Warning: very meta. And quite nearly out of date — there are two weeks left in this semester.
On the syllabus for this semester, number three at the University of Michigan’s Residential College, I have 6 classes: an introduction to Near Eastern religions, a survey of the concept of race from a biological view, a course on political economy, a small conversational German course, an undergraduate research project, and a program on symbolic and literary logic.
An economist on a train from CHI to ARB some time ago told me that the most valuable class he took at the RC was Carl Cohen’s Logic in Language. I’m liking it quite a lot. We alternate philosophy (Plato, Descartes, Hume, and Mill) with symbolic logic. Logic in Language was once a part of the RC’s core curriculum before the students voted out the Core system. Now, only the course guide designator, RCCORE 100, survives.
In the earlier days of the RC, around the late 70s and early 80s, the college had funding to do a number of focused research projects in the social sciences. A small group of students would elect to take a 12-credit course with one professor. These reports, ranging from “Women, hard drugs and natural highs” to “Conflict and Power on the Campus: Studies in the Political Economy of the University of Michigan” still exist, filed in the Bentley Historical Library’s Residential College collection. One, “A History of Jackson Prison,” became a part of Charlie Bright’s The Powers that Punish. A professor’s normal teaching load is perhaps 6 contact hours per semester, making these projects were prohibitively expensive, so once the federal funding dried up, the courses stopped.
Today we have the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, UROP. The project I joined involves integrating a county-level wiki with a service-level database; the details are as yet unclear.
This summer, I was able to spend two months taking intensive German courses at the Goethe-Institut in München (photos: on flickr). My written grammar still needs work, but I feel very confident about my speaking abilities. To stay somewhat in practice, I am enrolled in a conversation course in the German Department. Unfortunately, an hour a week is too little to realistically stay current.
I’m also in Political Economy, RCSSCI 220, with Frank Thompson. We cover micro and macroeconomics in a quick but thorough fashion, including some externalities (fairness, justice) that Econ 101 doesn’t notice. Mathematics is not a feature — that part “can be covered well with a fair amount of hand waving,” and it is.
Two other classes are also on my schedule: Race and its relationship to human evolution is a useful system to understand, and AnthroBio 360 does a good job of covering the basics. This is one of those large non-RC powerpoint-based classes; I have the urge to send the professor my copy of “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint“.
Near Eastern Religions, with E. Ginsburg, S. Jackson, and R. Williams, is an excellent introduction to Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.
Just past us is the 40th anniversary of the Residential College at the University of Michigan. Many excellent photos have been collected in the Flickr pool. In the near future are plans for a centralized alumni network and an increased level of interaction; I hope the the momentum from the event continues.
I continue to gravitate towards collaborative and organizational technologies, partly because that’s what I’ve always done, and partly because they still are incredibly interesting to me.
Development of ArborWiki, the civic wiki for Ann Arbor continues apace, which means generally ad hoc. The Ann Arbor District Library graciously hosts our project on a new development server. It’s my hope that we reach a greater level of integration, with librarians (my old colleagues) and local historians officially joining as contributors.
Also on the wishlist is a real mapping system, one that allows for points, paths, and polygons to be attached to maps geocoded pages. This interface will take some work — the technology is out there, but no-one seems to have spent the time making it usable.
Even more limited peripheral participation for this semester involves a great interest in: the RC’s book forum and its plans to make the Benzinger Library a true student institution; a program run by a Neutral Zone alumna in Ypsilanti, and other projects around campus.
