Welcome

• Welcome
• Schedule
• Discussion post guidelines
• Browser recomendations

Welcome!

Welcome to Technology and Social Change. I'm Jim Nielson and I'll be your instructor. I'm the person who will mark your work, and I'm also the author of the lessons you will read. I like to be called Dr. Jim. I really wanted to be a DJ, but it was too much work.

Quick Start Guide

• You will read a new lesson each week
• Almost every week you will be writing a discussion post on the week's lesson; you will also be replying to other people's discussion posts
• Your post is due on FRIDAY night at the latest; your replies are due on MONDAY night at the latest
• There will be a multiple choice quiz online every couple of weeks and a multiple choice test and final.
• There is nothing due this first week, but you should familiarize yourself with the course and read the first lesson.

There isn't really any quick start guide. This course involves a lot of focused reading. This welcome message, the schedule of lessons and assessments, and the notes on discusssion posts should clarify many of the expectations around the successful completion of this course.

Please read this entire page carefully, and perhaps even print it out and make some notes. It lays out many important points about how the class works and your responsibilities.

This is an asynchronous online course. There will be no lectures, and few or no synchronous sessions. Long before the pandemic lockdown, this course was designed as an entirely online class, and I will be teaching it that way again this semester. I can make myself available for office hours in MS Teams if needed, but we will mainly be interacting through Blackboard discussion forums. I think most of you will find that this creates an excellent, stimulating, and surprisingly meaningful learning experience!

Overview

The course is about how changing technologies influence human behaviour and social interaction, and how technology can actually have a shaping effect on "human nature" as such. Technology doesn't just mean today's electronic advances, but everything humans have done to extend our reach into and impact on the world (for better or worse), from agriculture and the invention of the wheel to Artificial Intelligence. The focus in this course, however, is the last couple of hundred years.

Broadly speaking, the first half looks at some of the technological changes that have arisen since the Middle Ages, and how the technological breakthroughs of the Industrial Revolution and the current "Information Age" have helped shape who we are today in the Western world. We will look at the mechanization of work, the rise of ever more realistic and seductive virtual realities, technologies of war and surveillance, and how politics and the democratic process may or may not change because of technological opportunities and pressures.

Following the midterm, we will be taking a closer look at how our current digital and network technologies may be changing human life - in particular, social interaction, our sense of self, morality, and what it means to be a human being. We'll look at changes to our understanding of intellience and knowledge; we'll watch documentaries about people who spend significant amounts of their time in virtual worlds like Second Life and multiplayer games; we'll explore new moral questions that only arise when we have multiple, virtual social personas; we'll question the meaning of human identity itself; we'll examine love and sex in the networked world; and we'll take a peek at the possibility of greater than human intelligence emerging in the near future, perhaps taking humans into a new form of existence that we can only guess about at present.

Prepare for some slight weirdness. There are two sites you need to be aware of.

1. soci3005.com The lessons and instructions for assignments will be found at soci3005.com. You are there now. ("Be here now.") You can think of this as the "textbook."

The weekly lessons are chapter-length, and though some can be a challenge for those not used to focused reading, people generally find them stimulating and ultimately digestible. They are lighly illustrated, and make use of vidoes, diagrams and charts where visual learning seems appropriate. Most of the lessons include at least one or two videos, but they are mostly like (longish) web articles. You should put aside a couple of hours each week for undistracted reading of the lesson. If you're not used to focused reading, you may want to get software to read the lessons to you. I don't recommend using ChatGPT to summarize them. A lot of the meaning comes in the telling.

2. Blackboard Instructor announcements, discussion boards, quizzes, and exams are handled in the Blackboard site. There are links in the Blackboard site to the lessons and schedule on soci3005.com.

Readings

The readings you are held responsible for are my lessons. Suggested additional readings are available on the web or as downloadable PDFs. These are linked to from the right-hand sidebar for each lesson. You are expected to read carefully and without distraction each lesson before or during the week it is assigned to. Then you are asked to think about the ideas in the lesson, and then to respond to them. That is the "class," and at least the amount of time you would spend in a lecture should be devoted to it each week.

Exercises and assessments

Your mark in the course is based on three kinds of exercises and assessments: (1) quizzes on the information in the lessons, (2) discussion posts, and (3) exams.

Basically, after this first week, you have discussion posts due every week, except for the week of the midterm exam. Every second week, more or less, there will be an online quiz covering the previous two weeks. There is a midterm - multiple choice - and a final - multiple choice and a final discussion post where you need to show you have understood something specific for full marks.

The discussion posts are worth 40% of your mark. The quizzes are 20%. The exams are 20% each. The discussion posts (and the lessons, of course) are the core of the course.

You will get full marks for the discussion posts as long as you make them on time and follow the instructions. The quizzes and exams are marked to assess your accurate knowledge and understanding of the material I've presented. Quizzes and multiple choice exams are marked in an automated way by Blackboard.

You may want to take a look at the Schedule of Lessons and Assessments now, and then I will continue here with a few more words about the discussion posts.

Discussion Posts

The discussion posts are meant to replace classroom discussion and aid in study and enriching all of our understanding. Each week you are expected to write a medium-length (usually 250-750 words) response to the week's lesson by midnight on Friday night, and then you should go back and read all the posts by your colleagues for that week and respond to two of them by Monday night at midnight.

Do not use ChatGPT. If your post is full of generalities and vague statements and sounds like it was written by a chatbot you will not get credit. Misspell some words, mess up the grammar, say something only a flawed human would say. Let me hear your voice. Focus on my lesson and what YOU thought. I want to hear that I've been understood.

Don't plagiarize - not from Internet sources, not from my lessons, not from each other. I’m not marking you on grammar, English, or whether or not you agree with everything I’ve said. I’m marking you on whether YOU have made an attempt to understand and think about the lesson. If you quote from something, don’t worry about proper referencing, but please show where it came from, so that one could track it down with an Internet search. Quoting is an art form and a kind of creation, where “Old words are reborn with new faces,” as Criss Jami said in Killosophy. (For instance.)

You will get the full two marks for your own post as long as it is clear that you have read the lesson for the week you are responding to. You can say anything you want about it! You can ask a question about something you had difficulty understanding, make a comment or criticism, add to what is said in the lesson, and so forth. Do not just write something about what you think the lesson is about without having read it, though. You will want to mention ideas from the lesson explicitly, to be sure it is clear that you read and thought about it ...

You will get 1 mark for each of your two responses to other student posts. You can ask them a question, raise another point, agree or disagree with what your colleague has written. Do not just write something like "It's so true! LOL." You should be continuing a conversation with the author of the post you are commenting on, not just saying something vague or thanking them. Further guidelines and some examples from previous semesters will be found under the Discussion Posts tab.

What you should do for this class each week

1. Read the lesson, before Friday night.

2. Share your first thoughts/questions/ideas about the lesson in a discussion post by 11:59 pm on Friday night. (Posts tend to be between 250 and 750 words. Take a look at the examples in the Discussions tab. Occasionally people are inspired to write even more than 1000 words. That's fine!) (2 marks)

3. Read your colleagues' posts on the lesson and respond to two of them by 11:59pm on Monday night. (1+1 = 2 marks)

Each week I will be reading through the discussion responses from the previous week and commenting on some of them in the forum. I will also, as time permits, draw attention in a Blackboard announcement to any of the posts I thought were particularly worthy of comment or attention. I will generally provide any feedback directly within the discussion board; I am one more participant in the discussions. If I don't respond to a post you made, it doesn't mean anything one way or another.

This is another reason that I strongly suggest that you do your work in the class before the dropdead due date. You should ensure that your browser works fully with Blackboard and contact support if it doesn't. There is a sample quiz under Assessments that you can use to test your brower before you take the first quiz for marks. You will find advice about ensuring that your browser works with all components of Blackboard under the Browser Recommendations tab. These are specifically about making sure your browser deals well with Blackboard Collaborate (the synchronous video conferencing component that we will be using very little in this class), but following the advice should ensure that you don't have other problems with the quizzes and discussion board.

So one last time, as a piece of unsolicited advice (for this course and school in general), you don't have to wait until the last minute to do your posts and quizzes. I always recommend that people "backdate" their due dates on all their schoolwork by at least two days, so that they are not doing them at the last possible moment. Embrace the peace of mind that being proactive can bring.

If you know you are not going to be able to complete something on time, please contact me ahead of time, and we may be able to come up with alternative work for you to do. Don't just miss assignments and then do them at the end of term hoping I will accept them late. If you haven't discussed it with me, I won't.

Contacting me

I do my best to respond very promptly, so if you have a problem, question, or concern please send me an email. Please send me a real email at james.nielson@humber.ca if you can. I will receive this immediately on my phone, whereas Blackboard messages I will only see and respond to when I have time.

I genuinely look forward to collaborating on this class with you, and I expect to learn a great deal from you! Hopefully you'll learn something worthwhile from me as well. Good luck, and welcome aboard!

Wellness.
Dr Jim

Not sure what to do next? Read the intro lesson.

Or just watch this inspirational video that picks up on the theme of our slavery to the technology that is highlighted in the intro lesson, the mechanical clock: