For Monday Jan 28

1. Picking up the pieces. We lost some data, namely the list of presentations. Did anyone write down the complete list?

About McLuhan: So our ongoing question will be: What has McLuhan got to do with curriculum?

Introducing McLuhan
Initial thoughts

In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan predicted that education would be transformed as society embraced what he called variously “electric technologies”, electronic technologies, or media. His arguments were both provocative and controversial. He became a celebrity. Some thought him a genius; others a charlatan. His most famous statement was the provocative “the medium is the message.”

After his death in 1980, his ideas seemed to vanish quickly. But somewhere around the beginning of the 21st century, people began to look back and to realize that his predictions and theories were coming true. Contemporary technologies were indeed having a critical impact on contemporary schooling and contemporary education.

Sir Ken Robinson said that we have no idea what we are teaching kids for. The future, he says, is just too unknown. His answer: We need to encourage creativity. McLuhan’s answer: Teaching about technology is the only way we can avoid being pulled down by the vortex of commercialism, hype, globalization.

We are living in a world of empire, but it is a new and different empire, but an empire nontheless. It is not the destructive empires such as the Roman or Spanish or Soviet or Russian empires, nor a benign empire such as the British Empire. Today’s empire is global, run by technology and capitalism and commercialism. The empire we exist in is a subtle hidden empire. An empire is “characterized fundamentally by a lack of boundaries. Empire’s rule has no limits. The concept of empire posits a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality, a regime that rules over the entire civilized world. No territorial boundaries limit its reign.” (Hardt and Negri, 2000 quoted in Reynolds, Expanding Curriculum Theory (2004). McLuhan's global village concept is precisely a practical example of empire.

McLuhan and his Canadian colleagues argued that the growing information technologies would transform formal education.

The basic idea behind media theory is that communication media are not simply conduits for transmitting information. Instead the media themselves influence the meaning of a message and therefore the media shape our society. Therefore, the media ultimately shape our educational system. The medium is the message. We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.

McLuhan argued that all media do four things: They enhance a human function; they extend our senses. They make obsolete something that we used to use. They retrieve a function that we previously had lost. When pushed to the extreme they reverse into unintended functions.

We live in spaces. If our vision is highlighted, then we live in a visual space.
When audio is highlighted, we are in an acoustic space. Spaces were assumed to be based on our senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch.
Today, there seems to be a new electronic space. Or, digital space. Being thoughtful about digital space is sometimes dubbed digital citizenship.

McLuhan’s Wake is a 90 minute documentary film that explores McLuhan structured loosely through his “four laws”.

See an excellent review at http://www.dvdverdict.com/reviews/mcluhanswake.php

The resource guide for the film is available at
http://www.nfb.ca/webextension/mcluhanswake/resource.html

A really tough paper, which we will discuss in class eventually, can be found by googling “Household at the shore”. This paper appears in the Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies in 2006.The narrative part of the text is only three pages. After that, the language is poetry. Not sure if anyone who does not yet have a topic actually wants to present this, but take a look…

Jan 21 Class: Not a summary but some pointers

We are beginning to "collect" some necessary names and concepts.
These should become automatic in your thinking about curriculum:

Kliebard for his three metaphors of production, travel and growth.
Tyler for his four focusing questions from 1949.
Ben Peretz for her concept of Curriculum Potential.
Eisner and Vallance for their five approaches to curriculum: production, academic rationalism, etc.

I tried to survey curriculum design in one hour. Tyler's questions set the stage; Oliva's 16 step model is simply an expansion of Tyler. The ABCD objectives model (audience, behavior, conditions, degree) is a tylerian focus. Two other dimensions were left unfinished. In the next class, I will provide an overview of a postmodern approach by William Doll and a tongue-in-cheek examination of how curriculum texts are produced. Doll eschews a step by step approach and suggested four characteristics that need to be part of every curriculum. (More on that next week.)

The excerpt from Camelot is presented as an example of curriculum defined as the passing on of the heritage of the past. Also significant is the "postmodern" juxtaposition of King Arthur with Sir Thomas Mallory. Arthur lived in the fifth-sixth century; Malory died 1471. The content of the conversation between the two reaches across time. (Sounds like a TV episode of Medium.)

And finally, we began our exploration into Marshall McLuhan. The over-riding question here must be "What in the world does Marshall McLuhan have to do with curriculum theory?"
One answer, so far, is that he believed strongly that everything is interrelated. Obviously, curriculum, too. A second answer is in his definition of medium: extensions of man. Media are not merely machines and information technologies. Media means anything that extends our senses. Gloves, clothes, houses, ... and even curriculum.

Curriculum Potential and the Hydrogen 7

I have read all the submitted papers. They were thoughtful and well written. There was one thing, however that almost everyone missed. (though some comments sort of side-swiped the issue). My interest was triggered by the one student who said that the purpose of the commercial was to sell those BMWs. But no one went on line to see whether there really was a Hydrogen 7. There was or is. So, look at this:

http://www.autobloggreen.com/2006/09/12/bmw-officially-announces-the-bmw-hydrogen-7/

There is clearly a debate as to whether the Hydrogen 7 is truly ecologically friendly, or whether swe are barking up the wrong tree. On the other hand, notice that the critics sign only their name, not their credentials. Who are these guys. As it stands, this is no more than "talkback" or letters to the editors.

All of this has additional relevance to curriculum design and development. How do we know that we are teaching, as Robin Barrow asked, the right things?

Getting Ready for Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan is arguably the most important University of Manitoba alumnus. He spent his formative years in Winnipeg, attending elementary, secondary and post-secondary schools. He received both his Master's and has PhD here at the U of M.

And yet, we seem to ignore him. Or, at the very least he has been forgotten. Too bad.

McLuhan's contribution to curriculum design and curriculum theory is tenuous at best. Or is it? What a wonderful topic for a thesis, or practicum topic!

What McLuhan said was that there are four laws the govern how media/technology influence us. They happen all at once in a kind of a tetrad. In order to understand our global world, we need to ask these four questions simultaneously. They are:

• What does the technology enhance?
• What does the technology obsolesce?
• What does the technology retrieve (that we have lost)?
• When pushed to the extreme, what does the technology reverse into?

We are going to explore McLuhan's real or virtual or imagined contribution to curriculum. It will take us on a journey (Remember Kliebard?). At the very least it will be a challenging journey, perhaps even "going where no one has gone before. (Those lines come from Star Trek)" The original narration of that 1966 series was

Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its 5-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Later, when it was determiend that the phrase was sexist, the final line was changed to "where no one has gone before.

Our purpose here is to set the stage for an analysis of McLuhan and curriculum. our mission will not be a five year one, only three months. And perhaps we are not exploring the final frontier. On the other hand, we could be breaking new ground, as we explore...Curriculum and McLuhan.

The following excerpt, found on an online blog relates mcLuhan to curriculum:

Eric McLuhan, “The new media won’t fit into the classroom”
I had the pleasure of sitting down and reading the Walrus Magazine this evening. There was a rather unflattering article on The McLuhan International Festival of the Future held recently in Toronto. This piece at the end of the article really caught my attention:

As the last few intellectual thrusts of "Probing McLuhan" wound down, a figure rose from the crowd and said a few words. The voice was eerily reminiscent of the Master, as was the rhetoric. It was Eric McLuhan. "The new media won’t fit into the classroom", he told the audience. "It already surrounds it. Perhaps that is the challenge of the counterculture. The problem is to know what questions to ask."
For the first time that afternoon there was silence, and it spoke volumes.

All of the action is outside the classroom - blogs, wikis, IM, podcasting - you name it. Soon, the only place to get away from media will be inside the classroom. Hey, they don’t even have a telephone (c. 1876) in every classroom yet.
( found at http://www.jarche.com/node/view/475).

As they say on TV, stay tuned for more...

Access Class Blogs here...

In the last class we set up blogs for the assigment requiring each student to interact with the content and the ideas of each class period. Please post your blog address here as a comment.

Class Two: January 14

Class Two began with the question what is curriculum. Using the document reader, each individual presented a brief definition of what curriculum meant to them. A follow up looked a curriculum from the perspective of three metaphors presented by Kliebard: production, growth and travel. Each metaphor was found to have both strengths and problems. It was noted that while most class participants felt that their preferred metaphor was travel or growth, the official curriculum documents clearly follow the production metaphor. This disconnect provides a gap in which this course will need to explore.

A half hour break took the entire class to the computer lab (Rm 328) where everyone set up a blog. The purpose of a blog or web log is to be a kind of diary. In this course, each student is asked to keep a running blog in which individuals can interact with the content of the classes.

The final portion of the class looked at the concept of curriculum potential, a term posited by Mirriam Ben-Peretz. Her complete paper is available on JSTOR, accessible through the University of Manitoba.

In class we previewed a 60 second "commercial" titled "Hydrogen 7". (It can be accessed by doing a google search for the words Bezos and Ted. the commercial appears at the tail end of a 20 minute lecture titled "After the gold rush, there's innovation.") Don't watch the lecture; cut to the commercial starting at minute 18:00. Your task: write a one page exploration of the "curriculum potential" you see inherent in the commercial.

The argument behind the concept of curriculum potential is clearly stated by Ben-Peretz. She says that while "curriculum is the embodiment of the developers' intentions", that once the materials have left the developers hand's, they may be interpreted and used in many ways."

So what exactly is curriculum potential? I leave it to you to tease out its meaning based on the Ben-Peretz paper.

For those of you with a technology focus, there is an interesting connection to what is called learning objects. Learning objects are small units of learning, usually technologically available, that are re-useable, re-purposable, tagged, and readily available. They are the building blocks of instruction, therefore, at a wider level, the basic building blocks of curriculum.

Summary of keywords from this class:
Kliebard, curriculum metaphors, blogger, blog, Ben-Peretz, Curriculum potential, curriculum, learning object.

Class One: January 7

The opening class focused on an extended example of the Christmas Canon. Christmas as such is not a part of the formal curriculum (or is it?) And yet, it is one of the very few days in the Canadian year in which everything is closed down. The only other such day is New Year's Day. All others seem to be susceptible to political and commercial influence.

So what is special about Christmas? Is there a canon a "representative works" in music that exists. What is the "story" underlying that canon.

This demonstration illustrates that there are in fact many "stories", many legends, many songs, many practices. Christmas becomes a postmodern phenomenon that transcends any initial canonical discussion. Issues of audience, power, and genealogy are all part of the discussion.

Ultimately, this is a metaphor for curriculum itself as we move beyond a specific story into the broad world of education, curriculum and society.

*****

Day One also introduced the course outline and set the stage for what is to follow.

Welcome to EDUB7560

This is the official course blog for EDUB 7560 Theory and Practice of Curriculum Design.

The course runs from January to March 2008.