Welcome to This Is Your Brain on the Internet, ISIS 120

For those following our course online on the HASTAC site, here's my opening welcome post to the students.  To find all of our posts, remember the tag to search for is ISIS 120.   Unfortunately, our Wordpress class site is not entirely compatible with this HASTAC Drupal site (so entirely annoying!) so lots of the punctuation is wonky in this post.  In the future, I'll try to write in Drupal and then reblog on Wordpress.  For now, consider this an adventure in punctuation. 

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Welcome to the students in ISIS 120 (reblogged from our class website, with apologies for Drupal messing up the punctuation; we can also blame Drupal for any spelling mistakes or infelicities of prose or thought . . . )

Hi, everyone--You probably dont know that faculty members get as excited before the beginning of a new class as students do----but some of us really do.  Ill be meeting all of you in a few hours and Im thinking about what to say, what to do, what to wear . . .  all my pencils are sharpened, my crayons are in the box, and Im looking all over for my brand new Choo-Choo notebook.  (Thats an obscure crosscultural reference:  Choo Choo is Koreas wise and slightly sinister-looking version of Hello, Kitty!   I keynoted a conference at the Brain Research Center at KAIST, Koreas answer to MIT, in Novemberand, yes, I really do have a Choo Choo notebook).  But, even without Choo Choo, Im ready for today'sclass--crayons and all--and excited about our semester ahead and hope you are too.

Joking aside, it is great looking over this interesting class roster and seeing a little of who you all are.  Today, in class, well all be learning more and Ill be warning everyone that, because of the contract/crowdsourcing grading system, this class will not be about grades, it will be about testing the intellectual limits:  and you will be the testers!  We will be looking at all forms of knowing, different ways of collaborating, and it will be a class about doing as much as it will be a class about reading.  After the first two units, youll be taking over and your objective will be to push the limits. Since you will know your grade in advance, you can take risks.  Well talk about this today. 

I'll be kicking off the first unit which will begin with an exercise in communication, then reading the memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly dictated with that form of communication, then viewing the movie based on the book by artist Julian Schnabel, then reading popular accounts of the science of neurological intervention in patients with the kind of catastrophic brain stem injury that results in Locked In Syndrome, then reading scientific articles by Migel Nicolelis, then visiting Professor Nicolelis's lab.  That's the first unit.  Subject and method and ways of knowing, ways of communicating, and brains quite literally on the Internet.  Professor Nicolelis's patients communicate by means of thoughts and electrodes in their brain and interfacing with a cursor.

I also wanted to let you know about the unusual make-up of the class.  There will be sixteen of youand six of us.   That is, I come to class with an entourage, a posse.  In this case, there is Alex Greenberg who is the TA for the class and the main person in charge of logistics, keeping track of grades and absences, and so forth.  Alex is a Ph.D. student in Literature (high theory, international).  There will also be two other humanities doctoral students, both from the English Department, Bill Hunt and Ashon Crawley.  These are called Teaching Apprentices.  They are in the class to learn first hand what a classroom is like, how you organize a class, what works and what doesnt.   Given my personal style, I cannot imagine a better way to begin ones teaching career than by being part of a class designed to push the limits.   Why not start with the non-traditional-and then leap from there?  Alex, Ashon, and Bill will be leading the second unit in the class, on "How To Crowdsource Grading," the blog post (and method) that gained so much notoreity.  We'll all be talking about what evaluation is, what grading means, and where grading as a concept comes from (hint:  like a lot of what we will discuss this term, it too is a product of Industrial Age mentality . . . you know, the one we're trying to get rid of!)

The other two participants are both key members of HASTAC, Mandy Dailey (HASTAC Senior Program Director) and Nancy Kimberly (HASTAC Program Director and also my assistant).  They are taking the class to see what you are interested, your insights, your knowledge base and questions, and what you consider to be innovative so they can help bring some of your inspiration to our international network of networks.  HASTAC (www.hastac.org) was founded in 2002, and now has about 3800 members, including 130 graduate and some undergrad students, HASTAC Scholars, who blog about issues of importance in a digital world.  HASTAC is pronounced haystack and it is an acronym (of course) for Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory.  It is dedicated to three things that we think must be connected:  creative design, critical thinking, participatory learning.   That is, you shouldnt be designing new technologies without thinking about issues of impact and use and access and dividethats the critical thinking partand then, as educators, we pioneer different ways of learning that arent based on IT (Instructional Technology) but are based on the new interconnected, interrelated, international ways that we can think as an iterative process, interactively, and in a way where knowledge is interconnected and constantly changing.  How does that change what a college classroom looks like and how it functions.  ISIS was the local predecessor; HASTAC is the international organization that grew out of ISIS.  And This Is Your Brain on the Internet is the example.

One final thing:  if you didnt know it before, you should know that you are taking a famous course.  Its been written about, blogged about, applauded and condemned.  We will be watched this semester.  In fact, Ill be reblogging a lot of what I write on this internal blog on the external blog on the HASTAC site.   So will you.  This internal blog will be for just our class.  But well also be reporting on what we do to the public at large on www.hastag.org using the tag ISIS 120

So thats it.  See you in a couple of hours!