Google 101 Courses: From Hardcore to High Concept

  • By Paul McCloskey
  • 03/06/07
Last week we reported that the University of Washington was offering an introductory course on Google programming developed by a Google employee who was dissatisfied with the quality of computer science learning arriving with the company's latest college recruits.

Now another big campus is getting into the act. Duke University announced it was offering a freshman seminar about Google, but this time the theme is more abstract: "Google: The Computer Science Within and Its Impact on Society," taught by Shivnath Babuam, an assistant professor of computer science at Duke. The course is a mixture of technology and ethnography: after several lectures on computer science, the students are pursuing topics such as the behavior of people searching the web, the founding of Google as a company, and Internet advertising.

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Duke University

About the Author

Paul McCloskey is contributing editor of Syllabus.

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