a course on participatory media and collective action
I have been a graduate student for two years now at Annenberg but have yet to teach a course as a TA. If I would be asked to design a course, though, it would very much look like this course on participatory media and collective action, taught by Howard Rheingold and Xiao Qiang at the Berkeley School of Information (I wish I could take it!).
I think it is great how they used a wiki to publish their syllabus online. It is sad to notice a trend where syllabi increasingly are hidden and not made public, and there is really very little reason to hide them, right? So this class syllabus is a great exception. In addition, Tim Armstrong of Info/Law found this great collection by Jessica Litman of online syllabi on the topics of internet law. Whereas these are bottom-up examples of what I see as attempts to free up education, Wikiversity is a more top-down driven example that just started and which I hope will be an aggregator of these online syllabi.
I mean, if education is not about sharing knowledge, what is?
EDIT: how could I forget mentioning MIT OpenCourseWare? (thanks Christina). On another note: bad bad bad Blackboard. IDEANT writes about how the blackboard patent issue makes him think of a much more serious issue: how education is being replaced/reinterpreted as information delivery. He could have been describing another example straight out of a chapter of Neil Postman’s Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.
Posted in academia
August 16th, 2006 at 10:34 pm
Hey Lok! Good to see you found my blog =P
I absolutely agree..I think it’s terrible that syllabi are becoming more private, and I actually think I know the reason why: some professors are actually afraid of being judged by their peers.
But yes. MIT’s OpenCourseWare also sets a great example for open syllabi, and I really hope other top universities (ahem) will follow suit soon =)
August 17th, 2006 at 4:59 am
hey check out Wikiversity – it’s brand new and I think I might start editing the sociology entry. Sounds bold, but I like the idea of having an online free open university. I wonder if there can more people working on it.
August 17th, 2006 at 1:55 pm
Berkeley is always into participatory education. I took a grad course at the School of Education on Participatory/Action Research, and it was awesome.
August 23rd, 2006 at 8:24 pm
[...] As usual, the Berkman Center is taking a leading role in attempting to answer these questions. Professor Charles Nesson, as inspiring and charming as always, is co-teaching a class with his daughther on CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion – the class is not just restricted to Harvard students – anybody with an internet connection (and arguably a monster of a computer that can handle the requirements of running Second Life) and an account on Second Life can participate. Really, with this class and the earlier mentioned Berkeley class on Participatory Media, it promises to be a fascinating ride the coming time in terms of re-thinking how classes ought to be taught. Here’s to more classes that enable thinking outside the box! [...]