For syllabus and lecture notes, etc. of courses I teach, please see the STS, ETEC 511 & 531 + EDCP 481 & 571 blog and the Technology Studies and HWL blogs.
- Seminar on Bruno Latour and STS (2013)
- Cultural & New Media Studies (ETEC 531) (2013-)
- History of Media and Technology (in Education) (EDCP 571) (2010-)
- Foundations of Educational Technology (ETEC 511) (2010-)
- Introduction to Curriculum Issues and Theories (Digital Learning & Curriculum @ 21st Century Learning) (EDCP 562) (2011)
- Cultural & New Media Studies (ETEC 531) (2000-)
- Media Studies (Across the Curriculum) (EDCP 481) (2010-)
- Introduction to Issues and Theories in Curriculum Studies (EDCP 562) (2010-)
- Seminar in STS and Bruno Latour (TSED 508) (2009)
- Review of Research in Learning Sciences, Learning Technologies, and New Media (TSED 508) (2007)
- Introduction to Research Methodologies (EDUC 500)
SEMINAR ON BRUNO LATOUR & STS (2013)
This seminar focuses on recent work of Bruno Latour, arguably the most creative and challenging scholar of Science & Technology Studies (STS). Latour’s reputation and scholarship traverses an extremely wide range of disciplines in addition to STS (e.g., anthropology, art, education, environmental studies, geography, history, law, philosophy, political science, sociology, theology, etc.). Following a survey of Latour’s work and the postsecular turn in STS, we will focus on three new texts: An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013), Rejoicing or the Torments of Religious Speech (2013), and On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (2010). The seminar is interdisciplinary and inviting, and students from any and all disciplines are encouraged to enroll. We will work systematically through these texts to closely examine Latour’s strategies for doing STS.
Cultural and New Media Studies
This course focuses on understanding media and associated freedoms of cultural expression and the press for learning, teaching, and public pedagogy. Media studies is a dynamic discipline tailored to exploring youth, culture, and education through concepts or techniques such as articulation, framing, regulation, remediation, representation, and transcoding. In addition to understanding culture, media, and the process of meaning-making, this course focuses on making and managing media across formats, cultural expression, and civic engagement. Making minimal distinction among (the) media of, on, and in education, the course provides a survey of media studies and new media with an emphasis on media education and literacy. Media education and literacy are among the most relevant challenges to “official” knowledge and represent key movements in the sociology of curriculum. Hence, this course balances practice with ethical, legal, and theoretical aspects and emphasizes the design of curriculum and courses for teaching media studies and for integrating media literacy across the curriculum.
EDCP 571: History of Media and Technology in Education (2011)
In this Winter 2011 section, the theme is From Twentieth to Twenty-First Century Learning— proceeding from Edison and motion picture students through McLuhan and new media to telelearning and mobile autodidacticism. We will address issues such as how, why and to what degree media and technology have been incorporated into, or changed by, education over time. Some historians argue that media and technology have been an imposition on humanistic curriculum practices; others describe media and technology as the principle means of progress in administration, learning and teaching. Some lament the separation of curriculum from instruction via media and technology, and subsequent displacement of instructional labour by capital; others champion the creativity and intellectual productivity that media and technology seemingly nourish. This course is designed from a basis that educational media and technologies are not merely tools; educational premises are neither fully durable nor pliable; and actors or agents of education are not merely humans.
EDCP 562: Introduction to Curriculum Issues and Theories (Digital Learning & Curriculum @ 21st Century Learning) (2011)
What is curriculum studies? What is the state of research in curriculum studies? What are the primary challenges of curriculum theory for digital learning, and vice versa? This course is one of the two core requirements in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy’s graduate program. We survey a wide range of research and practices in curriculum and pedagogy (C&P) or curriculum and instruction (C&I)— i.e., curriculum studies. In this winter 2011 section for the Digital Learning and Curriculum (DLC) cohort, we will focus on curriculum theory and a recent survey of curriculum studies with special attention to digital media, technologies, and 21st century learning. The emphasis is on understanding curriculum as a dynamic discipline or interdiscipline, demanding specific attention to discourses, issues, and practices germane to curriculum studies and digital media or technologies.
TSED 508: Seminar on Bruno Latour and Science & Technology Studies (2009)
This seminar focuses on Bruno Latour, arguably the most creative and challenging scholar of Science & Technology Studies (STS) in the world today. Latour’s reputation and scholarship traverses an extremely wide range of disciplines in addition to STS (e.g., anthropology, art, education, environmental studies, geography, history, law, philosophy, political science, sociology, theology, etc.). We will focus on four of Latour’s most recent texts: We Have Never Been Modern (1993), Pandora’s Hope (1999), The Politics of Nature (2004), and Reassembling the Social (2005). The seminar is interdisciplinary and inviting by design, and students from any and all disciplines are encouraged to enroll. We will work systematically through these texts to closely examine Latour’s strategies for doing STS— for researching science, technology, and technoscience as problems in what Haraway calls naturecultures and Stengers calls cosmopolitics.
ETEC 511: Foundations of Educational Technology (2008)
This course provides both a disciplinary tour and poststructuralist deconstruction of the foundations of e-learning, educational technology, learning technologies, and new media. It addresses the anthropological, economic, historical, phenomenological, philosophical, political, psychological, sociological, and spiritual foundations of educational technology along with a critique of these foundations. These foundations are cast within a larger framework of ecological-natural, ethical-personal, existential-spiritual, socio-political and technical-empirical dimensions of technology with implications for curriculum and instructional design. How, why and to what degree have media and technology been incorporated into, or changed by, education and what foundational structures underlie these processes? How do the processes of foundation building shape educational media, technology or learning technologies? What happens to e-learning, educational technology, learning technologies, and new media if and when we can no longer rely on their foundations or when foundations shift? This course is designed from a basis that educational media and learning technologies are not merely tools; educational premises are neither fully durable nor pliable; and actors or agents of education are not merely humans. It begins with an exploration of the cultural and social foundations of education, and proceeds through disciplinary and interdisciplinary foundations of e-learning, educational technology, learning technologies, and new media and concludes with a critique of these foundations and the cultural studies of educational technology, learning technologies, and new media.
ETEC 531: Cultural and New Media Studies (2008)
New media technologies have intensified and transformed the way we communicate, the way we learn, and the way we teach. They have, we might say, transformed the student and transformed the teacher. But what is the nature of these changes? Cultural and new media studies are specifically oriented toward understanding the ways in which culture, nature and technology are converging to intensify and transform everyday life. This course provides a forum for exploring technocultural issues such as cyborgs and hybridity, digital property, cyberpunk fiction, the posthuman, AI and AEI, information warfare, virtual reality, third nature and religion. The course is organized around nine modules that correspond to the chapters and themes in the text, Culture and Technology.
TSED 508: Review of Research in Learning Technologies, New Media and the Learning Sciences (2007)
So you call yourself (or want to be) a learning scientist? Or do call yourself (and would rather be) a learning technologist or new mediatician? Or a learning artist? Doesn’t one imply the other? Maybe you are (or really want to be) a design-based researcher, establishing yourself in both the learning sciences and the learning technologies. Or perhaps your answer is “none of the above,” and you are critical and poststructural and want to contradict or deconstruct the learning arts, sciences and technologies. This course addresses current research in learning technologies, new media and the learning sciences with a focus on “what is cognition in the messy complexity of the real world?,” “how do we learn?” and “how can design-based research help explore these questions?” The course will challenge you to theorize cognition while conducting research with groups of participants on and off-campus throughout the term.
TSED 508: Review of Research in Cognition, Emotion and Technology: How We Learn (Technology Across the Lifespan) (2005)
At the turn of the early 21st century, to ask the question “how do we learn?” is to ask the question “how do we learn technology across the lifespan?” However, technological change seems too fierce— too intense— to conclude that learning technology is smooth and developmental. In this course we will explore interdependencies among cognition, emotion and technology and the way these they play out in the lives of children, adolescents, teenagers and adults. We will explore school-based studies and workplace studies of how we learn; we will reconcile research into children and technology with research into adult learning and gerontechnology. How we learn (technology across the lifespan) means asking “how do we age (gracefully) with technology in this new age?”
EDCI 601a: Technology, Rights and the Public Interest (2004)
How we use technology and conceptualize its use in education is contingent on how we use and conceptualize rights in the public interest. This interdisciplinary, research-intensive course explores this connection and provides opportunities for students to publish in special issues of Workplace: A Journal of Academic Labor and Educational Insights. Topics addressed in the course include academic freedom, intellectual property, the commercialization of education, public knowledge and the open source movement, surveillance and discipline, civil liberties and human rights.
CUST 565: Cultural and New Media Studies (2000- )
Cultural and media studies continue to be the “hottest thing in the humanities and social sciences,” as a commentator in the Chronicle of Higher Education depicted them in the mid 1990s. This course provides an introduction into these fields and addresses the ways in which schooling is implicated in politics, practices, and studies of culture and the new media technologies. We will “do cultural and media studies” as well as utilize the new media to express our work. This course assumes no prior knowledge of cultural and media theory; rather, the course is designed to survey, in introductory fashion, discourses on the hybrid of culture and commodity form. Nor does this course assume prior capability in the design of media. In order to meaningfully “do” cultural and media studies we will attend to the socioeconomic normativity of relations in the production, consumption, and regulation of cultural artifacts and texts. We conclude with the issue of globalization, the internationalization of cultural and media forms, and the effects of imperialism. In the spirit of cultural and new media studies, all work we produce– all assignments– will be in non-print forms.
TSED 565: The Philosophy of Technology (1996)
This seminar is based on a critical reading of the philosophy of technology and postmodern readings of technology. In Questioning Technology, how does Mitcham suggest technology can be questioned? What does he mean by ideas about, rather than theories of, technology? What is technology? Is technology always good or useful? What constitutes goodness within technology? What is the logic of technological thought and action? What kind of reality do technological objects possess? What kind of logic do engineering science contain? What is the meaning of technology¬¬¬— that is, how is technology related to other aspects of human life?¬ The course addresses conceptual issues (e.g., science and technology, applied science), ethical issues, political philosophy, and religious and metaphysical issues (e.g., Technological Determinism, Autonomous Technology, Progress, Spiritualness of matter and nature). What is the goal of the questioning of technology? “It is not to serve technology.”