This Is Your Brain on the Internet

After several years as an administrator and then on my first sabbatical since 1995, I am returning to teaching in the Spring. One of my courses is called "This Is Your Brain on the Internet" and is an introduction to the deep structure of thinking in the information age. I thought HASTAC readers might be interested in seeing my course description.

ISIS 120, “This is Your Brain on the Internet”


“This is Your Brain on the Internet” is open to any student fascinated by how we come to know the world and how we may or may not know differently in the Information Age. It is conceived as a trans-disciplinary exploration in which we will consider the deep structure of cognition in a digital age. We’ll learn from theoretical and expressive books and articles ranging from neuroscience to memoirs, from various experimental and mainstream films as well as from a range of non-traditional sources (websites, interactive games and virtual environments, new media art exhibits, forest walks with environmentalists, conversations with social networking activists and community organizers, demonstrations by performance artists and illusionists, Virtual Reality tours, etc.) We will also learn from engaged collaboration (what HASTAC calls “collaboration by difference”) with others who have complementary skills, strengths, attitudes, and assumptions. “This is Your Brain on the Internet” is an educational remix that examines the aesthetic, digital, linguistic, psychological, political, philosophical, computational, ethical, and socio-cultural factors influencing how we know ourselves and our worlds. For students proficient in science or technology, “This is Your Brain on the Internet” will provide insights into the cultural assumptions that shape the quantitative methods and scientific assumptions of our time. For students in the humanities and social sciences, “This is Your Brain on the Internet” will examine how the computational capacities that make ours one of the great scientific eras also shape global social and cultural intellectual and aesthetic flows.

We will meet twice a week in the IMPS (Interactive Multimedia Project Space) at the Franklin Center, with Monday classes devoted to discussion of the core readings and Wednesdays for hands-on, project-based creativity that draws upon the insights and skills of the class members. (If you know how to write code, you might lead us in a session on authoring in 3D environments; if you are English major, you might analyze the narrative forms at work in that authoring.) We will experiment with online environments, games, virtual worlds, and collaborative multimedia digital publication. The class will include guest speakers as well as labs, performances, technology demos, installations, or whatever else captures our interest.

Course requirements: Students will write weekly blog posts (approximately 300-500 words) on the assigned readings and in-class and out-of-class projects. Some of these posts will be shared with a larger public and at least one must be converted into a public multimedia presentation. Our class will have a dedicated “This is Your Brain on the Internet” space on the HASTAC website and a group on Facebook, Ning, or another social networking site.

Students will also be expected to contribute to public knowledge through editing Wikipedia entries or by contributing to online collaborative book projects such as Christopher Kelty’s Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software and the Internet, Siva Vaidhyanathan’s The Googlization of Everything, or Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg’s The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age. (The last three are all available on line on interactive sites that accept feedback and comments.).

The readings for the course are divided into two parts. Part One (This Is Your Brain) includes books such as Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music, Jeff Hawkins’ On Intelligence, Norman Doidge's The Brain That Changes Itself, Temple Grandin's Animals in Translation, Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Part Two (This Is Your Brain on the Internet) includes Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, John Palfrey and Urs Gasser's Born Digital, Anna Everett's Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media, and the three online books.

Grades will be based on class participation, the weekly blog posts, an in-class midterm exam, a final portfolio of revised and selected writing from the course, and a final project (either individual or collaborative).