http://www.cs.brown.edu/~rbb/ctcr/ctcr.oct23.html
Introduction to the CTCR Seminar
As this is the first session of the CTCR Seminar, we'll begin with introductions and a discussion of when/where to meet throughout the year, and what topics/issues are of particular interest/concern to those who attend. The Seminar was created as part of my appointment as Senior Fellow at the Sheridan Center, and the basic charge is to provide an opportunity to both showcase and discuss critically innovative ways that higher education faculty across the country are using digital technologies and networked computing to rethink teaching, course and curriculum design, as well as the undergraduate academic experience at liberal arts institutions similar to Brown.
The current Seminar plan calls for monthly sessions, devoted to "teaching and technology" topics motivated by the idea of undergraduate course design. Our next meeting will be on November 20th, also a Thursday afternoon, when we'll discuss the OpenCourseWare Initiative at MIT with members of the OCW Core Team. A February 19, 2003 session is planned with Carol Twigg, Director of the Center for Academic Transformation at RPI, but the time has not yet been set.
Framing the Discussion(s): From Hutchins to the Net
I've chosen "course (re)design" as an organizing topic because it allows for traditional "teaching & technology" topics like tools, best practices, and teaching techniques in the context of disciplinary trends and priorities. The Seminar is by definition interdisciplinary, but that needn't mean an abandonment of disciplinary insights, realities (or even prejudices). The philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser once joked that he wished to someday organize an interdisciplinary seminar with the Engineering Department to be called "The Abstract and the Concrete", and it would be nice if we could put our interdisciplinarity to use in more substantive but equally entertaining ways.
Given the rather grandiose title for this session, we should probably ask whether there is really any substance to the claim that liberal arts institutions like Brown have been, will be, or should be affected by a "post-modern" turn. What if anything do/should the following sentiments have to do with course design, at Brown, in the 21st century?:
I "Politics, the architectonic science, teaches us that we are remorselessly headed toward the unification of the world. The only question is whether that unification will be achieved by conquest or consent. The most pressing task of men everywhere is to see to it that this consummation is achieved by consent. ...The liberal arts are the arts of communication. The great productions of the human mind are the common heritage of all mankind.......
... A scholar in one country can now communicate with another scholar in the same field anywhere in the West. He is usually incapable of communicating with a scholar in another field on his own campus. If the university, as such, the university as distinguished from its individual members, is to exert intellectual leadership toward creating a genuine communion of minds, it must have such communion within itself." Robert M. Hutchins. The Conflict in Education (Harper & Brothers, 1953), pp. 89, 104.
II "It is reasonable to suppose that the proliferation of information-processing machines is having, and will continue to have, as much of an effect on the circulation of learning as did advancements in human circulation (transportation systems) and later, in the circulation of sounds and visual images (the media).
"The nature of knowledge cannot survive unchanged within this context of general transformation. It can fit into new channels, and become operational, only if learning is translated into quantities of information. We can predict that anything in the constituted body of knowledge that is not translatable in this way will be abandoned and that the direction of new research will be dictated by the possibility of its eventual results being translatable into computer language. .... "It is only in the context of the grand narratives of legitimation -- the life of the spirit and/or emancipation of humanity -- that the partial replacement of teachers by machines may seem inadequate or even intolerable. But it is probably that these narratives are no longer the principal driving force behind interest in acquiring knowledge. If the motivation be power, then this aspect of classical didactics ceases to be relevant. The question (overt or implied) now asked by the professionalist student, the State, or institutions of higher education is no longer 'Is it true?' but 'What use is it?' ... "But one thing that seems certain is that ... the process of delegitimation and the predominance of the performance criterion are sounding the knell of the age of the Professor: a professor is no more competent than memory bank networks in transmitting established knowledge, no more competent than interdisciplinary teams in imagining new moves or new games." Jean-Francois Lyotard. The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, (University of Minnesota Press, 1984/1979), pp. 4, 51, 53
III "Nothing is predictable as one explores education on the Net. Huge and exciting potentials open up, alongside aspects that occasion alarm or even horror. Minor innovations take on major significance (word processing perhaps, or the listserv) whilst elaborate technological developments begin to look educationally marginal or trivial (is multimedia as important as e-mail or file transfer? how useful is videoconferencing really?). Some intellectual possibilities seem to close down whilst others open up, as Lyotard above suggests; and the more one thinks about the Internet, the less one seems technologically at its mercy, yet the more locked in conflict with the forces in society who seek to control or promote it." Nigel Blake and Paul Standish, "Introduction", Journal of Philosophy of Education, vol. 34, No. 1, 2000, p. 5
Background Readings for Today:
Note: If you wish to access the full-text articles from off-campus, you should return to this page after authenticating as a Brown user, through Brown's proxy server.
Information about the Seminar, including schedules, session descriptions, archived materials, and links to background readings will be available throughout the year at http://www.cs.brown.edu/~rbb/ctcr/ and we may make use of a listserv if there is sufficient interest.
This page was last updated: October 23, 2003.
© 2003 Roger B. Blumberg and Brown University