A passage by the Chair of Oberlin's Environmental Studies Program: ...danger of formal schooling is that it will imprint a disciplinary template onto impressionable minds and with it the belief that the world really is as disconnected as the divisions, disciplines, and subdisciplines of the typical curriculum. Students come to believe that there is such a thing as politics separate from ecology or that economics has nothing to do with physics. Yet, the world is not this way, and except for the temporary convenience of analysis, it cannot be broken into disciplines and specializations without doing serious harm to the world and to the minds and lives of people who believe that it can be. We often forget to tell students that the convenience was temporary, and more seriously, we fail to show how things can be made whole again. One result is that students graduate without knowing how to think in whole systems, how to find connections, how to ask big questions, and how to separate the trivial from the important. Now more than ever, however, we need people who think broadly and who understand systems, connections, patterns, and root causes.
(David W. Orr Earth in Mind: on education, environment, and the human impact GR70 .O77 1994 --emphasis added)
In September we embarked on the second iteration of an experiment with a novel way of doing a course, centering its activities on the computer as a communication tool --composition, data-handling, display, distribution-- and at the end of a dozen or so weeks I'm of (at least) two minds about how the experiment has worked. My excursus ("On the Study of the Anthropology of East Asia...") laid out an ambitious scheme for subjects and specific resources, and my collection of "Topical Weblets" indexes at least some of what happened in and out of the various classes.
I want you to spend the next hour or so thinking and writing about this experience, incorporating the following into a page which I'd like you to save in your /anth/ folder as andso.html. The overall question is:
In considering this I'd like you to answer the questions indicated below, but please feel free to raise other points as well. This is intended to be much less an 'evaluation' than a stock-taking, and I'd like it to inspire you to synthesize (or at least think over) what you've done with the opportunities:
Review the course description and explore the excursus and comment on their objectives and success and/or lack thereof, considering both what I did and what you did. You may find it useful to look over the comments of last year's survivors to get an idea of the scope I have in mind. Explore links on the course home page to refresh your memory of what we've done, think about the experience as a whole, and tell me:
- Does it make sense to teach/learn in this way? What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages?
- Does the lab setting facilitate OR get in the way of aspects of teaching/learning?
- The Project segment of the course: I wanted to escape the constraints of "term paper" mentality and nudge you into developing Web skills and get you to explore a broad range of information resources. Convince me that this worked for you, or tell me why it didn't.
andso.html