ESTS ISSUE 9.2

What follows is a small selection of teaching materials I used when teaching innovation studies and STS to first year students at the University of East London (UEL). The course was called “Innovation, Technology & Culture”. It was compulsory for all of the students following the “New Technology” degrees. Included on the following pages are the aims and objectives, lecture and seminar schedules, examples of seminars, lectures and assessment. Along the way, I point to some of the material features of teaching pre-Internet. More context for this material can be found in my article “A Journey through STS and Innovation Studies” [ADD LINK].

These are the covers for the same course, one from 1992/93 and the other from 1999/2000. By the turn of the millennium we had coloured paper and binding. But we didn’t have a logo on the course material. Perpetual branding of university materials really took off in the 21st century.

The course was called “Innovation, Technology & Culture”, and was compulsory for all first year students.

These lecture notes were prepared on a home computer, probably WordPerfect, the dominant word processing software from the mid-1980s until the late 1990s (and still used today by the legal profession). If you look closely, you can see it was printed using a dot matrix printer (still in use for high-volume printing needs in some sectors). 

I love my clarification of the difference between ‘a Marxist view of the role of the state in a capitalist country’ and ‘a Marxist state’. The former emphasises the role of the state as an agent to support the interests of capital (as described by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles in The Communist Manifesto, 1848), whereas the latter is a system of government based on Marxist principles.

See next page for a more readable version of the document.

This is one of the assignments related to the theoretical part of the course. Students are referred to the reading list, of which the first page is reproduced here. The numbers after some of the references refer to the library (MH – Maryland House where we were based, or BK another part of the campus). The reading list was four pages long.

These two assignments relate to the case studies. Again, I’m struck by our ambition in asking students to read Eric Hobsbawm and/or David Landes. I also like how we expected them to incorporate non-academic sources in the second assignment. We wanted to sensitise students to the idea that science, technology and their representations could be found everywhere, including popular and high culture.