Stephen Petrina Curriculum Vitae (CV)

Just uploaded “Status and Trends of STEM Education in Canada” to my Academia.edu account: Canada is at various crossroads and one of these is STEM education. The Canadian government anticipates that STEM will be a catalyst for economic and cultural change. After a decade of federal policies and funds for STEM education, there is little to show in K-12 schools and teacher education programs. The vast majority of non-profit, private sector, and professional society policy recommendations reinforce the federal government’s lead. This chapter provides a critical analysis of challenges, policies, practices, and trends in STEM education in Canada. The chapter primarily focuses on K-12 STEM education and teacher education and tangentially on postsecondary STEM education.

Forthcoming: MacDowell, P. & Petrina, S. (2020/2021). Philosophy of technology for children and youth II. In STEM in Education 2020/2021 proceedings (pp. xx-xx). Vancouver, BC: EDCP.

Just published: Petrina, S. (2020). Philosophy of technology for children and youth. In P. J. Williams & D. Barlex, (Eds.), Pedagogy for technology education in secondary schools (pp. 311-323). Dordrecht, NL: Springer.

See Pedagogy for technology education in secondary schools.

We just uploaded “Soul (Slow Online and Ubiquitous Learning): Analysis and Regulation of Instructional Time,” which will be presented at the upcoming STEM in education in conference here at UBC.

ABSTRACT: This paper addresses an experimental and innovative pedagogy and philosophy: Slow Online and Ubiquitous Learning (SOUL). Since 2011, the co-authors have implemented SOUL as a pedagogy and philosophy into the online courses they teach at a university level. Pedagogically, SOUL is a pragmatic temporal regulation that limits and paces course commitments for students and instructors. Philosophically, SOUL is an intervention into the conventional wisdom that portrays online learning as a limitless exchange of ideas 24/7. This paper reviews relevant research on time, provides a theoretical framework that underwrites SOUL, and analyzes instructors’ and students’ experiences and self-study data.

Petrina, S. (2019). “Scientific Ammunition to Fire at Congress:” Intelligence, reparations and the US Army Air Forces, 1944-1947. Journal of Military History, 83(3), 795-829.

I recently published a major article on the history of the Air Force: This article synthesizes histories of Operation LUSTY, the Scientific Advisory Group (SAG), and Project PAPERCLIP, and follows the SAG into Germany’s R&D installations, the concentration camp Dora at Mittelwerk, allied interrogation facilities, Japan and the atom bomb, and finally into Congress, 1945. The history of the SAG’s efforts from 1944 to 1947 reveals the intensity with which the AAF and its consultants in the aeronautical sciences pursued Nazi R&D. The fact that an exploitation of this R&D configured into the postwar policies of the AAF and USAF is accepted by historians. This article explains how this was done by describing the coordination of LUSTY, OVERCAST, PAPERCLIP, and the SAG in the AAF’s exploitation of intelligence and reparations for postwar policies and politics.

Although initially cautious about the implications of recruiting personnel for R&D in the US, engineers and scientists in the SAG were anxious to transfer Nazi technologies to the AAF. Whether or not the military “was sold— or sold itself— an expensive bill of goods” by Nazi scientists and technologists, as a reporter concluded at the time, remains a historical question.

CRITIQUE OF MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY WORKSHOP 

Wednesday, April 29, 2015
10:20-12:00     Scarfe 1209
Year of Research in Education event #yreubc

CRITIQUE OF MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY

Stephen Petrina
University of British Columbia

This workshop focuses on the Critique of Media & Technology. The first part of the workshop includes a presentation and discussion on a forthcoming chapter. The second part of the workshop focuses on the process of researching and writing with special attention to philosophical and historical research 2.0 and narrative. How can we or ought we write a (big) history of the critique of media and technology?

The chapter begins with the spiritual critique of media and technology and proceeds historically through cultural criticism and social, psychic, ontic, and identic critiques. Differentiated from the spiritual critique that precedes, cultural criticism of media and technology emerges in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a mode of describing and depicting the mechanical arts. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, spiritual critique is displaced through a rejection of religion and theology as sources of modern authority. With spiritual ground undermined, social, psychic, ontic, and identic critics of media and technology compete for defensible ground for leverage. The history of critique is a search for ground. This chapter historicizes the critique of media and technology as well as critique as a practice that has run out of steam. “Critical distance” from or “free relation” to media and technology— a seductive orientation since the 1940s— has been instrumental in critique’s gradual decline. The critique of critique has quickened the decline. The conclusion questions the short-term future of machinic critique and long-term renewal of spiritual critique.

Download the Critique of Media & Technology chapter.

In memory of David F. Noble, I am revisiting the automation of education and trends in the MET program here at UBC.  My first report was published in 2005: “How (and why) Digital Diploma Mills (don’t) Work: Academic Freedom, Intellectual Property Rights, Automation and UBC’s Master of Educational Technology Program.” The MET program is now ten years old and on first glance, many of the problems documented in 2005 still exist with the most poignant being a continued exploitation of sessional or part-time faculty members.  At that time, I chronicled:

MET sessionals work without basic support and for a piecemeal wage of $220 (CD) per student. When necessities, such as office space, a monthly photocopy allocation, and a phone budget were requested, the MET Coordinator asserted that these niceties are unnecessary for S2S courses (Gaskell, 2005). Laptop and workstation requests were similarly denied. After calculating the time that MET sessionals spend in attending to the everyday demands of S2S courses, remuneration for teaching MET courses disintegrates into the average national minimum wage ($7.30 per hour) or worse. (p. 51)

After ten years, none of this has changed save for a minor increase in the piecemeal wage.  After ten years, the program has yet to be submitted to a review. Once again, time for an empirical analysis of the MET program.