All of the projects are briefly described on the Project Pool page.
As an environment for teaching and learning, the undergraduate seminar is useful for subjects that are more concerned with ideas than with techniques. In a successful seminar, the discussions occupy a middle ground between extreme objectivity (e.g. definitions) and extreme subjectivity (e.g. non-verbalizable impressions), and promote learning and understanding through debate, the clarification of ideas, the refinement of arguments, and the experience of intellectual community. A premium is placed on dialogue rather than monologue in a seminar, but at the same time a seminar can be used by students to try out arguments and ideas in order to see how they sound and fare in discussion.
The choice of readings in a seminar is designed to elicit discussion, of course, but the readings also allow participants to understand and evaluate particular ideas and arguments by seeing them projected and depersonalized. It also provides students interested in particular subjects to engage with an ongoing conversation between authors who are (and often have been for a long time) interested in those subjects as well.
Consistent with our unique approach of CS92/ED89 to the design of educational technology, the readings in CS92 are also chosen in reaction to traditional approaches to software engineering and interface design. Thus, we use textbooks very little in the course, and most of the assigned texts are meant to do more than simply convey information. Why? Because the design of educational software is about the experience we want the student to have in addition to the content we want the student to cover and the concepts we want the student to learn; therefore, we have to be conscious of how we make meaning from our experience with different sorts of information.
Here are a few questions to start our discussions of Ullman's book:
After the Second World War, however, a significant body of literature developed -- you can think of it as beginning with Martin Heidegger's "Question Concerning Technology" -- that claimed that technology was not at all neutral, that technology (at least some technology) exercises as much power over us as we do over it. For example, we might say that the existence of nuclear fission technology has determined the nature of global politics as well as our sense of personal security whether or not anyone chose to have it be so influential. The non-neutral view of technology is sometimes called the "substantive" theory.
Obviously, the role you think computers should play in education depends a bit on your position concerning the neutrality of technology/technologies. In chapter 4, Ullman addresses the neutrality issue explicitly, but you might consider the entire book a comment on this issue. What is Ullman's position on the neutrality of computer technology and how does it compare to your own views on the subject?
"It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement -- that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life."Ullman's book is clearly about conflict as well, but what is the conflict about? If you were to imitate Freud's sentence so as to make it appropriate for a beginning to CLOSE TO THE MACHINE, how would you write it?
1. What is a system of education for, and what are institutions of education for?
2. Who is state-sponsored (i.e. "public") education for, and what is it for?
3. What is and should be the relationship between schools and the social/political structures in which they exist?
4. What difference should the existence of computing technologies and computer networks, and their place in contemporary society, make in our consideration of questions #1-3?
Also have a look at the Buzz!! program for Tuesday, and the MathBug program for Thursday (both are only available in PC format).