"Your Brain on the Internet" Course Description for S 2011

(With advance apologies for odd spacing errors and typos that come when Word interfaces with Drupal; who needs an apostrophe anyway, right?):

English 173S, ISIS 120S:  "This Is Your Brain on the Internet"

Spring 2011 MW 1140-1255

Smith Warehouse, Humanities Lab, Bay 5, First Floor

DESCRIPTION:

This is Your Brain on the Internet is an experimental, innovative, adventurous, non-traditional, multidisciplinary, student-led, contract- and peer-evaluated course open to any student fascinated by how we come to know the world and how we may or may not know the world differently in the Information Age.  It is not for the faint of heart.  You will be reading and watching creatively and critically, both practical and theoretical works.  You yourself will be writing and also creating multimedia collaborative projects (in lieu of traditional midterms and finals). If you are not up for what John Seely Brown calls thinkering (thinking while doing, project-based thinking, evolving and progressive  creative production), this is not a course for you.

Our quest in this course will be to explore many different, quirky, eccentric, and exceptional models of mind in order to force ourselves to think, together, about what models best suit our digital, interactive, collaborative age.  Although we are in a great era of neuroscience and are learning more and more about our mental processing, what we do not know about how our brain works is infinitely more vast than what we know.  Thus we make models to try to explain ourselves to ourselves.  Every era (and the present is no exception) and every culture imagines its own models of mind.  In the scientific method, this hypothesis then both shapes experiments and data collection and uses experimental findings and the data collected to test, refine, or (sometimes) refute the hypothesis.   In literature and film, new models of mind are being explored all the time.

We will be thinking together about how we know the world, how we think, and how we think about thinking as individuals, as groups, as a culture, as subcultures, in a historical moment, as mediated by and through technology.  The readings and filmings range across all fields.  Well be going to art and science installations, visiting artist galleries and workshops, listening to and watching live performance, visiting science labs, and traveling to lots of virtual sites.  The two cultures paradigm does not exist in this course, except to be interrogated and historicized and deconstructed.   

Grades will be contract-based and peer-evaluated.   In what is one of the most famous blogs in recent pedagogical history, How to Crowdsource Grading, I described this method: http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/how-crowdsource-grading     Lots of people watch this course.  And some part of all we do will be on a public blog, some other part will be private for our class only.   Assignments consist of:  (1) readings, viewings, field trips.  I will set the first weeks assignment and suggest others but the syllabus will evolve collaboratively;  (2) weekly blogs in response to all class presentations (and comments on one anothers blogs); (3) a collaborative class presentation and then (4) requirement to peer evaluate all that weeks blogs on your presentation, including feedback on how to make an unsatisfactory post satisfactory; (5) two contributions to public knowledge; (6) a final, collaborative multimedia project.  A note on contract, peer-reviewed grading:  Detailed contracts will be passed out the first day of class.  Students and the professor will sign these. Contracts are serious. Failure to meet any of the terms of the contract results in a full point automatic grade deduction for the course.  How we evaluate, give feedback, and learn from feedback is part of Your Brain on the Internet.

First assignment sequence:  Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; film Screening:  The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, dr. artist and film director, Julian Schnabel;Interview with Schnabel: Brain-Computer Interface entry in Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93computer_interface; Brain Wave of the Future, The Washington Post, http://www.scribd.com/doc/14572490/Brain-Wave-of-the-Future-Brain-Computer-Interface;  field trip to one of the neuroscience labs on campus.