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)."

Comments

Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace

[JonZittrain]

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/.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

[Anonymous Coward]

It's fiction, it's exciting, the protagonist is a high schooler, and it talks about crypto. Neil Gaiman approved.

What "right" implications?

[KalvinB]

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.