Massachusetts Institute of Technology
6.805/6.806/STS085 Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier
Spring Semester, 2001
Term papers and progress reports
The major component of your grade in 6.805 will be your team project,
both the in-class presentation and the written paper due at the end of
the semester.
In order to help you keep to a timetable and avoid a last-minute
panic in producing your report, we are requiring weekly intermediate
reports as explained below:
- In-class presentation: due as scheduled in calendar
- Written project plan: due April 19
- Oral progress report 1: due April 26
- Oral progress report 2: due May 3
- Written draft paper: due May 10
- Final paper: due May 17
In-class presentation
The presentation by the anonymity group on April 12 is an excellent
model for the other groups to use in their presentations. All members
of the group should get an extensive opportunity to speak and to lead
the class, to cover the readings that the team assigns for everyone,
and to ask and answer questions. You presentation should be a mix of
background and an explanation of your team project. The teams later
in the semester should be prepared to report extensively on what was
accomplished, since a lot of the work should have been done by then.
Written project plan: due April 19
This is due by email to Hal and Danny on April 19, one write-up per
team.
Send us
- A short one-paragraph description of your project, including the
major thing you hope to accomplish.
- A list of four or five major tasks you need to do on the way to
getting your project done. You'll be referring to this list in the
two oral presentations.
Note: The authentication team, which is presenting on April 20, has an
extension on this, until Saturday, April 19.
Oral progress report 1: due April 26
One person on each team should give a two or three minute oral
progress report, saying briefly what your project is, and how you are
coming on the four or five major tasks (above). The team presenting
this day should not give a separate report, but include this in your
presentation.
Oral progress report 2: due May 3
Same deal as on April 26. Presumably you'll have made more progress
since then.
Written draft paper: due May 10
Submit a draft of your paper by email to Hal and Danny. Obviously,
many sections of the paper won't be in finished form by now, and a few
may be missing. But you should by this point have a very clear
defined outline and most of the sections in draft form. We'll give
you feedback as soon as possible to guide the rest of your writing.
Final paper: due May 17
The final paper should be a substantial piece of work. We're
expecting papers around 50 or 60 pages long, but we're more interested
in quality than in length. Although the paper should be a coherent
whole, it should be divided into sections, and the individual author
of each section identified. You will probably want to have one team
member identified as editor, responsible for the overall uniformity
and coherence of the entire piece.
For a model paper, see the report done for this class in fall 98:
Digital Identity in Cyberspace, by
Paul Covell, Steve Gordon, Alex Hochberger, James Kovacs, Raffi
Krikorian, Melanie Schneck, HTML
version,
MS Word version