In the coming three weeks, students from Harvard, MIT and Stanford will be tackling real-life problems of Internet commerce, governance, security and information dissemination. These problems themselves are not only conceptual issues but also identifiable struggles within their spheres. Students will be engaged with practitioners and academics–people who potentially hold the power to shape the future of these issues or at least provide the course with a sounding board to articulate better questions about the future.
An important aspect of the trajectory of this course is the students’ participation in the Internet phenomena they have chosen to investigate for these few weeks. Students will be required to understand cycles perpetuated by Reputation Defender, participate in human computing sites like Amazon Mechanical Turk and understand debates around the successes and perils of Couchsurfing.com (of course, through forums, as three weeks at Stanford is a quite lengthy amount of time to couchsurf!). The students are also offered field trips to interact firsthand with various components of the technical sphere they seek to understand including Facebook, Ebay and Google. The idea behind this immersion is to allow students the participatory (albeit “couchsurfing” free) understanding of the media they consume and now also advise.
