here follows the old website (this will gradually be phased out). please visit the new site instead.

I101	Introduction to Informatics	Fall 2000

	Name	Email	Office	Office Hours
Professor	Gregory J. E. Rawlins	rawlins@cs.indiana.edu	Lindley 301D	Mon 4:30-5:30 PM
Associate  Instructor	Edward Fox	ewfox@indiana.edu	Memorial 401	Wed 4-6 PM
Lecture	Wylie 115, Tuesday & Thursday, 4:00-5:15 PM
Newsgroup	ac.informatics.i101.6946 (be sure to read this every few days)
Texts	Gregory J. E. Rawlins, Moths to the Flame: The Seductions of Computer Technology
	Gregory J. E. Rawlins, Slaves of the Machine: The Quickening of Computer Technology
	Larry Gonick and Mark Wheelis, The Cartoon Guide to Genetics
	Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers

Policies on:

Assignments Exams Cheating Evaluation

Overview

This course will help you become more aware of the information ocean that we all swim in, and it will help you think critically about its meaning. Informatics is a field still in the process of becoming, so although this course is an introduction to the field it will not attempt to cover each of the field's currently recognized subparts.

For alternate views, see Kenneth Davis' IUPUI Informatics 101 homepage and Memo Dalkilic's Informatics 101 homepage.

Topic areas may include:

• The computer as an information machine
• Information encoding and its communication
• Computer programming and its problems
• Human-computer interfaces; virtual reality and neurotransmitter encoding
• Non-verbal communication: body language and sign language
• The telegraph as a reflection of the web; revolutions in communications (language, printing, telegraph, satellites) and their consequences
• Information in economics: web economics, branding, trust, the stock market, "the information society"
• Information as intellectual property: encryption, electronic distribution, MP3s, DIVX, Napster, Gnutella, Freenet, privacy on the web, intellectual property in biology
• Information in biology: cells, DNA, RNA, viruses, evolution, the human genome, cloning (livestock, pets, people),
• Artificial Intelligence, Nanotechnology, and our information future

Evaluation

Course grades will be divided as follows: final 35%, midterm 25%, assignments 40%. There will be about 6 assignments, and each may be weighted differently.

Students may submit electronic versions of their notes after each class to potentially earn up to 5% of each week's assignment course credit by being chosen to be the best note-taker for each class session (evaluation decisions are final and are made by the AI). The best notes will be posted to the newsgroup and to this website.

Students may gain an automatic 'A' in the course by producing the best overall essay that links the various topics covered in class. Depending on the quality of the essays, students failing to gain such an 'A' might still receive bonus course credit.

Students may submit questions for potential inclusion in the midterm (and possibly the final, although we haven't decided that yet). Students receive no credit for that but they then have the chance of answering a question on the exam that they themselves made up.

Calendar

assignment one

assignment two

assignment three