Tomorrow night I launch my technology, innovation, and design seminar for Georgetown’s Learning, Design, and Technology program. I’d like to share the syllabus here.
The class is required for LDT students. Its goal is to expose those students to a variety of intellectual approaches to technology and innovation. Accordingly I’ve cued up philosophy, linguistics, history, antiracism, business, feminism, science fiction, medicine, sociology, information studies, and a role-playing game.
Students have a lot of work to do. There’s a barrage of reading, to which they respond through weekly writing and discussion. They have two midterm projects (analyzing one tech; an annotated bibliography) in addition to a final work. Each will also present on one technology, introducing and analyzing it.
I will keep my own presentations to a minimum. The goal is less for me to rant at students and more for us to think together to build collaborative understanding. I encourage students to drive the discussion in general, and also to bring in their individual professional work and personal interests.
Overall I think it’s a challenging, rich, and wild ride.
Here’s the schedule. Books follow at the end:
August 24
Topic: Introductions
Readings:
- Plato, excerpt from Phaedrus (the story of Theuth)
- Etymologies (On “tek” (just p. 1)
- The huge technological takeoff (one, two)
Exercises:
- A quick sketch of technology history
- Exploration of key concepts, starting here (Links to an external site.)
- Signing up for tech presentations (here’s the list) and using this as a prompt:
August 31
Topic: the history of technology
- Reading: How We Got To Now 1
September 7
Topic: the history of technology
- Reading: How We Got To Now 2
Student tech presentations:
September 14
Topic: Imagining innovation
Readings:
- Forster, “The Machine Stops” (https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/Machine_stops.pdf) (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops)
- Bush, “As We May Think” (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
- Schroeder, “Noon in the Antilibrary” (https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611829/noon-in-the-antilibrary/
- Atul Gawande, “Slow Ideas” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/07/29/slow-ideas
Student tech presentations:
September 21
Topic: how innovations spread, 1
- Readings: Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 5th Edition: 1-52; 72-3; 87-218 (chapter 1; chapter 2 through the Miracle Rice story, the STOP AIDS story, and from “Opinion Leaders” on; chapters 3-5)
- Referenced: Moore, Crossing the Chasm
Student tech presentations:
September 28
Topic: how innovations spread, 2
- Reading: Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 5th Edition: chapters 7-11
- Christensen, Raynor, McDonald, “What Is Disruptive Innovation?” https://hbr.org/2015/12/what-is-disruptive-innovation (Links to an external site.)
Student tech presentations:
October 1: innovation analysis due
October 5
Topic: how to nurture innovation
Readings:
- Jon Gernter, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (part one, chapters 1-11)
- Rosen, “Prologue”.
- Rage Against the Machine: Technology, Rebellion, and the Industrial Revolution, pp. 1-36; the primary sources are fun, too.
Student tech presentations:
October 12
Topic: simulating technological and social possibilities through Reacting to the Past
Readings:
- Rely on Rage Against the Machine: Technology, Rebellion, and the Industrial Revolution.
- Your character biography (emailed to each of you)
- Your faction advisory (emailed to each of you)
- Video clips (1,2)
Character assignments: TBD
October 19
Topic: justice and innovation, or: does technology have a politics?
Readings:
- Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, 1-96.
- Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (one copy)
Student tech presentations:
October 26
Topic: Justice and innovation, 2
Reading:
- Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, 97-end.
- Lepore, “The Disruption Machine” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine
Student tech presentations:
November 2
Topic: beyond the western world
Reading: Digital Middle East, selections:
-
- Zayani, “Mapping the Digital Middle East: Trends and Disjunctions”, 1-32
- Any four (4) chapters of your choosing, based on your interests.
Student tech presentations:
November 9
Topic: technology and society
- Rosen, “Changes in the Atmosphere”
- Judy Wajcman, “Feminist Theories of Technology”
- Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”
Student tech presentations:
November 16
Topic: futures
- Student presentations
- Two short readings, to be determined by the class
November 19: annotated bibliography due
November 23
Topic: futures
- Student presentations
- Reviewing key concepts, starting here
November 30 LAST DAY OF CLASS
December 17 FINAL PROJECT DUE
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Print readings, offline, which you need to obtain
Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code.
Jon Gernter, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation.
Steven Johnson, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made The Modern World.
Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 5th Edition.
Mohamed Zayani, ed., Digital Middle East State and Society in the Information Age .
Recommended readings
James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future.
Charles Fadel, Wayne Holmes, Maya Bialik, Artificial Intelligence In Education: Promises and Implications for Teaching and Learning.
James E McClellan and Harold Dorn, Science and Technology in World History, third edition.
Carlota Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages
Alex Roland, War and Technology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press)
Shoshana Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.
I wish I could be in that class, Bryan:) Enjoy!
That’s very kind of you to say. Maybe another time.
Thanks for posting this syllabus. I read the fascinating linked story Slow Ideas, very illuminating. It reminded me of the sci-fi trope, meat brains in a digital world, which has driven so many dystopian narratives. And it offers a compelling message for these Covid-panicked times – the importance of person-to-person communication, the importance of reducing highly technical messages to seven (or fewer) accurate easily remembered and implemented statements, the importance of the availability of directly observable results. And it presents the question: How is our current social media technology inhibiting, even destroying, the quality of information in the hands of the people… and what innovations might counter that trend?
Years ago, I took a graduate course on the diffusion of innovation, you know, Bass and Rogers, the logistic curve.
But what’s different here is the focus on “technology”. I think the notion that we are changed — sometimes subtly, sometimes radically — when we interact with technology because our orientation changes — the idea is in Heidegger. In order to interact with technology we have to be-facing-it and intentionality (Brentano) goes in the other direction. Like the Holocaust. Another example of the evil twin?
Looking into Carlota Perez, *Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages*, I am reminded that the Chinese invented paper and soon thereafter created paper currency — which was naturally over-produced, resulting in financial collapse and the end of the dynasty in power at the time. Paper was soon forgotten, only to be re-invented later on.
Along the lines of Perez’s thesis, and lending it support, is *A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America’s Financial Disasters* (2012) by Scott Reynolds Nelson.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv-k_dPbCUA
Good Efforts
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