Your project is to be based on either on a book or a topic. Here is a list of suggested books. I will refrain from giving a list of suggested topics so that you can better let your mind wander. Topics only need to have nonvoid intersection with ethics-and-technology. Don’t make a topic overly broad. I suggest to discuss your topic with me early on.
There are two aspects to the project: a paper and a presentation.
The paper should be no less than 2000 words (about 8-pages). Please indicate the word count at the beginning of the paper. The paper should be written with an intended audience of me and your classmates. Write something that you yourself would want to be given to read. And, in fact, you will be reading one another’s papers, which must be sent to so that I can drop them to the web. If you don’t want your last name on this (publicly available) document, for reasons of personal privacy, please reduce it to a single letter.
Your paper should be carefully written, and will be graded for writing quality. Give full references in the bibliography (eg., author, title, journal, publisher, pages, date; a URL alone does not a reference make). Include all necessary citations and footnotes. Please number all pages. Prominently include the project number on the first page. Please order authors alphabetically by last name. Follow standard stylistic conventions (any fixed set of conventions you select). If you don’t know standard conventions, check with a source like Strunk (The Elements of Style). Use justified text (no ragged-right margins). Use a pleasant-to-read font (not Arial or any other sans serif font). Do not write stuff off the top of your head, so to speak—you need to do some genuine research here. Think, organize, think, and organize. Write and rewrite.
The paper is a research paper—research in the sense of learning some of the scholarship for some particular area, not research in the sense of doing creative scholarship of your own. Make sure your sources represent actual scholarship, not random web pages, blogs, or the like. While it might not sound nice to say, the truth is that I am not terribly interested in reading page after page of your own ideas on some topic—I want to learn what those who have spent years of effort on the issue have come to understand. Yes, you can throw in your personal opinion, but please keep it separate and keep it small.
The papers should be sent to be as a .pdf file. Please give your paper a file name of p followed by the number assigned to you on the list of student projects followed by .pdf; for example, p106.pdf. If you write the paper in Word and just can’t figure out how to convert it to a pdf, you may send me the Word (.doc) file I will convert it for you. I always recommend serious students to use LaTeX, not Word.
Paper due dates are as follows:
Presentation will occur during week 10, during the scheduled final-exam slot (assuming there are students who want to use that slot). Sometimes we must use part of week 9 as well.
Presentations should have content substantially different from what’s in your paper. The audience will have read your paper; they don’t want to listen to the exact same stuff. Besides, that which “works” in a good talk is usually quite different from that which works in a good paper.
They’ll be two milestones preceding giving your presentation and paper:
No-double-use policy: Your project should be something “new&rduo; for you. In particular, you may not select a project topic that largely intersects with a project you already used for another course in the past, or that you will use for another course this term. Both partners are considered to be in violation of the policy if either is.
Plagiarism: You may not use, modify, or refer to any related presentation or paper from a former student or professional service. Any material used that is not your own work should be properly credited to its source.
Good luck and have fun.