Final Writing Assignment

As you come to the end of your time working with your community partner, think back to the beginning of the semester and try to remember how you felt before your first visit to their site. How have your opinions (of a community, yourself, or your abilities) changed? What has remained the same?

Week 13 Writing Assignment

Discuss the scenario in the Baase book, question 9.27, p. 482.

Week 12 Writing Assignment

Write a blog entry about your community partner. It should contain (at least) the following information:

• What is the organization, and where are they located?
  
• What population do they serve?
• How big is the organization?
• How long have they been in existence?
• Are they a local organization, national, or international?
  
• What is their mission?
• What are you doing with them this semester?

You might want to talk with your community partner to find out the answers to some of these questions.

Week 11 Writing assignment

1. Read Chapter 8 of Baase and answer question 8.26.

2. Chapter 7 of the Cress book deals with failure in service-learning projects: what happens when things go wrong. Read this chapter and identify a problem, challenge or difficulty that you've had in your service-learning assignment. Apply the D-U-E process discussed in the book.

Digital Information Writing Assignment

There are a large number of sites, such as Amazon, Netflix, iTunes, Rhapsody, eMusic, Hulu, Joost, Pandora, mp3.com, and many others, that are moving into the business of selling or providing digital information. Choose at least three sites (it can be these ones or different ones) that provide legal access to online media such as music, games, movies, or TV shows and write a blog post that addresses the following issues:

1. What is the site's revenue model? That is, how do they make money?
2. What freedoms does the consumer of this information have? What can he/she do with it?
   

Week 7 Writing Assignment

Read The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond and write a blog post that answers the following questions:

• What does Raymond mean by the 'cathedral' and the 'bazaar' style of software development?
• According to Raymond, what is necessary for a successful bazaar-style project?
• Do you think Raymond's characterization of these styles of development is accurate? Why or why not?
• In your opinion, what sorts of projects tend to be successful open-source projects? What is it about them that causes this?
• In your opinion, what sorts of projects are better suited for commercial development? Why is this?
  

What is LAMP?

One of our projects in this semester's class will be to collect data for San Francisco's TechConnect
database and upgrade their website. (you can see the old one here). We'll talk more about the details on Monday - in preparation for that, I'd like you all to become familiar with the ideas behind LAMP. A good place to start is OnLAMP.

Write a blog entry that explains what LAMP is. What do each of the letters stand for? Why do people think this approach is so interesting and effective for building applications?