[Themaintainers] readings for a 100-level course on maintenance?

[Yvonne Lam]

My first thought was Ursula Franklin's The Real World of Technology, which
I found through Deb Chachra's Why I Am Not A Maker (
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/why-i-am-not-a-maker/384767/
).


On Sun, Nov 19, 2017 at 5:15 PM, Andrew Russell <arussell at arussell.org>
wrote:

> Hi everyone -
>
> Help!
>
> In Spring 18 I’ll be teaching a 100-level course on Science, Technology,
> and Human Values, offered by my college's program in Interdisciplinary
> Studies.  We treat the course as a special topics course: in past semesters
> faculty have focused on themes of food & public health, but in Spring 18
> I’m organizing the course around innovation and maintenance.  I’ll have no
> more than 24 students, maybe as few as a dozen, and I expect that all will
> be taking it because it satisfies a general education humanities
> requirement.  I’m guessing a good chunk of the students will be computer
> science majors. A small but significant detail is that courses on my campus
> are 4 credits, which means class runs twice weekly for 1 hour & 50 minutes.
>
> My questions for you all have to do with readings, assignments, projects,
> and so on.  I’ve got some ideas, but I’m hoping you can help me with a few
> things.  My provisional semester outline starts by tracing some history of
> “innovation”; then turn to readings on maintenance (drawing heavily from
> the Maintainers conference papers); perhaps assign the book “Shop Class as
> Soulcraft”; and spend significant time on group projects that will be
> ethnographies of maintenance (inspired by Henke’s “Mechanics of Workplace
> Order").
>
> Questions:
>
> First, have you or anyone you know taught a course with these themes?
> Clearly there are many STHV syllabi out there, and those are helpful, but
> it’s the innovation/maintenance angle where I need the most help.  I know
> there is a genre of “innovation studies” courses that I plan to explore,
> although I don’t have high expectations (to be honest).  I’d be curious to
> see syllabi recommended by this group.
>
> Second, do you have any readings/materials (books, essays, movies, etc)
> that you would recommend?  In some ways I think a 100-level non-majors
> course could be trickier than a advanced undergrad seminar or graduate
> course, and I want to make sure the readings are engaging and the projects
> are meaningful.  Rigor is important, of course, but I’m not overly
> concerned with teaching theory or methods in any particular field.
>
> I’ll be really happy to hear any suggestions, and I’ll share the syllabus
> once I’ve got it nailed down…
>
> Thanks!
>
> Andy
> _______________________________________________
> Themaintainers mailing list
> Themaintainers at lists.stevens.edu
> https://lists.stevens.edu/mailman/listinfo/themaintainers
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.stevens.edu/mailman/private/themaintainers/attachments/20171119/5aea3e89/attachment.html>