Rainy Saturday mornings are made for being lazy. But unfortunately I am wasting mine by catching up on work. Since the office has moved location at the same time that I am completing my thesis and at the beginning of term real day-to-day work seems to have been pushed aside. But it will not wait. New students are approaching fast!
My main teaching this term will be in two main areas
(1)Â Â Â A distance-learning course on the theory and philosophy of Free Software.
(2)Â Â Â A technology ethics course.
Neither of these courses are new but I am re-vamping the technology ethics course in a big way. The main problem is helping students understand that the technology they take for granted also carries with it problems. Admitting to these problems is not the same as the Luddite impulse to abolish technology but it is the first step at improvement. We need to understand what the problem is if we are to be able to address it.
Previous attempts have been a varying degree of success. Even if the students pass the course I still have a sneaking feeling that some of them just donâ??t get â??itâ??. So this term I am trying something new. The students are going to blog!
Apart from the traditional course material, lectures and seminars the students will be required to set up individual blogs where they will be required to write posts relevant to the different themes of the course. Therefore when the course discusses areas such as privacy or intellectual property the students will be required to post their thoughts and/or other material on the subject.
The course starts with an introduction to the technology and social impact of blogs. Then they will have to go out and start their own (new) blogs. We will also be discussing the importance of visibility, ways in which traffic can be increased and the purpose of blogs either as citizen journalism or entertainment.
This will be followed by a section on basic ethics before the course really begins with applying ethics on questions of technology. The course will end as it usually does with an essay.
Hopefully blogging will enable the students to explore the questions we are looking at on their own terms â?? forcing them to evolve from passive consumers of information to active producers. The students will be graded on their essays but also on their blogs (have not decided upon the criteria for this yet).
In Swedish when things go very wrong we say that it all became pancake â?? so right now I hope that the whole thing does not go pancake.