Ryan

I don’t buy the justification that the number of pages of reading each week has a direct correlation with the amount of thinking that needs to get done to apprehend the basic ideas. Survey course or not, I’m sticking by my prediction that your undergrad students will balk specifically at the amount of reading for the syllabus as written.

Yet on the other hand, I’m a big fan of teaching to higher expectations and letting the class ramp up to meet them. I’ll be watching this blog to see how the course turns out.

Something else I need to keep in mind is that undergrad classes tend to meet in multiple day sessions, not single seminar sessions, so that would diffuse the assignments somewhat by allowing two sessions for discussion and thought each week. It would give the class the opportunity to see where the instructor is thinking on the class lesson for the first session, and over the break revisit the materials (yeah, I know, ‘revisit’ is optimistic) or at least think about the subject in a more guided nature. In that framework I could see the full courseload working.

Either way it’ll be interesting to see how things go.

As I note in a more recent post, I’m continually surprised by how little graduate students expect to read (and do) in our program. Granted, it is a professional, far more than academic, program, but my reading lists for ICM courses remain at about a third of the length of my communication (academic) seminars at Buffalo. They are about equivalent to those in the professional program I taught in.

In many of the courses in my own graduate program, we were expected to read one or two books a week. Of course, the standard load when I was a grad student was between two and three courses a semester, and it was strongly recommended that you not take on part time work while a graduate student. Those who did work part time generally took only a course or two each semester.

I’m deliberately staying away from “soft” science fiction (with regard to fantasy elements), though some of these issues are already covered. Some of the New Battlestar Galactica might be worth including, though I’m not sure many of the elements there are not better explored in earlier work. E.g., although Dune is one of my favorite books, I think with the combo of Sterling’s Shaper/Mechanist stories, and with Atwood’s genetic stuff, we get a better run at some of those questions.

The breadth is there for an obvious reason: it’s a 101 survey course. Just as poli sci 101 covers everything from social contract to elections, we’re doing a pretty broad look at cyberculture and its discontents.

An interesting thought occurs to me with your use of the phrase “post human”. I think there’s an underlying philosophy being begged there that humanity is somehow separate from or distinct from nature itself. Therefore we have this philosophical dichotomy where anything produced by living beings aside from humans gets called “natural” whereas anything that we human animals produce gets considered as an imposition on nature. I’m in favor of viewing humans as the animals we are, and technology as being one of our evolutionary advantages. As such, everything we humans produce is a product of humanity AND part of nature, from the asphalt of our roads to the nuclear waste products from our power plants. All natural, just processed by humanity. Technology, cyberpunk, and cyberculture are all just as human as the Middle Ages were. Just different technology. So to my way of thinking, we’ll never be “Post Human”. We may create monsters, but they’ll be built in our own image, and just like with other technological disasters in the past (the Hindenberg, Chernobyl, the Titanic, New Orleans levees, etc) we react with horror and (hopefully!) build a better mousetrap.

Oh, and you lose major points by not including the remake of Battlestar Galactica (does it get any more cybercultural than that?) in the cyborg unit. And where’s Asimov’s ‘four laws’ from the I, Robot series? Or reference to Dune and the prohibitions against thinking machines? Just sayin’. The cyberculture has its Cassandras as well.

But yeah, this looks like a hell of a course. A graduate course.