{"id":63,"date":"2022-08-30T14:06:28","date_gmt":"2022-08-30T21:06:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec565b\/?page_id=63"},"modified":"2026-07-14T15:06:34","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T22:06:34","slug":"course-description","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec565b\/course-description\/","title":{"rendered":"Course Description"},"content":{"rendered":"

ETEC 534:META-theory: New Materialism meets the History of Educational Media<\/span><\/strong><\/h1>\n

Course: Fall 2026, Online
\nInstructor: Prof. Samuel McCready
\nOffice hours: Online by Appointment
\nEmail: samuel.mccready@ubc.ca<\/h3>\n

UBC\u2019s Point Grey Campus is located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xwm\u0259\u03b8kw\u0259y\u0313\u0259m (Musqueam) people. The land it is situated on has always been a place of learning for the Musqueam people, who for millennia have passed on in their culture, history, and traditions from one generation to the next on this site. As teachers and learners here, we bear a responsibility to honour that tradition and contribute to its restoration.\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Course Description<\/h3>\n

As every MET student knows particularly keenly, it matters a lot<\/em> what medium educational communication happens in. This course is about how educational technologies, past, present and future, shape curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment. Its also about how to understand<\/em><\/strong><\/span> the changes and challenges educational technologies have catalyzed, and about the theories we have developed to research, \u00a0describe, analyze and explain how they \u2018work\u2019. That\u2019s the \u2018meta\u2019 part.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re especially interested in the relations of tools to educational ideas, to people, and to other biological and physical beings that educational theory has typically disregarded or overlooked.\u00a0 We will reach out to other places and times in exploring the technologies people used and use in trying to \u2018educate\u2019, look especially at the forms of pedagogical communications<\/span><\/strong><\/em> those tools made and make possible (and suppress), and how \u201cknowledge\u201d was\u2014and is\u2014conveyed, understood, and mobilized in the contemporary educational media ecologies we now inhabit.<\/p>\n

Instead of the more usual approach of reading about the history of educational ideas, or even charting the development of educational media and technologies, Metatheory is, perhaps improbably, a \u201cmaking\u201d kind of course<\/strong><\/span>.<\/em> Rather than prioritizing academic texts (we\u2019ll also have plenty of these, not to worry!) as a way to think about theory, we are going to focus on the making of \u201cthings\u201d, on the design and development of useful tools and purposeful digital artifacts, and to ground \u201ctheory\u201d\u2014 which a lot of people think of as an alienated, terrifying, autocratic and remote spectre haunting the academy\u2014in a larger networked ecology of assemblages and adhesions that extend well beyond humans, and which can be best explored through productive engagements with \u201cthings.\u201d To accomplish that, you will tackle three kinds of ‘making’:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0First,<\/strong> you\u2019ll be engaged, individually, in intellectual production<\/em><\/span>, where you grapple with making theory yourself, based on a set of texts and resources, classic and contemporary, and mobilizing both traditional and new media forms to extend and communicate your growing understandings through the course.<\/p>\n

The second <\/strong>kind of ‘making’ will be a small adventure in original research, specifically a mini internet research<\/em><\/span> project to discover what \u201cdoing theory\u201d looks like when it\u2019s re-mediated through TikTok. This mini project involves you in both \u2018making research\u2019 and \u2018making theory’ from that research.<\/p>\n

Third<\/strong> is the final project: the (small scale) design and production of an educationally useful tool<\/em><\/span>. This can be a searchable archive, a lesson, a game or quiz, a way of recording student progress, an online survey, or other digital tool that supports your educational work. The purpose of this assignment is to experience thinking and working as designers and creators, not merely users and consumers, of technologies for education, and in that process, encountering more explicitly the mostly un-acknowledged ‘parliament of things’ that goes into getting anything done.<\/p>\n

In this course, then, we will examine the educative possibilities for new and emergent digital media, asking whether and how what we know and how we know is re-shaped, re-mediated and invariably altered by education\u2019s technological affordances. Focusing on the design, development and practical implementation of learning tools, we will explore technologies for education as necessarily constructive, rather than receptive, media.<\/p>\n

Please note that when your activities require an online group discussion,\u00a0 you and your group members can set that up yourselves on zoom or teams or whatever you choose. <\/span>You can also ask for a one-on-one, or group tutorial with the prof, to respond to specific questions that have arisen for you.<\/span><\/p>\n

Learning Outcomes<\/h3>\n

By the end of this course, if you invest the effort to read through the whole set of texts, not just those you chose to complete graded assignments on,\u00a0 you will be able to:<\/p>\n