EDCI Graduate Programs
Graduate Profile
JOHN
MAXWELL
Ph.D.
Student
Culture
and History: The IT curriculum in context
I have a BA in cultural anthropology, a Masters in Publishing (SFU),
and a lot of professional experience in technology, information
architectures, and electronic publishing (largely through working
for BC's Open Learning Agency through the late 90's). I started
my PhD program in the Centre in 1999, working with Dr. Ricki Goldman-Segall.
My work and research has a number of threads, which I am trying
hard to weave together:
-
science
and technology studies/theory on the broad scale (I have been
reading Andrew Feenberg, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway...)
-
reconceptualizing
the IT curriculum such that technology is seen as a historical
process involving real people "doing" technology, instead of
a seeing it as a skills/knowledge commodity that you buy like
soap or ingest like pills. Towards a hermeneutics of technology,
as Feenberg (1999) might put it, in his call for more participatory
design.
-
the
Open Source & Free Software movement (here I have been reading
Stallman, Raymond, etc.) and the implications of this for reconceptualizing
IT curriculum.
-
viewing
information technology in general, and software development
in particular, as communities of practice (a la Lave and Wenger,
1991). Communities of practice share heritage, culture, language,
and so doesn't it make sense to approach IT in these terms?
-
boundary
issues in the culture(s) of technology, in the well-documented
sense (gender, race, class) but also in terms of self-representation
(I'm smart/not smart; I'm good at math/not good at math). To
what extent does the IT industry/curriculum rely upon/create
a culture of technophobia and learned helplessness?
I've
got lots of other threads going, too, but they're too numerous to
go into here, which is one reason CSCI is a valuable place to be
as a grad student, in that it allows space for these numerous threads
to reveal themselves -- it allows one to be a whole person, and
not just a "researcher".
In
closing, I should say that I will part with almost any amount of
valuable information for a cappuccino. Ask me about native plants
and trees of British Columbia, the nature of a "document", and about
my web-based annotated bibliography project
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