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At First Glance--And Later On

11/17/2004

By Terry Calhoun

The students explored themes of "peace in an unpeaceful world," and six of the eleven have permitted their projects to be available along with the professor's class materials on the OCW Web site--as PDF documents.

The class syllabus is simple. A description of the intent of the class, a single text assignment to a 20-year-old book, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, a note about grading, a note about enrollment limitations, and a note about a studio fee required of enrollees. The class calendar lists "sessions," many of which are "computer studio," "design," "critique," and so forth. The assignments page has more depth, linking to PDF documents of "problem sets" assigned to students, along with a notation of when they were assigned.

"Problem Set 2," sends the students out with a digital camera and a list of images they are to locate and capture. At the same time, related "Storytelling Notes" list a number of films such as "Fallen Angels," directed by Wong Kar-Wai--and a list of features to be noted during each film. It is difficult to tell if the films were screened in class or assigned out of class.

"Problem Set 4/5" requires the design and production of several assignments, all relating to a fictional campaign for the MIT student body government on the part of the student. For example: "PRINT: Design one 8.5" by 11" poster for your campaign for a specific UA office. You can use monochrome type in any manner you wish--stretch it, torture it, adore it."

One example of a student project is titled "Butterflies of War," and uses a nature scene with digitally modified Sherman tanks as "tank butterflies" engaged in a battle. The student found a great deal of meaning in the ludicrous notion of butterflies fighting wars. Another's, "The Suh State," makes an analogy--visually--between the Stalinist authoritarian state and MIT's campus, by staging a series of political campaign photographs in such a way as to emphasize the most drab, least humanistic views of MIT that the student could find.

So, completing the loop . . . after I made my graduate school decision and attended the University of Michigan, I frequently wondered--at first, until I learned otherwise--whether faculty compared class syllabi or collaborated on them. Over time, I learned that for many research-oriented faculty, very little time was spent in doing anything with the curriculum, much less comparing content and creative ideas with others.

MIT reports that many others are using and comparing curricula through OCW, with favorable results. Huge amounts of the content are being translated into Spanish, Portugese, Chinese, and more. The next OCW initiative is to encourage faculty from other institutions to publish their courses within OCW. Once that starts happening with regularity, the synergy of faculty being able to look at and compare, and collect the most appropriate parts from various courses, should have a hugely positive effect on teaching and learning.

Frankly, I don't know who on any given campus would be the person to decide to cooperate or not, as an institution, but if you know who that is on your campus I urge you to at least suggest this possibility to them. And if not, well, then you can do a lot of learning about IT yourself--for free!

About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.

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