Techfoot

A colleague of mine recently likened the course planning process to what goes on inside a sausage factory:

Over a century ago, the German statesman Otto Von Bismarck supposedly said, “If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.” Same point can be made about the way I construct course syllabi…

While some folks may be shocked by realities of how faculty members plan their courses, I think there is real value to opening up the process. In that spirit, I’m planning to use this blog to reflect on my activities in preparing the Emerging Technologies in Education course that I’m planning for the fall. The planning model that I use looks something like this.

For me, course planning involves balancing three sets of interlocking goals: the learning goals of the individual students, the constraints (and affordances) of accomplishing those goals in a credit-bearing college course, and the “institutional press” of conducting the class within a specific institutional culture. When I plan a class, I try to structure our time together in a way that does justice to the complexity of these three sets of expectations. In a perfect world, the goals would be largely aligned, but in the real world of practice they seldom are.

As a course planner, I make decisions about structure, sequence, timing, grading and the myriad of other details based on my individual interpretation of the context of the class. There are at least four lenses that I use to focus on the particulars of a class.

• Educational Philosophy: Since the earliest scientific studies on curriculum, planners have noted that course design is a reflection of individual educational philosophy, and there is tremendous variation in the fundamental world views that shape teachers’ decisions. While my practice draws on a variety of perspectives–liberal education, progressivism, sometimes even behaviorism–my primary decision-making lenses are humanistic education and individualized instruction.
• Authentic Learning: As an intellectual and genetic descendent of John Dewey, I’m committed to building classes that advance authentic learning: learning that uses real-world problems and projects and that allow students to explore and discuss these problems in ways that are relevant to them.
• Authentic Teaching: One of the dangers of a scientific approach to teaching and learning is that it devalues the relationship between teacher and learner. In planning courses, I try to find topics, techniques and problems that connect to my genuine interests and concerns. In Parker Palmer’s terms: “Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic self-hood, whether it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will also find the joy that every human being seeks–we will also find our authentic service in the world. True vocation joins self and service, as Fredrick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as ‘the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.’”
• Communities of Practice:. I’ve come agree with John Seeley Brown that one of the major goals of education is to bring students into contact with divergent communities with distinct understanding of knowledge and distinct ways of judging what is interesting, valid and significant. The focus of a community of practice is “learning to be” rather than merely mastering a body of knowledge. A major question in my courses is what does it mean to be an effective learner, citizen, teacher or administrator in a time of unparalleled technological change.

Translating those broad principles into practice—a set of activities and interactions, bounded by time and constrained by the realities of “institutional press”—make the course planning process an enormously complex one, but one that constitutes the heart of effective teaching.

Recently I had a colleague contact me asking for a bibliography of recent influential texts that he could include in a three credit introductory course in technology for language students. Mike said that he was looking primarily for items that approached technology from a theoretical or philosophical perspective.

I went though my RefWorks bibliography of about 1366 references for courses that I’ve taught in Adult Education, Technology Planning and Emerging Technology, and came up the following list as a starting place. Since I happen to have the New Media Reader sitting on my desk, I strongly suggested that he start there.

Any ideas of others that have shaped your thinking would be appreciated.

References

Anderson, C. (2006). The long tail: Why the future of business is selling less of more Hyperion.

Baase, S. (2008). A gift of fire: Social, legal, and ethical issues for computing and the internet (3rd edition) (3rd ed.) Prentice Hall.

Brown, J. S., & Duguid, P. (2000). The social life of information. Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press.

Dertouzos, M. L. (2001). The unfinished revolution : Human-centered computers and what they can do for us. New York: HarperCollins.

Duderstadt, J. J., Atkins, D. E., & Van Houweling, D. E. (2002). Higher education in the digital age : Technology issues and strategies for American colleges and universities. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.

Friedman, T. L. (2007). The world is flat 3.0: A brief history of the twenty-first century Picador.

Hafner, K. (1998). Where wizards stay up late: The origins of the internet Simon & Schuster.

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide NYU Press.

Lessig, L. (2005). Free culture: The nature and future of creativity Penguin (Non-Classics).

Lessig, L. (2006). Code: Version 2.0 Basic Books.

Montfort, N., & Wardrip-Fruin, N. (2003). The new media reader. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press.

Negroponte, N. (1996). Being digital (New Ed ed. ) Coronet Books.

Shenk, D. (1998). Data smog: Surviving the information glut revised and updated edition (Rev Upd ed.) HarperOne.

Shneiderman, B. (2002). Leonardo’s laptop : Human needs and the new computing technologies. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Talbott, S. (2007). Devices of the soul: Battling for our selves in an age of machines O’Reilly Media, Inc.

Vaidhyanathan, S. (2005). The anarchist in the library: How the clash between freedom and control is hacking the real world and crashing the system (New Ed ed.) Basic Books.

Weinberger, D. (2007). Everything is miscellaneous : The power of the new digital disorder (1st ed.). New York: Times Books.

Wright, A. (2007). Glut: Mastering information through the ages Joseph Henry Press.

Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk?: Scientific American

M. Mitchell Waldrop’s excellent introduction to “open notebook” science in Scientific American fits nicely with some of the work we’re doing to support the Charles Center’s initiative on expanding undergraduate research at the College. My class last semester helped plan a web site that will help students in all disciplines make the process of their research more open and transparent. The site will use a series of Web 2.0 tools to build a community among students at William and Mary who are actively engaged in research.

Most students get lots of exposure to the end products of scholarly work, but they are much less likely get much exposure to complexities of producing that scholarly work. As Ron Gross noted in The Independent Scholar’s Guide:

Rarely do researchers or writers “let their hair down,” revealing that they started where each of us must start: with mere infatuation for a subject… Established researchers rarely portray the faltering steps by which they came to pinpoint their purposes, chose their subject, sharpen their skills. By the time the work of the scholar or scientist comes to our attention, it is usually well packaged as a finished monograph, a carefully-crafted article, a well-honed paper, a polished book, a museum worthy collection or display, a documentary on film or videotape, or as some other finished work. This final project seems to have sprung full-grown from the author’s head. So we get a misleading picture of how intellectual and creative projects get started.
Gross, Independent Scholar’s Guide, Introduction to Chapter Two: From Messy Beginnings to Finished Product

In open-notebook science, blogs, wikis, and social networking tools provide a way to share the everyday decisions that shape an actual research project–both the successes and the failures. Scholarly papers offer clear views of what has been accomplished, but generally don’t provide much insight into the things that didn’t work. Often those details are precisely the ones that can jump-start the work of other scientists, making the whole research process more productive and efficient. The OpenWetWare initiative at MIT, for example, has expanded well beyond its beginnings as a few graduate students refining protocols for getting DNA cultures to grow:

In short, OpenWetWare has quickly grown into a social network catering to a wide cross-section of biologists and biological engineers. It currently encompasses laboratories on five continents, dozens of courses and interest groups, and hundreds of protocol discussions–more than 6100 Web pages edited by 3,000 registered users.

The article raises some interesting issues for institutions that are trying to expand undergraduate research. Timo Hannay, head of Web publishing at the Nature Publishing Group summarizes his vision of scholarly publishing in a way that fits nicely with our goals for the technology integration program:

Our real mission isn’t to publish journals, but to facilitate scientific communication,” he says. “We’ve recognized that the Web can completely change the way that communication happens.” Among the efforts are Nature Network, a social network designed for scientists; Connotea, a social bookmarking site patterned on the popular site del.icio.us, but optimized for the management of research references; and even an experiment in open peer review, with pre-publication manuscripts made available for public comment.

Waldrop has posted the article in Scientific American’s Edit This section where readers get to collaborate with the author in giving the story its final form.