Shawn Graham spoke to faculty and students at Muhlenberg College, in Allenberg Pensylvania on April 20th. He was invited by the Departments of Sociology and Anthropology, Math and Computer Science and History along with Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Office of the Provost and the Committee on Lectures and Forums. Was it about his research in digital archaeology? His studies on networks and simulations?
Nope. They wanted to hear how he ‘fails gloriously’. In the faculty talk, Graham had a frank discussion about ‘teaching fails’, the ways in which our best laid plans can go astray, and ways we can recover. (His speaking notes are available at https://gist.github.com/shawngraham/155fb95ad994711ed741c886133bc67d ). Indeed, when teaching with technology we *know* that things are going to break, and not come together the way we expect: how do we plan for that breaking to be a feature, not a failure, of our teaching?
The afternoon talk carried on this theme and discussed with approximately 40 students how to understand such ‘breakings’ not as failures, but as invitations to explore and understand more deeply what digital media do to our learning, our research, and ourselves as students. Those slides are available at http://j.mp/sg-apr20.
Fail gloriously! Break things!