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History of Technology: Tools of Toil

“the world can’t survive half rich and half poor,”

C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures. p. 45.

“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.”

Carl Sagan, 1934-1996.

Jacob Riis, 1890s; Mulberry lane, Manhattan: his reflection of immigrant life in America's largest city and entrépot.

 

Have we invested more in our symbols of technology than they can promise in satisfying our hunger for contentment, comfort and convenience?

 

The purpose of this course of study is to evaluate how well you apply the evidence from five authors to the arguments raised by each to the challenges we face in defining, comprehending social change, and determining how to solve the cultural divide perceived today to have been created by automated technology.

CORE: Clarify to organize to reflect in order to evaluate a problem posed by Sir Charles Percy Snow, in the 1959, called the "Two Cultures."  

As he reminded us:

"There is only one way out of all this: it is of course, by rethinking our education."

"All the lessons of our history suggest we are only capable of increasing specialization, not decreasing it."

"It may well be that this process has gone two far to be reversible. I have given reasons why I think it is a disastrous process, for the purpose of a living culture."

C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures, (1959), pp. 18-19.

 

To restate the aims of the course, this class exists: So you may define essential terms to compare categories in order to reflect on evidence related to arguments in order to judge a problem and interpret its consequences.

What | How | When | Where | Who

 

A). Outline the importance of what you have read by comparing two or more authors using these categories:

What, How, When, Where, Who,

What  

Explain the action, conditions, and context of the situation where industrial technology at deeper than surface levels created two cultures, or the cultural divide from Snow's perspective.   

How

Describe how these actions, conditions, or context of the situation are important and to what purpose, end, or conclusion they are, were, or continue to be significant. How did mechanization as it turned into automation lead to the alienation of at first workers, then consumers, and then society at large?  

When

Demonstrate the chronology by delineating the duration, frequency and place in time of the action, if the conditions were contingent on one or another of events, & the historical context of the situation. Do Snow, Pacey, Pursell, and Postman give precise dates, or periods of time in which revolutions occurred of such a profound character that society lost sight of its older values or traditions?  

Where

Create a verbal portrait of the place or places that manifested the conditions in which the actions took place and judge if the setting influenced or had no role in the outcomes of the situations you have depicted as significant. Does Snow, or other authors relay the settings and conditions wherein  key events took place such as China, Venice, Shropshire, The Siemens & Halske chemical works, or the River Rouge plant, or the Bell Labs? What key innovations occur there and to what lasting impacts do you attribute their widespread influences?     

Who

Delineate the players, or the people who carried forward the action, or altered the conditions, and thus shaped the contingent set of events manifest in the context of the circumstances. To what extent are inventors  who can exapt a concept crucial to moving technology from an existing set of applications to a new level of application?  

B). In comparing two or more authors using these categories to explain their:

Author	Category 1	Category 2
	Commonality	Divergent qualities

 

How do you know what best practices to use in evaluating your writing?

C). Here is an articulation of an idea (the debilitating influences of the cultural divide) whose contingent and collateral concepts are:

1. complex -- not easy to understand at the surface, or how the three facets of technology confound behavioral responses to powerful new inventions and their support systems.

2. related -- one change hinges on another for the outcome to become manifest (clocks before cars).

3. argument laden -- Pursell's four myths, Snow's three challenges to change education, Pacey's blocked technical systems, Postman's technocracy, Head's computerized business systems.

4. evidence rich, Pacey's history, Postman's key inventions, Pursell's dirt, disorder, and war in the age of intelligent machines.

5. revealing -- the social consequences revealed by all the authors, but alienation, misplaced sentiment, and technological autism especially.

6. spectrum of certainty to uncertainty -- what the discovery of nuclear science has done to technology.

7. resolved, or resolvable if, and to what extent unresolved -- the challenge you must explain and then judge for yourself if we are capable of adapting to the quantum world of automated experiences. Can you develop an essay based on Snow's warnings with these seven attributes?

 

One of the challenge of these remaining weeks is to reflect and debate:

4                Pacey 10 pp. 168-186.          Are scientific revolutions and dreams a prototype of automation?

6                Postman 7-8, pp. 147-143.   What are the meanings of computers and hidden technologies?

                                    Paper on to what extent has technology changed society and how big is the influence? Due.

11             C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures: Science and the Arts forever at war or is this a truce?

13             C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures: What is a debatable premise or are there premises in his arguments?

 

18             Debate prep select teams and teams decide on the arguable premises.

20             Debate    teams, debate team one.

25             Debate    teams, debate team two.

December
2                Head, Mindless, pp. 1-102. What is the role of CBS's in the "new industrial state"?
4                Head, Mindless, pp. 103-194. Emotional Labor and how is it at risk from military & corporations?

12            Friday, 2 – 4 PM, Final exam: You stay for the entire 2 hours, present your essay's findings.

November | December

Expectations for Student Learning outcomes for ecological history:
A Rollins student's submission of work for academic credit indicates that the work is the student's own. All outside assistance should be acknowledged, & the student's academic acquisition of information truthfully reported at all times.

• Information literacy by the use of computer assisted learning by your identifying and describing key sources of evidence presented by primary sources and texts used in the class.
• Communication Skills. Active participants will learn to organize and express their thoughts clearly and logically in writing and verbally by formal and frequent ungraded exercises and in a formal debate based on the texts.  
• Critical Thinking. Active participants will practice written analysis to apply historical methods to analytically evaluate the record of past events and how the text's authors have interpreted significant ecological, social, technological, and economic turning points in the past such as manufacture, industrialism, & automation.  
• Research Skills. Active participants will acquire and demonstrate historical research skills, including the effective use of the Internet, libraries, archives, and museums with appropriate texts or databases to display their information literacy.  
• Writing and Intellectual Integration. Active participants may demonstrate their mastery of the knowledge and skills involved in historical analysis by conceptualizing and executing a significant piece of interpretive writing based on more than four author's explicit arguments and related ideas on a clearly defined topic.
• Active participants will have repeated opportunities to exhibit an accurate knowledge of historical events where technological factors influenced how people responded to conditions and the significance of specified periods where technology perpetuated ecological predicaments that altered economic and social development.
• Active participants demonstrate in writing and verbally skills of critical analysis:
• Formulating persuasive arguments based on comparative and contrasting evidence from all the texts.
• Evaluating evidence and critiquing author's claims in the assigned readings in their formal essays.
• Integrate and apply perspectives from across the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities in the context of complex technological problems. (Mechanization, industrialization & automation, wage slavery, robotics, nanotechnology, and the paradox of: Kranzberg's laws, economic development, social resistance to new technologies, or technological changes on cultural expression.) 
• Communicate integrated perspectives on complex social problems in the form of written and oral arguments to both professional and lay audiences how the impact of technology on cultural norms, economic production and consumption as these technical impacts influenced the land, labor and capital accumulation of Europe, Asia, and the Americas.
• Independently design and construct formal oral arguments and written essays that describe and summarize examples of historical conditions that created intractable predicaments or stubborn problems that made the adoption of or blocking of new technology a pivotal watershed in a people's history.

Rubric
Each assignment that is submitted on Blackboard has an accompanying statement of outcomes, such that you can see before and after you write the paper what the terms by which your papers and other assignments are awarded points and ultimately a grade. I track the amount you write as well as the quality of the arguments you make, regardless of the grade you earn.

Books to read, comprehend and interpret in your essays:
Carroll Pursell, White Heat.
Arnold Pacey, Technology in World Civilization.
Neil Postman, Technopoly.
Charles Percy Snow, Two Cultures.
Simon Head, Mindless,

Pursell | Pacey | Postman | Head | Eberhart | Snow | Boulding | Tenner | Kaku

Interviews

concept map is conceived | tools are defined | web of technical relations emerges

Friday 12/12 : 2 – 4 PM – Final exam is an oral presentation of your written findings.
A. Submit a rewritten essay based on previous two papers and all the authors (20%)

B. You present a rehearsed and engaging verbal summary of your paper and focusing on what you learned specifically from the authors lasting from 4 -5 minutes in length of presentation. Music may accompany your talk but not video clips. You stay for the entire 2 hours. (10% of grade is oral present).

All work that you submit, including blogs, e-mails, and texts, must be your own words, or have an acknowledgment as to whose words, ideas, or beliefs are being used and from where.

ENV 260.1: Tools of Toil: History of Technology, is a course that carries 4 hours of credit and counts as an Environmental Studies elective or as the general education's "Knowledge of Western Civilization" requirements, elective course because learning is focused on historical analysis.

Course Requirements:                         value
Blackboard, frequent use.                          5%
Pretest                                                      5%
Reading and recitation in class.                  5%
Active Class Participation.                      15%
Interviews & write-up of three.               15%
Writing the 1st essay.                               15%
Writing the 2d essay.                                15%
Final essay on Snow & Head.                  15%
Final presentation on all authors.            10%

Percentage range for Grade Scale

93-94-95-96            A
90-91-92                  A-
87-88-89                  B+
83-84-85-86            B
80­-81-82                  B-
77-78-79                  C+
73-74-75-76            C
70-71-72                  C-
67-68-69                  D+
63-64-64-66            D
60-61-62                  D-
          59 & lower      F

 

I am here to excite and encourage you to excel in learning new concepts and practicing your writing and speaking abilities to improve your expression and in an effort to create meaningful discourse. My purpose is to feed your inquiring intellect with significant ideas in a coherent and challenging manner. I anticipate you will ask questions and actively work together to overcome the challenges the course material may pose for you in achieving an excellent level of performance based on an improved, articulated understanding of the readings. I recommend you to discuss perplexing ideas, passages, and assignments with me–at length–during my office hours.

My policies:

Active learning
Keep in mind that participation in this course involves not only alertness and verbally contributing your ideas, but also listening respectfully without interrupting other speakers who are presenting their views on the assigned readings. Paying attention to others and to me is a sign of respect that I will reward. The use of electronic media, texting, or web browsing for other than class purposes is treated as an absence since texting, internet surfing, e-mailing, or being digitally inattentive to our discussion during class meetings robs us of your intellect’s contributions to our discourse. Students on unauthorized Internet site will be asked to leave the class for that day and lose participation points for the week. Active participation may include meeting with me to confer during office hours.

What is CORE? The way the class is organized into sequential parts leading to you evaluating sources.

Late papers

Submit all assigned work on or before the start of class on the day the assigned work is due. Late papers cannot earn the same credit as those received on time in fairness to the punctual students. This is really because we discuss in the class the day the essays are due some of what you had written. Always back-up your work as you write, start at least a week before, and keep a printed copy of the essay you give me.

Paper format

The look of any college paper is always a professional document with an accurate date and page numbers indicating when the work was completely written. I ask you to place a cover page with your name, phone number, essay title, and an abstract of two to four sentences covering the substance of your essay for purposes of privacy because I make extensive comments on your work, that you must read in order to revise the essays. Spelling and grammar errors are unacceptable. All papers are to be typed, double spaced, in Arial or times new roman font, have one inch margins with 22 lines to the page as a minimum.

Academic honesty and writing with integrity

Cheating, borrowing ideas, or copying without proper citation diminishes the integrity of any writing. The habitual resort to these less than responsible practices amounts to plagiarism–a most serious academic offense of novices and experts alike. By the use of words or ideas that are not your own and are either insufficiently accredited or not acknowledged at all you undermine the essay’s reliability. The consequences are that you can fail the assignment, or even fail the class, since these offenses are a violation of the College’s honor code. As such, I am obligated to report such violations to the Dean.