Course Meeting Times
Seminar: 2 sessions/week; 1.5 hours/session
Course Short Description
New digital technologies are transforming learning across the lifespan—from reading apps for toddlers, intelligent tutors for school children, blended learning for college students, MOOCs for adults, and interest-based learning communities for hobbyists. In this course, we explore these technologies and how they shape people’s lives and learning. Coursework will help students explore learning, media, and technology through multiple lenses—history, policy, social theory, design, and evaluation. Students will refine their thinking about the opportunities, limits, and tradeoffs of educational technology. Graduate students will complete additional assignments.
Course Goals
I have five goals for this course. I hope you will do the following:
- Look anew at your own educational history, and understand the ideas and practices that have shaped your own schooling and learning.
- Develop familiarity with the skills and practices of social science and analysis of social-technical systems.
- Peer into the marvelous complexity and richness of the education field. Any exploration of learning inevitably touches on cognitive science, history, sociology, pedagogy, organizational behavior, and lots of other fascinating topics; investigations of education technology bring in computer science, human-computer interaction, media studies, and learning analytics.
- Seriously consider a career in the education field. It’s one of the most rewarding ways you can spend part of your life. Even if you don’t pursue education, I hope that investigating learning prepares you for leadership in whatever field you choose.
- Get a grounding in some of the foundational texts in education, as well as exposure to new research and thinking about learning, media, and technology.
Course Structure
Learning, Media, and Technology is a seminar course about how humans learn and how technologies help and hinder them. Our primary modes of inquiry will be reading, storytelling, writing, and discussion.
I’ve designed a preliminary syllabus of topics and readings, all of which I’m very happy to add to or amend. Over the semester, I hope that we learn about each other’s interests, and use those interests to shape what we do together in the seminar. I’m open to changing topics, readings, and assignments to let students bring their expertise into the course and to pursue what we’re most interested in together.
The fundamental commitment that I’ll ask you to make is to attend every session and complete the assignments. This isn’t a class where there is a body of knowledge that I’m hoping you will master, however you manage to do that; rather, the participation of every student in the course is essential to a successful seminar.
Books and Readings
Most of the readings in class are from online articles, but we’ll also use three books:
- Reich, Justin. (2020). Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education. Harvard University Press. ISBN: 9780674089044.
- Cuban, Larry. (1986). Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920. Teachers College Press. ISBN: 9780807727928.
- Reich, Justin. (2020). Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools. Wiley. ISBN: 9781119913528.
Assignments and Grades
For every class period, there will be a set of core readings that we will all complete, and then an additional set of “rabbit hole” readings for your continued exploration. Graduate students will be required to do at least one of these additional readings.
Some weeks there will also be a short assignment, asking you to reflect on your own educational history, imagine a new future, or read something closely. These assignments will typically be a few hundred words or their multimedia equivalent in images, audio, video, code, etc. Short assignments will be completed in a semi-public learning journal.
Over the course of the semester, you will do three written assignments that help you sharpen your ability to analyze complex systems at the intersection of society, human behavior, and digital technologies. They are described in detail on the Assignments page, but in summary:
- Write a 4-page paper where you analyze a learner’s experience with a learning technology through the lens of the pedagogical theories we explore in this class
- Write a 4- to 5-page paper where you advise a learning organization about a technology adoption.
- Write a 10-page (15 pages for grad students) paper on anything that you choose that connects to and goes beyond the subject matter of this class.
You need to be an active participant in class—listening carefully, participating actively in small group conversations, contributing proportionally to the full seminar discussion, bringing your assignments with you to class, etc. You need to attend every class. I will grant occasional waivers for good reasons (attending conferences, etc.—the best excuse I’ve ever received is to “drive robots in an opera in Canada”) and can excuse absences upon recommendations from Student Support Services. I don’t grant waivers for doing work for other classes. Cross-registrants should expect to adhere to the MIT undergraduate schedule.
Class Participation: 25%
Short Assignments: 25%
Two Written Papers: 25%
Final Project: 25%
