HSCI 3714 -- Changes

Wed Nov 4 12:07:05 2009

Effective Term: New:  1109 - Fall 2010
Old:  1089 - Fall 2008
Max-Min Credits
for Course:
New:  4.0 to 3.0 credit(s)
Old:  4.0 to 4.0 credit(s)
Years most
frequently offered:
New:  Every academic year
Old:   Other frequency
Academic
Progress Units:
New:  Not allowed to bypass limits.
3.0 credit(s)
Old:  Not allowed to bypass limits.
4.0 credit(s)
Financial Aid
Progress Units:
New:  Not allowed to bypass limits.
3.0 credit(s)
Old:  Not allowed to bypass limits.
4.0 credit(s)
Proposal Changes: New:  Change long and short titles of course for Fall 2006.
Fall 2010
 CORE: Historical Perspecitves
 THEME: Technology and Society
Old:  Change long and short titles of course for Fall 2006.
Faculty
Sponsor Name:
New:  Jennifer K. Alexander
Old:  Staff
Faculty
Sponsor E-mail Address:
New:  alexa056@umn.edu
Old:  
Student Learning Outcomes: * Student in the course:

- Can identify, define, and solve problems

New:

Please explain briefly how this outcome will be addressed in the course. Give brief examples of class work related to the outcome.

You will learn to identify, define, and solve problems by learning to look beyond immediately apparent explanations. By analyzing the history of how some technologies were developed and adopted, while others were not, you will learn that a technology¿s technical features are not the only explanation of why it was desirable or why it was adopted. You will learn to identify other features of a situation that may be involved, and develop criteria for deciding which features are the critical ones that require further investigation.

How will you assess the students' learning related to this outcome? Give brief examples of how class work related to the outcome will be evaluated.

For example, students will be asked to identify possible problems in their use of primary source materials in their term papers (HSci 1714 students) and in their research papers (HSci 3714 students), and their papers will be evaluated on their ability to solve these problems by using a variety of methods (discussed in sections and modeled in lecture) to evaluate the uses and limitations of their primary source materials.

Old: unselected


- Can locate and critically evaluate information

New:

Please explain briefly how this outcome will be addressed in the course. Give brief examples of class work related to the outcome.

You will learn to locate and critically evaluate information. By considering contradictory stories by apparently reputable sources, concerning the ancient engineer Hero of Alexandria and the early modern steam innovator James Watt, for example, you will learn to find different types of historical information, and to evaluate how authoritative and useful these different sources of information are.

How will you assess the students' learning related to this outcome? Give brief examples of how class work related to the outcome will be evaluated.

Students¿ location and evaluation of information will be assessed by how well they come to display a critical attitude toward information in discussions in lecture and in discussion sections. For example, during lectures on the role of monastic orders in developing water technologies in Medieval Europe, students will be asked to search for information on several authors quoted in lecture, and discuss how authoritative the opinions of those authors are. Students¿ term and research papers will also provide material for assessing how well they are learning to find and use information critically.

Old: unselected


- Can communicate effectively

New:

Please explain briefly how this outcome will be addressed in the course. Give brief examples of class work related to the outcome.

You will learn to communicate effectively by required participation in classroom discussions and by writing a short paper with multiple drafts reviewed both by your student peers and by your instructors. Paper topics will ask you to communicate arguments about how we may use our knowledge of technology¿s history to inform our opinions about technology in the present.

How will you assess the students' learning related to this outcome? Give brief examples of how class work related to the outcome will be evaluated.

How effectively students are learning to communicate will be assessed by the progress we see in their contributions to their weekly required discussion sections, and in their required in-class contributions to discussions during lecture hours. How well they are able to use the technical information they learn during technical workshops will also be assessed in their term and research papers, which require them to discuss the technical features of a technology, alongside the social and cultural contexts in which it was developed and used.

Old: unselected


- Understand the role of creativity, innovation, discovery, and expression across disciplines

New:

Please explain briefly how this outcome will be addressed in the course. Give brief examples of class work related to the outcome.

You will learn to understand the role of creativity, innovation, discovery and expression across disciplines by examining the many different disciplines that contributed to technological innovation and discovery, and by examining many examples of the surprising technological creativity of which people are capable. Examples of great technological creativity that we will discuss include the new engineering vision of Leonardo da Vinci, the remarkable inventiveness of monks who built water systems in medieval monasteries, and James Watt¿s ingenious solutions to patent restrictions that might have stopped him from developing a useful steam engine.

How will you assess the students' learning related to this outcome? Give brief examples of how class work related to the outcome will be evaluated.

Student learning will be assessed by their contributions to technical workshops, in which they are given the opportunity to try themselves to solve seemingly straight-forward technological questions. In general, students come to see that even apparently obvious technical solutions often require great creativity and innovation to make them actually work. How well students are coming to appreciate that the history of technology showcases human expression and doesn¿t just solve problems can be assessed in the types of essays they write on succeeding examinations in the course, as they shift from writing about technology as meeting needs and begin to write about technology as one of the ways people help to build the world around them.

Old: unselected


Requirement
this course fulfills:
New:  HIS - HIS Historical Perspectives
Old:  HP - HP Historical Perspective Core
Other requirement
this course fulfills:
New:  TS - TS Technology and Society
Old:  IP - IP International Perspective Theme
Criteria for
Core Courses:
Describe how the course meets the specific bullet points for the proposed core requirement. Give concrete and detailed examples for the course syllabus, detailed outline, laboratory material, student projects, or other instructional materials or method.

Core courses must meet the following requirements:

  • They explicitly help students understand what liberal education is, how the content and the substance of this course enhance a liberal education, and what this means for them as students and as citizens
  • They employ teaching and learning strategies that engage students with doing the work of the field, not just reading about it.
  • They include small group experiences (such as discussion sections or labs) and use writing as appropriate to the discipline to help students learn and reflect on their learning.
  • They do not (except in rare and clearly justified cases) have prerequisites beyond the University�s entrance requirements.
  • They are offered on a regular schedule.
  • They are taught by regular faculty or under exceptional circumstances by instructors on continuing appointments. Departments proposing instructors other than regular faculty must provide documentation of how such instructors will be trained and supervised to ensure consistency and continuity in courses.

New:
The study of history offers a vast laboratory of the past in which we can analyze and reflect on the wide variety of ways people have developed and responded to technologies.  It also considers the different ways people have explained technologies and technological development, how technology was linked to magic in some contexts, or how building and working with technology was given low social status in others.  The study of history allows us to see how explanations about technology, how it works and what its social, cultural, and political role should be, have changed over time. This means that the study of history is not just the study of the past, but also the awareness of how explanations of the past have themselves changed.  To be useful, knowledge of the past must do three things.  First, it must take into account the different contexts within which historical people acted; it must recognize the elements that made historical cases different from or similar to each other and the present.  Second, historical knowledge must take into account the methods by which we ourselves arrive at it; in other words, it must be methodologically self-aware.  Third, it must take into account its own history; historical knowledge, in other words, must take into account the way historical explanations have themselves been developed over time.  How people have used history to understand and explain their worlds has itself changed over time, just as scientific and technological knowledge has changed.  In this course, we use historical artifacts to examine how people, over time, created, understood, and used or rejected a variety of technologies.  Some of these artifacts are valuable and rare, or exist in places we cannot visit, so we encounter them on-line.  We examine prehistoric stone tools and communication systems through a virtual tour of the Caves of Lascaux (created by the French Ministry of Culture), interpret the fabulous paintings of the early Islamic technologist al-Jazari (made available on-line by the Muslim Heritage Association), and compare original drawings made by Renaissance engineer Agostino Ramelli with his published engravings (on a website developed by the Dibner Library of the History of Science).   We encounter other artifacts in translation:  ancient Greek texts on mechanics that were translated first into Arabic, then into Latin, and only recently into English, diaries of technological observations by Alfonso Cadamosto, voyager to Africa, and Matteo Ricci, Jesuit missionary to China; and the engineering notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci.  Documents and artifacts such as these, which were created during the time periods under study, are primary sources; they are evidence of what people were doing and thinking in their own times.  Primary sources are things from the past; each offers a ¿window into the past¿.  We also use a variety of secondary sources, which examine the technologies of the past but which were written more recently and thus do not offer direct evidence of what people were thinking and doing.  Instead, secondary sources offer reflection, analysis, and assessments of the past.  Secondary sources offer historical knowledge about the past; they do not show us the past.  We will read secondary studies describing how the monasteries of medieval Europe became surprisingly important to technological development; how European explorers of Africa, India, and Asia used their observations of technology to evaluate other cultures and how they often found Europeans to be lagging behind; and debating whether ecological disasters have their roots in a peculiarly medieval European and technological view of the world.  We will also read a novel illustrating the surprising roles of materials like women¿s hair and goat horns in building ancient war machines.  With all of these sources, both primary and secondary, we will discuss the contexts in which they were created and the contexts that they reflect, how it is that they have come to our attention and into our hands and before our eyes, how people have developed their own interpretations of historical events and episodes, and how those interpretations have themselves changed.  
Old:
This course is very much a part of liberal education.  It is now understood that technology (thought not acting autonomously) has had an important role in shaping our fundamental institutions and beliefs, including ideas of the good, the true, and the beautiful.  
This course encourages students  to enter different socio-technical frameworks and to appreciate ideas in their historical context. A primary means of achieving this goal is that of examining basic themes that appear in different forms in different cultures. Thus, notions of human freedom and democratic government arose where the mass of people were free (e.g. the peasants owned their own independent farms, as in Greece in the ages after Solon).  Similarly the coinage of standardized money, greatly encouraged economic individualism, but it also led (in varying degrees) to exploitation, and the democracy of Athens can be compared with the status society of ancient Egypt and the slave system of the Roman Empire.          Students are introduced to historical method and interpretation. Students read and discuss in recitation sections a number of key ideas. Technological developments (of Leonardo, Alberti, and others) are placed in their appropriate historical and social context, to introduce students to the complex interactions between technology and society.

INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES. This course treats the development of Western technology in the ancient near east and Greece and its transmission from Greece to Western Europe in the early modern period.  Thus Industrial Revolutions (of some sort) took place in Italy, France, and the Dutch Republic as well as Great Britain.
Criteria for
Theme Courses:
Describe how the course meets the specific bullet points for the proposed theme requirement. Give concrete and detailed examples for the course syllabus, detailed outline, laboratory material, student projects, or other instructional materials or methods.

Theme courses have the common goal of cultivating in students a number of habits of mind:
  • thinking ethically about important challenges facing our society and world;
  • reflecting on the shared sense of responsibility required to build and maintain community;
  • connecting knowledge and practice;
  • fostering a stronger sense of our roles as historical agents.


New:  Technology is an enormously important part of our daily lives and of the society in which we live, and in fact the University has identified the developing of innovative technologies as an essential part of its mission.  One way to become well-informed about technology is to study its history, and to evaluate critically how society has itself influenced technology by defining the context in which technologies were developed, choosing whether they were adopted or rejected, and determining how and under what limitations they were used.  The University¿s guidelines for courses meeting the Technology and Society Theme Requirement specify that such courses must help prepare students ¿to make sense of, evaluate, and respond to present and future technological changes that will shape their workplaces and their personal and public lives.¿  One issue that will confront the students of today is how they will reconcile the benefits of their technological way of life with its great costs.  This technological way of life offers great rewards in terms of longevity, health and comfort, and, because it frees many from daily toil to earn their bread, it allows the leisure that encourages cultural creativity and experiment.  But this way of life is also costly, in its demand for resources and energy.  By providing a systematic and historical examination of pre-industrial technologies, this course examines a broad range of perspectives on how particular technologies were developed, adopted, and used in societies very different from our own.  It examines ways of pre-industrial technological life that still pertain in many regions of the world and which are increasingly suggested as alternatives to the energy-intensive way of life of many in the wealthier parts of the globe.  Canal irrigation systems used in much of the rural Middle East, which have changed little in design since important innovations were made during the rise of Islam, provide an example of such a pre-industrial technology still in use. Religion offers another example. It remains a potent cultural and social force in the global world, and this course examines the different limitations placed on technology by Medieval Islam and by Medieval Christian Europe, and identifies trends in both cultures that are reflected in contemporary technological concerns.  The course culminates in an examination of early modern power technologies, including advanced waterwheels and early steam engines, which first established the criteria by which we now evaluate the usefulness and effectiveness of our own power machinery.  More generally, the course evaluates the development and use of technologies that have become so basic that many people no longer think of them as technologies at all:  technical drawing and the reproduction of technical drawings, which pointedly raise questions about the perspective both of the draftsperson or maker of the technology, and of its users or viewers; the concept of mechanical advantage, which was developed to account for the work of simple machines like the lever, the wedge, and the pulley and winch, and which anyone who has ever tried to rig up something in the garage or on the farm has made use of; and the physical concept of work itself, which was developed in the analysis of waterwheels and steam engines but which is so general and so powerful that it can be used to analyze almost anything that moves.  The course concludes by linking the physical concept of work to the developing concept of energy (the laws of energy were formulated in the 1850s, shortly after the conclusion of the time period of the course), and asks students to use the concept of work to analyze and evaluate the costs and benefits of the adoption of emerging steam technology.  In particular, students are asked to explain why they believe people took more than a hundred years fully to adopt a technology that seemed, technically, far superior to other alternatives.  This requires students to consider not only the scientific and theoretical understanding of work, but also to consider practical questions about the engineering and building of steam engines, and about who would pay for them, who would build them, and who didn¿t want them on their land or in their towns.  Throughout the course students are asked to consider these multiple perspectives, of the designers and makers of technology, of its users, and of others affected by it.  They are asked to reflect critically on the developing relationship between technical knowledge and skill, on the one hand, which is often specialized, and the demands and needs of the society, on the other, within which such knowledge and skill is put to use or perhaps rejected.  They are encouraged to develop criteria by which they will evaluate the technological choices that they will face themselves, criteria that can evaluate both technical claims that something works and is effective, and social and cultural claims about how a technology functions in the larger human world.
Old:  <no text provided>
Provisional
Syllabus:
Please provide a provisional syllabus for new courses and courses in which changes in content and/or description and/or credits are proposed that include the following information: course goals and description; format/structure of the course (proposed number of instructor contact hours per week, student workload effort per week, etc.); topics to be covered; scope and nature of assigned readings (texts, authors, frequency, amount per week); required course assignments; nature of any student projects; and how students will be evaluated.

The University policy on credits is found under Section 4A of "Standards for Semester Conversion" at http://www.fpd.finop.umn.edu/groups/senate/documents/policy/semestercon.html . Provisional course syllabus information will be retained in this system until new syllabus information is entered with the next major course modification, This provisional course syllabus information may not correspond to the course as offered in a particular semester.

New:     HSci 1714/3714.  From Stone Tools to Steam Engines:  
Technology and Western Civilization to 1750
Fall Semester 2009

4 credit hours
350 Anderson Hall MWF 1:25-2:15
NOTE:  The eight discussion sections meet one hour per week
at various locations, in addition to the common lecture meeting.
Students must register for and attend one particular discussion section.

Prof. Jennifer Alexander, Ph.D.
325D Mechanical Engineering
Office Hours:  10:00-11:00 a.m. Mondays and Wednesdays, or by appointment
612/626-7309; jalexand@me.umn.edu

Discussion sections are led by teaching assistants
TA offices:  125 Shepherd Labs.  
Office hours differ; check with TA

SYLLABUS CONTENTS

Section Title        Page

Course Description and Objectives        2
Course Format        2
Difference between HSci 1714 and HSci 3714        2
Liberal Education and        Core and Theme Requirements        3
        Historical Perspectives Core        3
        Technology and Society Theme        4
Learning Outcomes        5       
        Liberal Education Learning Outcomes        5       
        Historical Perspectives Learning Outcomes        7
        Technology and Society Theme Outcomes        9
Schedule of Lectures and Assignments        12
Readings        15
Grading        16
Examinations        17
1714 Students:  Term Paper        18
3714 Students:  Research Paper        19
Additional Notes For All Students        20
        Accommodations
        Scholastic Conduct
        Plagiarism and Citation of Other Authors
        Incompletes
Hints for Success
Flexibility
Office Hours and Appointments
COURSE DESCRIPTION AND OBJECTIVES

Technology is an enormous force in our society, and has become so important that in many ways it seems to have a life of its own.  This course uses historical case studies to help students realize that technology is not autonomous, but that it is a human activity, and that people and societies made choices about the technologies they developed and used.  It asks how technological differences between nations influenced their different courses of development, and why some societies seemed to advance while others did not.  We ask how technological choices can bring about consequences greater than people expected, and how we might use this knowledge in making our own technological choices.  In particular, we explore the historical background, development, and character of the most powerful technological systems the world has known, from pre-historic stone tool societies, through Egypt and the pyramids, ancient Greece and Rome, the explosion of Islam, and the dynamic and often violent technologies of medieval Europe.  These themes resonate today, especially in discussions of the conflict between developed and developing cultures.  Many peoples¿ attitudes toward technology, and the technologies many of them still use, can be best understood in the pre-industrial contexts discussed in this course.  Sample discussion topics include comparisons between technological development in slave-holding and in free societies; relationships between religious belief and technological development, especially the rise of Christianity and the rise of Islam; and the role of technology in the expansion of European power through overseas exploration and commerce. The overall objective of this course is to help students consider technology as a human and historical force, rather than simply a technical one.  The goal is to help students see that technological development results from human actions and human choices, and that they themselves are in a position to influence the future course of technology.  


COURSE FORMAT

This course uses lectures and in-class discussions, weekly small group meetings to discuss primary source materials, and technical workshops to develop understanding of the science and engineering involved in the technologies under consideration.  Students are required to attend all lectures, assigned discussion group meetings and technical workshop, and to do assigned weekly readings.  This is a four credit hour course; lecture meets three days each week, and discussion sections meet once each week.  

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN HSci 1714 AND HSci 3714

Students registered both in HSci 1714 and in HSci 3714 are required to attend all lectures, discussion section meetings, and technical workshops, and are required to take all three examinations.  The difference between HSci 1714 and HSci 3714 lies in the paper.  Students in HSci 1714 will write a short (5-6 pages) term paper on an assigned topic, including two drafts.  Students in HSci 3714 will write a longer research paper (10-12 pages) on the history of a technology of their choice, taken from the time period covered in the course.  The HSci 3714 research paper must be written in conference with the instructor, and students must also submit a paper proposal and a draft.  More details on both assignments appear later in the syllabus.  



LIBERAL EDUCATION AND
CORE AND THEME REQUIREMENTS

Liberal Education
This course fulfills requirements for Historical Perspectives (Core) and Technology and Society (Theme).  It is important that members of a democratic society be liberally educated and well-informed, because they are often called upon to make decisions about things beyond their own personal areas of expertise.  Members of a democratic society must learn to form opinions, and to express those opinions and thus help others form their own opinions in turn.  A liberal education gives people the tools to look beyond their own personal interests and personal knowledge to larger issues affecting the world in which we all live.  Technology has had an important role in shaping societies¿ fundamental institutions and peoples¿ differing beliefs about the world.  A fundamental understanding of the historical relationships between technologies and human cultures will help you develop an appreciation of the complexities of human society.

In your education and future career, you will become increasingly specialized -- you will develop particular skills and knowledge within a specialized field.  One of the goals of liberal education is to help teach you how to learn, by giving you skills that you can use as you become increasingly specialized in your studies and in your working career.  But such skills are not limited to single fields, because they will apply to many different areas -- not only in your studies but in your future decision making.  Liberal education helps you learn how to learn.  This ¿learning to learn¿ is critically important, but liberal education has another even larger goal:  to enable you to understand and evaluate the roles you and others play within society, and thus to understand how you might act for society¿s benefit.  Historical study provides you with a vast laboratory of the past, in which you can consider how people and technologies interacted in different contexts, toward different goals and with different results.  Historical study introduces you to the complex interactions of societies and technologies.  It helps you think about where you might find your own place in a complex world.

Historical Perspectives Core
The study of history offers a vast laboratory of the past in which we can analyze and reflect on the wide variety of ways people have developed and responded to technologies.  It also considers the different ways people have explained technologies and technological development, how technology was linked to magic in some contexts, or how building and working with technology was given low social status in others.  The study of history allows us to see how explanations about technology, how it works and what its social, cultural, and political role should be, have changed over time. This means that the study of history is not just the study of the past, but also the awareness of how explanations of the past have themselves changed.  To be useful, knowledge of the past must do three things.  First, it must take into account the different contexts within which historical people acted; it must recognize the elements that made historical cases different from or similar to each other and the present.  Second, historical knowledge must take into account the methods by which we ourselves arrive at it; in other words, it must be methodologically self-aware.  Third, it must take into account its own history; historical knowledge, in other words, must take into account the way historical explanations have themselves been developed over time.  How people have used history to understand and explain their worlds has itself changed over time, just as scientific and technological knowledge has changed.  In this course, we use historical artifacts to examine how people, over time, created, understood, and used or rejected a variety of technologies.  Some of these artifacts are valuable and rare, or exist in places we cannot visit, so we encounter them on-line.  We examine prehistoric stone tools and communication systems through a virtual tour of the Caves of Lascaux (created by the French Ministry of Culture), interpret the fabulous paintings of the early Islamic technologist al-Jazari (made available on-line by the Muslim Heritage Association), and compare original drawings made by Renaissance engineer Agostino Ramelli with his published engravings (on a website developed by the Dibner Library of the History of Science).   We encounter other artifacts in translation:  ancient Greek texts on mechanics that were translated first into Arabic, then into Latin, and only recently into English, diaries of technological observations by Alfonso Cadamosto, voyager to Africa, and Matteo Ricci, Jesuit missionary to China; and the engineering notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci.  Documents and artifacts such as these, which were created during the time periods under study, are primary sources; they are evidence of what people were doing and thinking in their own times.  Primary sources are things from the past; each offers a ¿window into the past¿.  We also use a variety of secondary sources, which examine the technologies of the past but which were written more recently and thus do not offer direct evidence of what people were thinking and doing.  Instead, secondary sources offer reflection, analysis, and assessments of the past.  Secondary sources offer historical knowledge about the past; they do not show us the past.  We will read secondary studies describing how the monasteries of medieval Europe became surprisingly important to technological development; how European explorers of Africa, India, and Asia used their observations of technology to evaluate other cultures and how they often found Europeans to be lagging behind; and debating whether ecological disasters have their roots in a peculiarly medieval European and technological view of the world.  We will also read a novel illustrating the surprising roles of materials like women¿s hair and goat horns in building ancient war machines.  With all of these sources, both primary and secondary, we will discuss the contexts in which they were created and the contexts that they reflect, how it is that they have come to our attention and into our hands and before our eyes, how people have developed their own interpretations of historical events and episodes, and how those interpretations have themselves changed.  

Technology and Society Theme
Technology is an enormously important part of our daily lives and of the society in which we live, and in fact the University has identified the developing of innovative technologies as an essential part of its mission.  One way to become well-informed about technology is to study its history, and to evaluate critically how society has itself influenced technology by defining the context in which technologies were developed, choosing whether they were adopted or rejected, and determining how and under what limitations they were used.  The University¿s guidelines for courses meeting the Technology and Society Theme Requirement specify that such courses must help prepare students ¿to make sense of, evaluate, and respond to present and future technological changes that will shape their workplaces and their personal and public lives.¿  One issue that will confront the students of today is how they will reconcile the benefits of their technological way of life with its great costs.  This technological way of life offers great rewards in terms of longevity, health and comfort, and, because it frees many from daily toil to earn their bread, it allows the leisure that encourages cultural creativity and experiment.  But this way of life is also costly, in its demand for resources and energy.  By providing a systematic and historical examination of pre-industrial technologies, this course examines a broad range of perspectives on how particular technologies were developed, adopted, and used in societies very different from our own.  It examines ways of pre-industrial technological life that still pertain in many regions of the world and which are increasingly suggested as alternatives to the energy-intensive way of life of many in the wealthier parts of the globe.  Canal irrigation systems used in much of the rural Middle East, which have changed little in design since important innovations were made during the rise of Islam, provide an example of such a pre-industrial technology still in use. Religion offers another example. It remains a potent cultural and social force in the global world, and this course examines the different limitations placed on technology by Medieval Islam and by Medieval Christian Europe, and identifies trends in both cultures that are reflected in contemporary technological concerns.  The course culminates in an examination of early modern power technologies, including advanced waterwheels and early steam engines, which first established the criteria by which we now evaluate the usefulness and effectiveness of our own power machinery.  More generally, the course evaluates the development and use of technologies that have become so basic that many people no longer think of them as technologies at all:  technical drawing and the reproduction of technical drawings, which pointedly raise questions about the perspective both of the draftsperson or maker of the technology, and of its users or viewers; the concept of mechanical advantage, which was developed to account for the work of simple machines like the lever, the wedge, and the pulley and winch, and which anyone who has ever tried to rig up something in the garage or on the farm has made use of; and the physical concept of work itself, which was developed in the analysis of waterwheels and steam engines but which is so general and so powerful that it can be used to analyze almost anything that moves.  The course concludes by linking the physical concept of work to the developing concept of energy (the laws of energy were formulated in the 1850s, shortly after the conclusion of the time period of the course), and asks students to use the concept of work to analyze and evaluate the costs and benefits of the adoption of emerging steam technology.  In particular, students are asked to explain why they believe people took more than a hundred years fully to adopt a technology that seemed, technically, far superior to other alternatives.  This requires students to consider not only the scientific and theoretical understanding of work, but also to consider practical questions about the engineering and building of steam engines, and about who would pay for them, who would build them, and who didn¿t want them on their land or in their towns.  Throughout the course students are asked to consider these multiple perspectives, of the designers and makers of technology, of its users, and of others affected by it.  They are asked to reflect critically on the developing relationship between technical knowledge and skill, on the one hand, which is often specialized, and the demands and needs of the society, on the other, within which such knowledge and skill is put to use or perhaps rejected.  They are encouraged to develop criteria by which they will evaluate the technological choices that they will face themselves, criteria that can evaluate both technical claims that something works and is effective, and social and cultural claims about how a technology functions in the larger human world.  

LEARNING OUTCOMES
The University has offered specific learning outcome goals for undergraduate education, which have guided my expectations for student learning in this course.  My learning expectations have also been influenced by the goals of the historical perspectives core and the technology and society theme.  Following are three sets of outcomes:  a general set of outcomes for the Liberal Education Requirements, and two more specific sets of outcomes, one for the Historical Perspectives Core requirement and the other for the Technology and Society Theme.

General Liberal Education Requirements Learning Outcomes
This is how we (the teaching assistants and I) will teach toward these learning outcome goals.  Communication skills will be modeled by the teaching assistants in discussion sections, and by the instructor in lecture/seminar, and you will be required to participate in discussion in both venues.  Your teaching assistant will record your participation in discussion sections, and when you make the required contribution to discussion in lecture, you will notify your teaching assistant so that your participation can be recorded.  If you find it difficult to speak in class, we will talk with you about it, and find a way to open the conversation to you ¿ perhaps by letting you ask a prepared question or make a prepared comment.  Lectures will model examples of how to identify, define, and solve historical problems, and teaching assistants will also provide such models involving the assigned texts and artifacts.  Lectures in particular will model how to locate and critically evaluate information, by using a variety of sources and illustrating how a historian makes use of them, and which ones s/he decides are useful and which not.  In lectures, discussion sections, and technical workshops we will offer you examples of the wide scope of human creativity, and give you the opportunity to try to solve technical problems yourself.  You will find that even things we now take for granted required considerable ingenuity to first develop.
Specific examples of how these outcomes will be taught follow.

You will learn to identify, define, and solve problems by learning to look beyond immediately apparent explanations.  By analyzing the history of how some technologies were developed and adopted, while others were not, you will learn that a technology¿s technical features are not the only explanation of why it was desirable or why it was adopted.  You will learn to identify other features of a situation that may be involved, and develop criteria for deciding which features are the critical ones that require further investigation.

You will learn to locate and critically evaluate information.  By considering contradictory stories by apparently reputable sources, concerning the ancient engineer Hero of Alexandria and the early modern steam innovator James Watt, for example, you will learn to find different types of historical information, and to evaluate how authoritative and useful these different sources of information are.  

You will learn to communicate effectively by required participation in classroom discussions and by writing a short paper with multiple drafts reviewed both by your student peers and by your instructors.  Paper topics will ask you to communicate arguments about how we may use our knowledge of technology¿s history to inform our opinions about technology in the present.

You will learn to understand the role of creativity, innovation, discovery and expression across disciplines by examining the many different disciplines that contributed to technological innovation and discovery, and by examining many examples of the surprising technological creativity of which people are capable.   Examples of great technological creativity that we will discuss include the new engineering vision of Leonardo da Vinci, the remarkable inventiveness of monks who built water systems in medieval monasteries, and James Watt¿s ingenious solutions to patent restrictions that might have stopped him from developing a useful steam engine.  

Evaluation of student¿s general liberal education learning outcomes
This is how we (the teaching assistants and I) will evaluate your progress towards these learning outcome goals.  We will keep track of your contributions to discussion in both the discussion sections and in lecture, and if you find it difficult to contribute we will find a way to open the conversation to you.  As the term progresses, your comments should begin to use the methods of identifying, defining, and solving historical problems that have been modeled in lecture and discussion section.  The first set of questions on the essay examinations (you will be asked to choose to answer one of two questions on the first part of the exam) will evaluate how you make use of provided material to identify, define, and solve historical problems on your own, by asking you to make an argument about the historical past or about historians¿ interpretations of it.  The second set of questions on the examinations (again, you will be asked to answer one of two essay questions on this second part) will ask you to evaluate the usefulness and authority of both the primary and secondary materials to which you have been introduced.  We will use your term papers (research papers, for 3714 students) to evaluate how you have learned to locate and critically evaluate information.  We will use technical workshops to evaluate how well you have come to understand the wide scope of human creativity and innovation that characterizes the history of technology, by giving you the opportunity to solve some technical problems yourselves.


Historical Perspectives Core Learning Outcomes
In this course, we (the teaching assistants and I) will teach toward specific learning outcomes identified by the University as central to developing a historical perspective.  We will examine the human past through primary readings, which you will discuss in discussion sections led by your teaching assistant; through secondary texts, which you will also discuss in sections; through lectures that model the complex work of making and evaluating historical arguments:  identifying historical issues, finding relevant sources for examining those issues, considering alternate methods of analysis and interpretation; and identifying specific and relevant historical contexts.  You are required to participate in discussion in both your discussion section and in lecture, and in both places we will begin by asking you to comment on how the questions we ask and the historical materials available to us influence our understanding of the past.  In your papers, both in the term paper for HSci 1714 students and in the research paper for 3714 students, you are required to discuss the specific historical context of the examples you use, to comment on the usefulness and authoritativeness of your sources of information, and to identify important methodological and conceptual issues involved.  Specific examples of how we will do this follow:

You will develop a historical perspective by examining the human past, and the beliefs about and practices of technology that have shaped the human experience over time, and how technology was experienced in different historical contexts.  You will be able to use this historical perspective in evaluating how current situations have been influenced by the past, and you will be able to use this perspective to consider the potential implications of current technological developments.  You will have learned to examine the context in which historical changes have occurred, and use that knowledge to examine the context of current situations in forming your own opinion about such situations and how you yourself might act.  You will learn to subject technology, and technological knowledge, to the same criteria you use to evaluate the potential benefits of other forms of action.

You will examine technology in specific historical contexts.  The contexts you will investigate include the importance of geographical and physical environments in early civilizations; the context of state authority and the developing tribute state in the monumental technologies that marked early irrigation civilizations; the context of religious belief and religious conflict that influenced technological developments in medieval Western Europe and under the Eastern Orthodox Church; and the new intellectual climate that influenced developing systematic technologies of the early modern period.  

You will learn to recognize the methods and conceptual frameworks with which scholars interpret primary sources and produce historical knowledge.  You will learn to critically assess issues such as the techniques used by archaeologists to date prehistoric and ancient tools; the role of translation in making it possible for you to read texts from ancient history, in particular the role of medieval Islam in preserving and translating ancient Greek and Roman technological and scientific texts; the disputed role of drawings and illustrations, and whether the copies and transcriptions of technical drawings available to us really do represent those actually used in the past; and how the activity of government agencies in collecting and preserving technological information (in patent offices, for example) may influence how we interpret technology¿s history.   

You will work with primary sources yourself.  Key to understanding technology¿s history is examining the primary materials that are available.  You will see re-enactments of the making of stone tools; examine early communications technologies during a virtual tour of the Caves of Lascaux; evaluate technological treatises written by Hero of Alexandria and Muslim engineer al-Jazari; examine the technical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, Villard de Honnecourt, and Agostino Ramelli; and read reports on Chinese technological ingenuity by European Jesuit missionaries.  You will learn to evaluate the uses and limitations of source materials, by asking what questions they can and cannot answer, and by examining how it was that such materials came into our hands -- perhaps through steps such as translation and editing, which may have influenced the form in which we encounter them.  

You will learn how the questions we ask and the sources available to us shape our knowledge of the past and our understanding of its significance.  We will examine how our historical knowledge cannot fully reflect technology¿s history, because it is limited by the resources available for study.  We will consider how the questions we ask about history reflect our own concerns, and how people have asked different questions at different times.

Evaluation of Student Learning Outcomes for Historical Perspectives
Your progress toward these learning outcomes will be assessed in several ways.  We will keep track of your contributions to discussion in both the discussion sections and in lecture, and if you find it difficult to contribute we will find a way to open the conversation to you.  As the term progresses, your comments should begin to use the methods of identifying, defining, and solving historical problems that have been modeled in lecture and discussion section.  The first set of questions on the essay examinations (you will be asked to choose to answer one of two questions on the first part of the exam) will evaluate how you make use of provided material to identify, define, and solve historical problems on your own, by asking you to make an argument about the historical past or about historians¿ interpretations of it.  The second set of questions on the examinations (again, you will be asked to answer one of two essay questions on this second part) will ask you to evaluate the usefulness and authority of both the primary and secondary materials to which you have been introduced.  We will use your term papers (research papers, for 3714 students) to evaluate how you have learned to locate and critically evaluate information.  We will use technical workshops to evaluate how well you have come to understand the wide scope of human creativity and innovation that characterizes the history of technology, by giving you the opportunity to solve some technical problems yourselves.  Your papers and your examinations will be evaluated based on how you develop arguments about the historical past, with the best arguments taking into account the specific historical contexts at issue, the limitations of your source materials, the methods and conceptual frameworks that produced the knowledge you are using, and how the questions you ask and the sources available to you have shaped your own interpretation.  

Technology and Society Theme Learning Outcomes
In this course, we (the teaching assistants and I) will teach toward specific learning outcomes identified by the University as necessary to fulfilling the technology and society theme.  Many of the lectures and readings will concern technologies that have had a measurable impact on our current society; other readings and lectures will concern technologies that had a significant impact on other societies.  Lectures will identify a particular technology as a central example; discuss its technical features and how it works; identify ways in which the society in which it was developed and used (or rejected) influenced that very design and use (or, again, that rejection); and discuss different viewpoints people have taken of that technology.  In discussions in discussion section and during lecture, students will be urged to evaluate conflicting information about technology and will also read and evaluate contrasting viewpoints on existing and emerging technologies.  Technical workshops will require students to engage with the technical and scientific understanding of technology, as a way to form an opinion about its larger role in society.  Term papers (1714 students) and research papers (3714 students) require students to consider both the technical function of technologies and their social roles, and to implement a framework for evaluating information about technological change.  In all aspects of the course, but especially in discussions in both sections and lecture, students are asked explicitly to apply what they are learning about history to their own concerns about technological change in the present.  Students often find that they are very willing to make comments and ask questions about current and emerging technologies, and you are encouraged to do this as part of developing your own critical perspective for evaluating new technologies yourself.  Specific examples of how these goals will be pursued follow:   
       
In this course, you will examine technologies that have had a measurable impact on contemporary society.  We will examine the development of concepts and tools that are fundamental to our own practices of technological design and innovation:  the concept of mechanical advantage, which was first developed to help in the analysis of simple machines such as the pulley and lever; the first uses of gears, which are remarkably similar to many still in use; and the development of power machinery, especially as it is still in use in many areas around the globe.

You will develop an understanding of the science and engineering behind the technologies we study.  You will participate in technical workshops that use our contemporary understanding of science and engineering to analyze the technologies of the past:  the concept of mechanical work will help explain the function of both the simple machines (which had only one moving part) and the complex workings of advanced steam engines; your own experiments in technical drawing will illuminate the difficulties early technologists had in communicating technical ideas, while also illustrating the limitations of technical drawing; and learning to measure mechanical advantage will help you analyze the simple machines while also giving you an awareness of the limitations of mechanical technologies.

You will discuss the role that society has played in fostering the development of technology, as well as society¿s response to the adoption and use of technology.  You will examine the technologies chosen by medieval Islamic societies, for example, and discuss technologies that were well-developed (chemical instruments and processes, for example) and others that were understood and known, but not adopted (power technologies, for example).

You will consider the impact of technology from multiple perspectives that include developers, users/consumers, as well as others in society affected by technologies.   You will examine the rise of the power of engineers as developers of technology, in the work of Archimedes of Syracuse, for example; technologies as experienced by their consumers or users, illustrated, for example, in the adoption by European farmers of agricultural technologies that were developed in Asia and came to change how they organized their communities; and you will examine how technology often affected many people who were not involved in its development or in its use, for example in the episodes of pollution and environmental degradation that accompanied mining technologies and smelting processes.  

You will develop skills in evaluating conflicting views on existing or emerging technologies.  The emerging steam engine was hotly contested, for example, by people who thought it was dirty, noisy, and polluting, and by engineers who believed that waterwheels were better and more reliable prime movers.  You will be asked to analyze the competing positions on this emerging technology and to evaluate their relative merits.

You will engage in a process of critical evaluation that provides a framework with which to evaluate new technology in the future.   The course begins with a discussion of technologies in context, and will help you use the idea of context to evaluate how new technologies might affect people in the future, and to evaluate the possibility for unforeseen consequences.  For example, emerging mining technologies, and later emerging steam engine technology, had significant environmental impacts that were not foreseen, and that were particularly devastating in certain environmental contexts.  You will learn to use context as a framework for evaluating new technology, not only environmental context but also other contexts, such as social organization, religious practice and belief, and political structures.

Evaluation of Student Learning Outcomes for Technology and Society Theme
Your learning of these outcomes will be evaluated in several ways.  Your understanding of technologies that have had measurable influences on contemporary society will be evaluated in the significance of the examples you choose when writing your term paper (1714 students) or your research paper (3714 students), and in writing your essay examinations.  Your understanding of the science and engineering behind technologies will be evaluated by the contributions you make to discussion of the technical features of technology during the technical workshops, and by the use you make this technical knowledge in your papers and your exam essays.  Your understanding of the role of society in the development and use of technologies, and your awareness of the multiple perspectives people have had about technology, will be evaluated in the essay examinations, in your answer to questions that ask you to develop historical arguments about technology taking into account peoples¿ multiple perspectives and the social context of technological development and use.  Your progress in developing a framework for analyzing existing or emerging technologies and your skill in critically evaluating opposing viewpoints and opposing information will be evaluated in how you interpret debates about emerging power technologies in the final discussion sections and on the final essay exam.


SCHEDULE OF LECTURES AND ASSIGNMENTS
Examination dates and due dates are firm; exact lecture titles may vary.

NOTE:  Full citations for the readings are listed in the section headed READINGS, which follows this schedule of lectures and assignments.  The weekly readings are from secondary sources; the readings for discussion are mostly primary sources

UNIT ONE        PREHISTORIC AND ANCIENT TECHNOLOGIES

        TECHNICAL SKILL:  HOW TO MEASURE         MECHANICAL ADVANTAGE

Week I, Sept. 8-11        Reading:  short selections from Leakey and Pitts & Roberts;
        Headrick, chapter one; Bradshaw, pp. 7-102
        Discussion:  Leakey and Pitts & Roberts
        9        Welcome
        10        Technologies and contexts

Week II, Sept. 14-18        Reading:  longer selection from Pitts & Roberts; Headrick, chap. 2; Bradshaw, pp. 103-189
        Discussion:  Pitts & Roberts selection
        14        Neanderthals, humans, and tools
        16        ¿Flintknapping¿:  making stone tools
        18        Environment, agriculture, technology

Week III, Sept. 21-25        Reading:  Caves of Lascaux website; Headrick chap. 3; Bradshaw, pp.  190-262
        Primary Source Discussion:  Caves of Lascaux
        21        Neolithic revolution:  civilizations begin?
        23        Greeks and metals:  mining, wealth, labor
        25        The tribute state:  building massive works
        3714 students:  research paper proposals due in class

Week IV, Sept. 28-Oct. 2        Reading:  Bradshaw, pp. 263-352
        Discussion:  Bradshaw
Assignment:  1714 students:  first term paper draft due and reviewed in section
        28        Archimedes and Syracuse:  genius and war
        30        Greeks, tools, and democracy:  democratic lottery
        2        Mechanical advantage:  analyzing the simple machines
       
Week V, Oct. 5-9        Reading:  No reading, prepare for Midterm
        5        Workshop:  experiments in mechanical advantage
        7        Review
        9        MIDTERM I


UNIT TWO        MEDIEVAL TECHNOLOGIES

        TECHNICAL SKILL:  MECHANICAL DRAWING


Week VI, Oct. 12-16        Reading:  Hero selection; Headrick, chap. 4; Noble chaps. 1-3
        Primary Source Discussion:  Hero of Alexandria, Pneumatics
        12        The web life of Hero of Alexandria:  whom do you         believe?
        14        Catapults and kingdoms:  social stability and technical
        development
        16        Tools of technical communication:  drawings and words

Week VII, Oct. 19-23        Reading:  al-Jazari selection; Noble chaps. 4-5
        Primary Source Discussion:  al-Jazari, Ingenious Devices
        19        Islam, alchemy, and technology: spirits and chemistry
        21        Society without wheels:  the role of environment
        23        Greek fire and other strange weapons:  how to make
        sense of strange historical descriptions

Week VIII, Oct. 26-30        Reading:  Lynn White article; Villard selection, Noble, chaps. 6-7
        Primary Source Discussion:  White article; Villard de         Honnecourt, Sketchbook
        26        What were ¿the middle ages¿?
        28        Gears, cathedrals, crusades:  a survey of creativity
        30        Mechanical drawings and ideal figures:  what do these
        drawings mean?  How to get it on paper?
        3714 students:  draft of research paper due in class

Week IX,  Nov. 2-6        Readings:  Noble, chapters assigned per section
        Discussion:  Noble
        2        Workshop:  experiments in mechanical drawing
        4        Power machinery and changing attitudes toward the land
        6         Air pollution in medieval London:  burning coal
        1714 students:  second term paper draft due in class

Week X, Nov. 9-13        Reading:  No reading, prepare for Midterm
        9        Discipline, government, and technology:  longbows and         firearms
        11        Review  
        13        Midterm II



UNIT THREE        TECHNOLOGIES OF THE EARLY MODERN WORLD

        TECHNICAL SKILL:  USING THE CONCEPT OF         MECHANICAL WORK


Week XI, Nov. 16-20        Readings:  Cadamosto and Ricci selections, Headrick, chap. 5; Adas, chap. 1
        Primary Source Discussion:  Cadamosto, Voyages; and Ricci,         Journals
        16        Technological encounters:  using technology to rate other         cultures
        18        Printing and Reformation:  did technology make         reformation possible?
        20        Guest lecture, to be arranged

Week XII, Nov. 23-27        Readings:  Ramelli selection; Adas, chap. 2
        Primary Source Discussion:  Ramelli, Diverse Machines
        23        Fortifications and renaissance technologies
        25        Agricola and the deep earth:  environmental issues
        27        No class ¿ Thanksgiving break

Week III, Nov. 30-Dec. 4        Readings:  Leonardo selection; Adas, parts of chaps. 3-5 as divided up by section
        Primary Source Discussion:  Leonardo, Notebooks
        30        Leonardo and scientific imagination
        2        Galileo as an engineer:  engineering experiments       
        4        Early industrial revolutions:  changes in power machinery

Week XIV, Dec. 7-11        Readings:  Adas, chap. 6; Headrick, chap. 6
        Discussion:  Adas
        7        What is work?  Analyzing power machinery
        9        Workshop:  measuring mechanical work in machines
        11        Waterwheel advances:  a rival for steam?   
        1714 students:  final term paper due in class
        3714 students:  final research paper due in class

Weei XV, Dec. 14-18        Readings:  Headrick, chap. 8
        14        Experiencing industry:  early worker concerns.          16        Perspectives on technology:  innovation, use, response,         adoption and rejection
        18        NO CLASS:  FINALS PERIOD

Final Examination, Friday, December 18, 1:30-3:30 p.m.

READINGS  

Four textbooks and a series of readings posted on the course Web Vista site are required for this course.  The textbooks are available for purchase in the Coffman Union bookstore.

        Textbooks (required):

Daniel R. Headrick, Technology:  A World History (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2009)

Gillian Bradshaw, The Sand-Reckoner (New York:  Tom Doherty Associates, 2000)

David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology:  The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1998)

Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men:  Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 1989)

        Primary source course readings (required):

All but two of these readings are from primary sources.  They are available on the course website on Web Vista, and you are required to carry a copy of the reading with you to discussion sections.

1)        Michael Pitts and Mark Roberts.  Selections from Fairweather Eden:  Life in Britain half a million years ago as revealed by the excavations at Boxgrove.  London:  Arrow Books Limited (Random House), 1998, pp. 284-298 and 308-313.  (Note: this is a secondary source.)

2)        Louis Leakey, The Progress and Evolution of Man in Africa, London: Oxford University Press, 1961, pp. xi-27.  (Note:  this is a secondary source.)

3)        Hero of Alexandria, The Pneumatics of Hero of Alexandria, Trans. Bennett Woodcroft, London: Taylor, Walton, & Maberly, 1851.

4)        Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari, The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, trans. donald R. Hill, Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publ. Co., 1974.

5)        Lynn White, Jr.  "The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis," and "Continuing the Conversation," in Ian G. Barbour, ed., Western Man and Environmental Ethics.  Reading, Mass.:  Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1973, pp. 18-30 and 55-64.

6)        Villard de Honnecourt, The Sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt, ed. Theodore Bowie, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959.


        7)        Matteo Ricci.  China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew
Ricci:  1583-1610.  Trans. Louis J. Gallagher. New York:  Random
House, 1953, pp. 3-5 and 19-25.

        8)        G.R. Crone, ed. and trans.  The Voyages of Cadamosto and Other
Documents on Western Africa in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century.  
London:  printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1937, pp. 1-3, 14-23, 40-41, and
50-51.

9)        Agostino Ramelli, Le Diverse et Artificiose Machine del Capitano Agostino Ramelli, 1588

10)        Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Arranged, Rendered Into English and Introduced by Edward MacCurdy, New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1938.


GRADING

All of the following assignments must be satisfactorily completed in order to pass the course.  Missing an assignment is a major problem, so if you anticipate any difficulties with scheduling, etc., please see me as early in the semester as possible.  You must meet each deadline and do each assignment if you want to pass the course.  Please note that attendance at discussion sections is required.  And do keep in mind that we can work around serious difficulties, if you let us know what is going on.

1714 students

        Discussion        20% (as assessed by discussion section leader)
        Midterm I        15%
        Midterm II        15%
        Final examination        20%
        In-class comments        5%
        Term paper         25% (grade given at end for whole portfolio)

3714 students

        Discussion        20% (as assessed by discussion section leader)
        Midterm I        15%
        Midterm II        15%
        Final examination        20%
        In-class comments        5%
        Research paper proposal        Required, but not graded
Research paper draft        Required, but not graded
Research paper, final version        25%

Late proposals, drafts, and papers will receive a deduction of one letter grade per day late. The clock for late proposals, drafts, and papers will begin at the end of class the day they are due.  As a general rule, you cannot make up missed examinations without providing official documents attesting to a university-recognized excuse (usually personal medical emergencies or family medical emergencies, or university-sponsored extra-curricular activities).  This is because I have to write another exam, and usually I have already used the best questions.  If you will miss examinations due to university-sponsored extra-curricular activities (athletics, speech competitions, etc.) you must make arrangements before the date of the exam, and should be prepared to take it earlier than scheduled.  University-sponsored activities do not justify missing proposal, draft, or paper deadlines.  Again, please keep in mind that we can work around serious difficulties, if you let us know about them.

In-class comments:  Each student is required to make one in-class comments during the course of the semester, which counts for 5% of the course grade.  These comments may take many forms.  You may ask a question about the lectures or readings, or a question about something that you think is related; you may remark on something in current events that seems relevant to you; you may describe a website that you have found and believe is both reputable and useful, or you may comment more generally on what you think about some aspect of technology and history.  Please feel free to write out what you wish to say ahead of time, if you prefer, and you may also to send it to me or to Xuan Geng or Amy Slaughter ahead of time for comments, if you want some feedback before your turn.  

Note on requirements for passing course:  You are required to attend lectures and discussion section meetings.  We expect you to complete readings assigned for discussion before your discussion section meets, and to complete reading assignments from the textbooks during the week assigned.   In order to pass the course you must complete all examinations (Midterm I, Midterm II, and the Final Examination), and you must complete the term paper draft and the final term paper by the dates specified (3714 students must complete a research paper proposal, research paper draft, and final copy of the research paper by the dates specified).  Students cannot pass the course if they do not complete all assignments.  Completing all assignments, however, does not guarantee that a student will pass the course.

We will assign grades on a scale from A to F, including plus and minus signs, according to the policy adopted by the University Senate.  If you have registered for satisfactory/unsatisfactory credit for this class, please be aware that an S requires achievement that is satisfactory, equivalent to a C- or better, and requires that your achievement meet course requirements in every respect.  I will award an incomplete (I) only if you can officially document an emergency and have already completed 50% of the course requirements.

EXAMINATIONS

All examinations will be essays.  The two midterms will each be fifty minutes long, and will each be divided into two equal sections.  Each section will ask the student to write an essay answering one of two questions, and students should expect to spend about 25 minutes on each of the two essays.  Midterm I will cover all material since the start of the course.  Midterm II will cover only material since Midterm I.  The Final will cover all material since the start of the course, and will have two parts.  The first part will be exactly like a midterm, and will cover only material since Midterm II.  The second part will ask students to write a longer essay (50 minutes) in answer to one of two essay questions covering the entire course.  The final is cumulative and students will want to draw examples from the earlier units of the course.

Schematic of examinations:

        Midterms:

Section I        Students must answer one of two essay questions.
Value:  50% of examination grade.
Suggested time:  25 minutes.

Section II        Students must answer one of two essay questions.
Value:  50% of examination grade.
Suggested time:  25 minutes.

        Final:

        Section I        Students must answer one of two essay questions.
        Value:  25% of examination grade.
        Suggested time:  25 minutes.

        Section II        Students must answer one of two essay questions.
        Value:  25% of examination grade.
        Suggested time:  25 minutes.

        Section III        Students must answer one of two longer essay questions.
        Value:  50% of examination grade.
        Suggested time:  50 minutes.

1714 STUDENTS:  TERM PAPER

All 1714 students are required to write one 5-6 page paper, based on two drafts, that uses at least one example from each of the three units of the course.  All students must also do a peer review of two or three other students¿ first drafts; these will be assigned in discussion sections.  

The paper must answer this question:  

Historically, how did technological changes intersect with people¿s ideals?  

Deadlines:  Three copies of the first draft are due in discussion sections the week of September 28, 2009; a single copy of the second draft is due in class on Friday, November 6, 2009, with all peer reviews attached;  and the final term paper, along with all previous drafts, peer reviews, and instructor comments, is due in class on Friday, December 11, 2009.  The first draft must be 2 pages long; the second draft must be 4-5 pages long; and the final term paper must be 5-6 pages long.  They must follow the format specified below, and must not exceed the page limits.

Contents:  Your drafts must follow a specific progression.  The first draft must discuss what the terms used in the question mean, and what types of authoritative information you will look for in answering it.  Your second draft must identify at least two specific historical examples you plan to cite in the paper, and discuss the technical features of those examples (how the technologies worked, in other words).  The second draft should also identify two questions you will pose concerning those examples ¿ about the methodology that lies behind the sources you are using to support those examples, for instance, or how certain you are that your sources are authoritative.  This may mean considering more carefully information provided in readings or in lecture.  Your third draft must discuss the specific historical context of the examples you use, and how those contexts bear on the way you use such examples in answering the question.

Schematic of term paper assignments and deadlines:

        Assignment        Length        Deadline

        First draft                2 pages        In section, week of Sept. 28
        (and three additional copies)

        Peer review of 2-3        photocopy of paper        In section, week of Oct. 12
        other students¿ papers        with your comments       

Second draft        4-5 pages        In class, Friday, Nov. 6
(include all previous drafts and peer reviews)

Final term paper/portfolio        5-6 pages        In class, Friday, Dec. 11
(include all previous drafts, all peer reviews, and all written comments from instructors)


Format of paper:  The papers must be typed, double-spaced, on letter-sized paper (8.5¿ x 11¿), with one-inch margins on all sides, using ten or twelve point type.  The pages should be numbered in the upper right-hand corner, and should be stapled together.  The student¿s name must appear on the first page.  

Format of peer review:  Peer review comments may be written directly on the draft, and additional comments may be typed up and attached as a separate sheet.  If part of the review is done via email, please remember to print copies and keep them to attach to the final paper portfolio.   

3714 STUDENTS:  RESEARCH PAPER

Topic:  the history of a technology of your choice from pre-history through 1800.

If you are taking the course for upper-level credit, you should be registered in HSci 3714.  You will be required to do all but one of the assignments required for 1714 students (you will not be required to do the term paper), and a research paper on the history of a technology of your choice from within the time period we are covering.  You must turn in a three-page research paper proposal (due in class Friday, September 25, 2009), a seven-page research paper draft (due in class Friday, October 30, 2009), and a ten- to twelve-page final research paper (due in class Friday, December 11, 2009).  All three of these assignments must be typed, double-spaced, on letter-sized paper (8.5¿ x 11¿), with one-inch margins on all sides, using ten- or twelve-point type.  Proposals, drafts, and papers longer or shorter than the specified lengths are not acceptable.  Footnotes should appear at the bottom of the page (we will discuss footnote formats later in the course).

        Research paper proposal:  Your proposal should identify the technology you will write
about and the time period that you will cover, and it should include a preliminary thesis.
It should include a technical description of the technology and how it worked
(or was supposed to work).  The proposal must also describe at least five print sources
that you will use for your research, and what you think their strengths and weaknesses
are.  On-line resources are not acceptable unless cleared by the instructor.  It must be
three pages long.

Research paper draft:  Your draft should have a clearly stated thesis.  It should identify the various contexts surrounding your technology (i.e., political, technical, religious, social), and should indicate which contexts you think will be important in demonstrating your thesis.  The draft should also include a fuller technical description of your technology, and it should describe how useful you have found your sources so far, and what limitations they have.  The draft should include at least three additional print sources you will use for further research, and it must take into account the instructor¿s comments on the proposal.  It must be seven pages long.

Final research paper:  The final research paper must have a clearly stated thesis, and it must support that thesis through an argument you have developed based on the research sources you identified in your proposal and draft.  It must take into account the instructor¿s comments on the proposal and draft.  It must be ten- to twelve-pages long.

ADDITIONAL NOTES FOR ALL STUDENTS

Accommodations:  If you have a disability or condition which interferes with your learning, please let me know as soon as possible.  Any student with a documented disability condition (e.g., physical, learning, psychiatric, vision, hearing, etc.) who needs to arrange reasonable accommodations must contact me and Disability Services at the beginning of the semester.

Scholastic conduct:  This class is subject to the University policy on student scholastic conduct.  You may find the Regents' Council Student Conduct policy on the web at <http://www1.umn.edu/regents/policies/academic/>.  In general, academic dishonesty includes submission of false records of academic achievements; cheating on assignments or examinations; plagiarizing; altering, forging, or misusing a University academic record; taking, acquiring, or using test materials without faculty permission; acting alone or in cooperation with another to falsify records or to obtain dishonestly grades, honors, awards, or professional endorsements.  

Plagiarism and citation of other authors:  All work that students submit must be their own original work, in their own words, or it must cite completely and correctly from whom the ideas or words came.   Students who submit plagiarized work will receive a failing grade for that assignment, and may receive a failing grade for the course.  You are expected to express your ideas and to sustain an argument in your own words.  You should not submit written work that does not properly acknowledge the use of the words of others or that includes excessive quotation of the work of others.  If you want to quote from a published work, you must put the passage in quotation marks and cite the reference.  When you state another author's viewpoint, theory or hypothesis -- especially when it is original or not generally accepted -- you must include a reference to the published work.  Failure to cite the work of an author that you used is plagiarism and unethical (it is also often illegal).  Citations should also be given so that the reader can further pursue or check the references and your use of them.  Beware of internet sources, which can change without notice and which may no longer exist when a reader checks your citations.  For this reason, internet sources and citations are not acceptable unless approved in advance by the instructor.  

Simply changing a few words from the writings of other authors does not alter the fact that you are essentially quoting from them.  Paraphrasing of this sort, where you use the words of another almost verbatim without acknowledging your source, is the most common form of plagiarism among undergraduates.  Another common problem may arise from working with another student in studying and carrying out assignments.  Such collaboration is encouraged, but the work that you submit must be in your own words, and not jointly written or copied.

If you are unclear about collaborating, paraphrasing, quoting, and the need to indicate sources please ask us for guidance.  By putting the results of your reading in your own words you are compelled to think about what you read.  In this way these new ideas and facts will become part of your own thinking, which is the aim of your education.

Incompletes:  I will assign a grade of incomplete (I) only in emergencies, usually personal or family medical emergencies, and only when a student has already satisfactorily completed fifty percent (50%) of the course requirements.  To get a grade of incomplete, students must sign a contract with the instructor specifying when the work will be made up, usually within three to six months of the end of the course.

Hints for success:  By far the best predictor of success is coming to class.  You can learn a lot just by being there, without even noticing it.  The next best predictor of success is preparation.  That means doing the readings as they are assigned, and reviewing your notes regularly.  Another predicator of success is asking questions.  If you are taking notes but don¿t know what to write down, ask me.  Or if you are confused about something, ask me.  You can ask questions during class or during my office hours, or via email or the telephone, or talk to me after class.  Just ask.  One other essential of success:  meeting deadlines.

You will get to know your fellow students and find out what their interests are, and you will discuss historical problems with them in small groups and in discussion sections.  You will listen to lectures and see films about particular technologies, and you will learn to ask key questions about each technology:  who was involved?  what were the circumstances?  

Flexibility:  That said, there is always flexibility in case of a substantiated emergency; just be sure to let me know as soon as possible.  There is also a lot of flexibility in the content of any assignment, and I design them to allow you to flex your intellectual and historical muscles.  For instance, the essay questions on the exam are very broad, and you can answer them any way you wish, as long as you stay within the context of the class.  There is one area, however, where I am not flexible, and that is on deadlines and the physical format of assignments.  Missing deadlines means that you get backlogged, and it is extremely difficult to get past that in this class.  And you must observe the instructions on the format for the papers.  We only have so much time to read them, and they need to be of a manageable and fair size.  It is not fair when some students observe the page limits, while other students ignore them.

Office hours and appointments:  My office hours are after class on Wednesdays, from 2:30 ¿ 3:30 p.m., and on Fridays, also from 2:30 to 3:30.  During those times, I will be in my office (325D Mechanical Engineering), if you would like to come by or to call me.  It is a good chance for you to ask questions and to discuss how the course is going for you.  If that time is not convenient for you, I will gladly set an appointment at a different time.
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