect society, privacy, expectations, digital divide etc. We were suggested Blown to Bits, which covers a lot of this but I'm not sure high school students are really going to enjoy it or even take away the right implications ... any recommendations for anything else ? Movies, Fiction, Non-Fiction Books and any other media are all welcome. Students are expected to read no more than 200 pages (that's all the time they have)."
How about Lessig's Code 2.0? It's cyberlaw's pathbreaking book, and it's written in a very accessible way. It's free online at http://www.codev2.cc/.
Orson Welles' masterwork "1984" will teach them all they need to know about how computers have changed their society.
As an added bonus, it will also teach them to understand what politicians means when they use innocent sounding words.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
True, too true.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
There is a perfect book, but it's 201 pages, so nvm
1984
Have gnu, will travel.
IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black is probably the best one out there.
Also, James Bamford's books on the NSA (there are three?) talk about computers quite a bit.
I haven't seen anyone as good as Clay Shirky in studying and predicting the effects of the internet on society.
http://www.amazon.com/Here-Comes-Everybody-Organizing-Organizations/dp/1594201536
-- Miki Tebeka The only difference between children and adults is the price of the toys.
You'd almost need to use Cliff's Notes if you want to cover anything more than half a book.
And done!
start with http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Power_and_Human_Reason
although it's 37 years old it's concise and still applicable.
Everyone should know about the WOPR.
You might also look at selecting a story or two from Gibson's Burning Chrome, but as I don't have a copy handy at the moment, I can't make a hard recommendation.
Another consideration might be George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails. READ this one before you assign it, as it touches on some racy subject matter.
Finally, consider Daniel Keys Moran's The Long Run. Not as well known as the others, but a great read.
Hope this helps....
-Red
The silicon jungle is an interesting read about the effects of wide-spread collection of data by the large email/social sites.
Why not spend the time you have teaching them some practical information they can use? How are they going to benefit from hearing someone's social agenda? Are the students there for your benefit, for you to use to advance your societal goals? Or are you there for their benefit, to help them learn things and improve their future lives?
My suggestion: skip these "society" lessons and use the time to teach them how to search text with regular expressions.
is to provide fodder for discussion on topics like these, which are simultaneously too staid and too confusing for the classroom. It reminds me of an old economics textbook I once had that started with the sentence "Government is big and important in our society." Well, computers are even bigger and more important.
You can look at sci fi flicks for glimpses of what might be in store for us. But given the ages of your students, it might resonate more to assign them programs that show how people lived in the past:
"Leave it to Beaver", "I Love Lucy" - life before the computer age
"All in the Family", "Mary Tyler Moore Show" - only mainframe computers
"Family Ties", "Dallas" - personal computers and client/server computing, but no Internet
"Friends" - Internet and mobile phone era begins, but no social networking
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=books+computers+society
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
A russian woman wrote a work called 'We' about the changes that science (including political) was making to society. 1984 is a pretty unabashed ripoff of the book, and since you're studying the effects of tech, copyright issues are at the forefront. Making that read uniquely suited to the modern dialogue. Anyway, We can feel dry before you realise what the author is doing, which is another good reason for students to read it. The voice is mathematical to the point of lunacy, so statements like 'we fired the engine test precisely on time. We'll need to replace 20 engineers,' feel matter-of-course. And to me that did a wonderful job of communicating the dehumanization wrought by industry.
Sounds like an autobiography of a Muslim
http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/giftfire/
Used this in university, but should be easy enough of a read for HS students.
It's fiction, it's exciting, the protagonist is a high schooler, and it talks about crypto. Neil Gaiman approved.
Surely you mean We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, published in 1921?
-B
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/
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Written in 1995 at the dawn of the Internet, The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst by Steve Talbott (and it's also available free online!) is even more applicable now with the arrival of texting and the smartphone. It's about the reductionism enforced by computers, and how while initially luxuries, every new device soon becomes a necessity to compete and survive in the modern world, and how each additional technological dependency reduces our humanity and severs our rich connections to each other and to the complex natural world around us.
It's 500 pages long, but reading 200 of those pages will convey Talbott's philosophy and point of view.
Fahrenheit 451 might be too long, but germane.
Or Nook 451?
Tips And Tricks For Windows
_1984_ would be my book of choice, but a look at recent tinfoil-hatter screeds...err, wait, I mean legitimate and verified news stories... in newspapers about such things as metadata about all our phone calls and postal mail being recorded forever, license plate databases tracking our vehicle's (and therefore in many cases our own) movements, etc, would also be instructive.
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by educator Neil Postman. Written about TV, but equally applicable to what the internet has become today.
The book's origins lay in a talk Postman gave to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. He was participating in a panel on Orwell's 1984 and the contemporary world. In the introduction to his book Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, than by Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, where they were oppressed by state control.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
It's really not your job to indoctrinate students.
Since it's a computer science course, how about focusing on how computers work and making them do things instead of politics?
People really should not be allowed to teach until they have at least 10 non-teaching years (full time, paid) of experience in the area they want to teach.
If the students can't be bothered to read more than 200 pages about a subject then it really doesn't belong in school anyway. That's a little over 1 page per school day.
Work Safe Porn
... that you keep the course limited to the 'technical aspects' of the course?
The students would likely be better served if the course focused on the computer science instead of those other sociological and/or political matters.
I remember taking my first similar class in high school. Already being a very limited hobbyist programmer at the time, it was easier for me that most of my classmates. I did learn some better practices, and it was rewarding for me to be able to help out my classmates, some of whom found a few of the concepts fairly alien. The class focused on syntax, logic, and math. That was enough to keeps things moving forward, and by the end of the course, we were all creating simple programs and pleased to see what we can get the computers to do when we put what we had learned into practice.
Looking back at that, I think we'd have been derailed if we were then forced to consider things like digital divide or privacy expectations. I'm not saying that those matters aren't things worth considering, but not in an introductory class. Leave that material for a later elective... let the kids get their hands dirty right out of the gate.
You may be trying to cast your net a little wide looking for a single (or even a few) books, articles, and movies that illustrate technology and its impact on our lives, privacy, culture, etc. You might be better off giving them a laundry list of books (I would stick to books for a high school level course) and giving them the opportunity to answer that extremely broad question in the form of a 5 page paper, or something along those lines. Almost none of them are under 200 pages... You're well within "short story / novella" lengths there, and you REALLY need to rethink that, even if it means turning this into an extra credit assignment. Is it possible that you're vastly underestimating the amount of reading time your teenage students have?
You've got a lot of material to potentially choose from, so why not let the students make their own choices? Besides, it makes reading 30 "original" responses that much more interesting when they're not all saying the exact same thing.
Some of my choices would include:
Gibson's Neuromancer
Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties (actually the whole trilogy would be okay here)
Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age
Neal Stephenson's Anathem (for the really brave students...)
Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and probably Ender's Shadow too
Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch
Tad William's Otherland series, although this is probably too bulky to be feasible
Daniel Keys Moran's Long Run and The Last Dancer
Heinlein's Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Heinlein's Starship Troopers
Heinlein's Door into Summer
If you open up your page limit the options are almost endless. If you don't, you'll never find a single work under 200 pages that illustrates the things you want to illustrate. Especially not in fiction.
Because they spend the rest of their time on Facebook, Twitter, and WoW.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
It's got a ninja-lady in space!
Ze Atomic Device! It iz Ztolen!
Okay, you may think you only have time for 200 pages. And you may have some students putting in only the minimum effort but you really ought to have more than 200 pages. One of the best teachers I had assigned 100 pages a week for 11 grade history. I haven't read Blown to Bits yet (downloading) but it looks good. I would stay away from fiction even near reality works like Little Brother and 1984 as the primary source but they are important if only in how they have changed how we look at technology. Put them on an additional reading list and have them handy for the student that resonates with the material. Also consider having at least an excerpt of Lessig or watch one of his presentations in class. Have it ready for a substitute, he is a great speaker and I use him as an example when teaching presentation skills. You might also consider Bruce Schneier's blog as a source. Bruce has essays about this material and links to scholarly and popular works in this areas all the time.
Doctorow also wrote some short stories for quick reads (I recommend Scroogled, esp. in the wake of the discussions around the NSA): http://craphound.com/?cat=2
Take a look at Douglas Coupland's books as well (Microserfs, JPod), even if some of the content is a bit dated: http://www.coupland.com/
Neil Postman's Technopoly is an excellent book on the subject.
Neal Stephenson's books are bigger than 200 pages, but is just hard to stop reading some them. The Diamond Age is a great start, essentially is how a poor homeless 6 year old girl becomes a superpower by herself and changes the world because got access to Wikipedia++
Hackers by Steven Levy. It is not so much about the effect of computers on society as it is the effect of computers on early computing pioneers. It is very readable and makes the early history of the PC revolution both human and exciting.
Looks like there are several book suggestions. How about a movie? I suggest Terry Gilliam's "Brazil".
How about gathering a collection of essays, say 1 from Bruce Schneier, 1 from Cory Doctorow, 1 from Fenyman's lectures etc to give an overview of issues facing computer scientists?
If you are clued up, how long would it really take to write two hundred pages of course material on this topic, with appropriate references? If you are NOT clued up, should you really be teaching such a topic?
You say 'High School' level, which means you'll be required to puke out a metric ton of pro-Obama propaganda anyway. This being so, why not simply contact the appropriate 'PR' department of Team Obama (soon to be Team Bush III or Team Clinton II) for the 'politically correct' statements about the wonders of the computer age?
If we pretend for a moment that you desire to be honest (hohohohohoho) in your teaching, how do you intend to cover the universal surveillance of every citizen of your nation by the NSA? How do you intend to cover the ramifications of Bill Gates working with the NSA to place a camera, microphone, and movement detection system into the homes of millions of Americans, poorly disguised as a 'gaming console'? How do you intend to cover the story of the school department that gave the pupils laptops to take home, purely so perverts could spy on the young people in their bedrooms- and the fact that immunity laws prevented the perverts from prosecution after the fact?
Are you looking for materials that will inform your pupils that every cell phone is a real-time location tracking device, and that its cameras and microphones can be remotely activated by the NSA at any time? What about the fact that vehicle tires have had embedded RFID chips for years now, so that astonishing cheap under-surface readers can track the movement of Americans infinitely more efficiently than the camera systems people THINK are responsible for all monitoring of traffic movements?
Why the hell does the understanding of all this (or NOT, few if any current books contain the above information) require the opinions of a publisher through the words of his/her carefully chosen authors?
But I will make one specific suggestion- the short story "A Logic Named Joe". This story takes moments to read, and pre-dates the Internet (or even proper computers) by quite a time. But the issues it imagines are quite remarkable and prescient, and would make for an excellent point of discussion for pupils of all technical abilities.
My ex-adviser wrote this book, "Moths to the Flame" and you will find it here: http://www.roxie.org/books/moths/. The book enables you to think about computers and their consequences without assuming you know computer science.
I realize it's an introductory class, but surely you could actually teach them something useful where they end the course with some accomplishment, like enough html to make a simple hand-coded web page, or some other language that will end with a finished program of some sort. Even the old Commodore Basic I was taught gave me a foundation in the structure of programming.
Keep a technical course technical.
Joseph Weisenbaim, "Computer Power and Human Reason"
Paul Virilio, "The Information Bomb"
Lev Manovich, "The Language of New Media"
Dalai Lama, "Ethics for the New Millennium"
Orson Scott Card, "The Memory of Earth" (sci. fi.)
Films:
"Surviving Progress"
"High-School Suitable Books On How Computers Affect Society?"
What's that 'book' thing you're talking about?
I think that has already been affected in Society.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Espionage/dp/1416507787
Historical and a fun read. Also teaches you what a PhD. in Astrophysics got you ;-)
"On the Edge; The Rise and Fall of Commodore Computers" is another good read, albeit business centric.
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut....
Dan Means
I would contact a professor in a college/university Science and Technology Studies program, like this one. There are entire degree programs in the area you want these students to read.
Networked Life: 20 Questions and Answers is a new book by Mung Chiang at Princeton which picks a few major features of our modern technological society and explains them in some detail. Doesn't require math, very clearly written and also relatively cheap.
David Brin's 1998 book "The Transparent Society" (ISBN 9780738201443) is cogent and still timely -- http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/transparent-society-david-brin/1100622841 and see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society -- consider mentioning it as supplementary reading at least.
You can't go wrong with "Free as in Freedom 2.0" and "Free Software, Free Society". Both are just a little over 200 pages, and available as free PDFs.
Circumcision is child abuse.
How about selections from Marshall McLuhan's "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Media:_The_Extensions_of_Man
Select Dilbert cartoons from the Internet age might be a good thing to lighten the atmosphere - Bob the Dinosaur being mistaken for a COBOL programmer, Ratbert's bug dance on the keyboard, Dogbert doing maniacal tech support, etc.
Greg Egan - Diaspora, Ray Kurtzweil - The Singularity
In other words, you're not teaching them computer science, you're going to indoctrinate them politically - and you want to be sure they aren't exposed to anything or reach any conclusions that doesn't agree with your views.
I would want them to be introduced to things like media theory by Marshall McLuhan, so they could grab whole picture, not just load of detail.
Servant of karma
As a teacher of high school science fiction class, there are some titles.
Read Machines That Think, and take out the various short stories you want to use. They are many different themes.
Artificial Intelligence is a great movie. Great theme about our relationships to machines and their relationships to us.
Some of the computer stories have as a theme of how much control do we as a society allow computers to have over our lives. Self-driving cars: OK. Remind me to take my medication OK. But what if I don't want to take my meds? Does the computer shoot a dart into my arm with the proper does? The students think that may be OK for the crazy person but not for themselves.
Does the computer plan my high school courses? That way skynet decides that John Conner does not take computer science course, but puts him in poetry class filled with pretty girls, and he falls in love and has a happy family, with many children to keep his mind occupied. Humanity is happily enslaved without knowing it.
Several of the stories in machines that think have the nightmare of the machines have removed humans from their decision making process. But even a child can see that the machines are wrong.
There's still some cryptography news, but so much of it lately is the very best insight and analysis on the intersection of technology, privacy, security, government, and society that is available.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
How about the new documentary, Terms and Conditions May Apply: http://tacma.net/
---jstlook ---For that is the way of Elves, for they say both yes AND no, and mean every word of it. --- J.R.R.T.
"Ypsilon minus" by Herbert W. Franke. It touches upon prism controversy, hacker ethics, singularity...
You're teaching an introductory class on computer science. Not sociology. Teach them computer science.
available here:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
more than 200 pages, but Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End
Alvin Tofler's take on societal future written in 1970 is still a revealing read. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock
Also (not sure how many of these are in print currently - but - still may be available 2nd hand if not):
What will be: Michael Dertouzos: 0062515403
Release 2.1 A Design for living in the Digital Age: Esther Dyson: 0140266623
Interface Culture - How new technology transforms the way we create and communicate: Steven Johnson: 0062514822
The Technological Society: Jacques Ellul: 0394703901
Computer Ethics: 2nd Ed: Deborah G Johnson: 0132903393
The Cult of Information: Theodore Roszak: 0520085841
Megatrends 2000: John Naisbitt & Patricia Aburdene: 0380704374
Composing Cyberspace: Richard Holeton: 0070295484
Technics and Civilization: Lewis Mumford: 015688254X
Case Studies in Information and Computer Ethics: Richard A Spinello: 013533845X
Slaves of the Machine: The Quickening of Computer Technology: Gregory J.E. Rawlins: MIT Press 0262681021
Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing: Peter J. Denning & Robert M Metcalfe: 0387985883
Literacy, Technology and Society: Confronting the Issues: Gaile. E. Hawisher, Cynthia L. Selfe: 0132275880
No - these are not from a University reading list - I own each of these, and others that I don't have to hand right now, and read most of them some years back as I was researching writing a book of my own on the subject (which - I never got round to - oh well). Not all the information in these is focused on the subject evenly but is thought provoking in any case and relevant overall.
Kind regards
W.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ylee/The_Two_Faces_Of_Tomorrow
"An artificial intelligence system solves an excavation problem on the moon in a brilliant and novel way, but nearly kills a work crew in the process. Realizing that systems are becoming too sophisticated and complex to predict or manage, a scientific team sets out to teach a sophisticated computer network how to think more humanly. The story documents the rise of self-awareness in the computer system, the humans' loss of control and failed attempts to shut down the experiment as the computer desperately defends itself, and the computer intelligence reaching maturity."
However, the 1950s movies "Invisible Boy" and "Forbidden Planet", both featuring "Robbie the Robot" would also be good. The first is about AI out of control, the second is about augmented humans out of control.
But lots more on these themes. Brave New World and 1984 are classics. Norbert Weiner's (founder of Cybernetics) "The Human Use of Human Beings" is great, as is Vannevar Bush's original "Memex". Reading "The Pleasure Trap" and "Supernormal Stimuli" might show them what they are up against.
Vernor Vinge's stuff is great, including about high school in the near future.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collected_Stories_of_Vernor_Vinge#Fast_Times_at_Fairmont_High
But together all more than the time of reading just 200 pages...
Theodore Sturgeon's short sci-fi story from the 1950s called "The Skills of Xanadu" is something maybe better than all of these on how computers could affect society, because it provides hope, and it sparked Ted Nelson's Xanadu work on Hypertext that contributed to the Web. It is online here and short:
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PP1
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"We also want to cover some aspects of how computers affect society, privacy, expectations, digital divide etc."
"The end of Work" by Jeremy Rifkin
"The New Division of Labor" by economists Frank Levy and Richard Murnane
"Race Against The Machine" by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
These books are all about how computers and automation effect society, expectations and the digital divide.
Any of them. Who says that highschool students cannot read what 37,5-year-olds can?
If you don't already belong, consider joining ACM's SIGCSE (http://www.sigcse.org/). Their mailing list is an excellent place to ask questions like this, and they are an invaluable resource for anyone teaching CS at any level.
No offense to slashdot, but you'll get much more on point answers from the SIGCSE mailing list than here.
Start reminiscing about the days of punch cards and teletypes. Few peopel are interested in last years technology much less decades ago.
The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll. Kurt Vonnegut's "Player Piano."
For a more critical view, try Evgeny Morozov's "To Save Everything, Click Here". Populist in style, certainly, but a necessary dose of reality to counteract a dominant fascination with everything technology.
"Program or be Programmed". "Present Shock".
It really depends on what you're trying help the students get out of the reading. While some aspects of Sci-Fi (Gibson, et. al.) would be interesting - and many things explored in some of those novels became in some ways, science fact... their primary purpose is one of imagination. Possibly selected a few chapters as excepts for that sort of content? In the realm of non fiction - you could do a lot worse than some of Rushkoff's titles, or "In the Beginning was the Command Line" by Neal Stephenson. It's a bit dated at this point - but still interesting. A possibly better source of inspirational writing might be "The Diamond Age" by the same author.
Try Ready Player One. It might be a bit too long, but it's a fun look at a possible near future.
Having the students watch triumph of the nerds would be pretty good education. Dated now, but would do a good job of putting mobile into perspective.