In one month you will learn a great deal about nanotechnology, including what it is, how it works, how it changes, and what its costs and benefits are. A master's degree, or even a bachelor's degree, in nanotechnology cannot fit in a month, so we will not attempt to teach you everything there is to know about nanotechnology. However, what we can do may be of greater value: We will teach you strategies and processes.
You will learn how to understand and evaluate nanotechnology, as well as technology in general. This critical thinking process will serve you well the rest of your life as you make important choices that are either overtly or subtly predicated on technology. We do not know what will be discovered in the future or what, perhaps already discovered, will change the world, but we can give you a timeless strategy for placing those things in a grand context so that you can understand and evaluate them. You will also learn what disciplines of science, mathematics, and engineering intersect in nanotechnology, helping you to decide what you wish to study in the future.
And you will learn all this, not simply by listening to us lecture and taking notes on the relevant answers, but by launching from some answers we’ve developed (and will expand on in lectures) to find your own (or to develop our answers in new directions). You will not be memorizing information, but analyzing and synthesizing it. Beyond giving you a framework for your research, we will work with you as facilitators and colleagues, discussing issues, answering some of your questions, and questioning some of your answers.
This requires that you take an unusually active role in your education. The answers are not all in a textbook or in the lectures, though you will find some there. Once we give you the tools to find your own answers, you will be in open territory. And like ants in search of food, you and your 17 student colleagues may find answers in unexpected places. You may find answers that your instructors had not thought of--or ask questions they had not considered (we will accumulate open questions in class each day, ready for volunteers to research and report on to the class). This might not work in a conventional classroom, but you are not conventional students. You may never have been satisfied being spoon-fed answers at the same pace that the rest of your classmates could handle. Now, not only are you with other students likely as clever and motivated as you, but there are no speed limits. Without set answers, we welcome you—encourage you, urge you—to discover as much as you can as rapidly as you can. What you bring back to class each day may connect with what others have discovered, sparking new directions and ideas. Just as behavior present in no single ant emerges in a colony, behavior found in no single participant will emerge in our class. Emergent behavior is an important biological and technological concept that we will be not just learning, but living.
You will be student, researcher, and teacher. We will divide the class into three groups: alpha (a), beta (ß), and gamma (?). Your group assignment will determine which day (see Schedule) you will present an answer you’ve discovered to one of our nine questions. Your 10-minute presentation, followed by five minutes of questions and discussion, is a formal part of your teaching, but you will be expected to informally transition from student to teacher and back again throughout the class. We all have much to learn and much to teach, and there is little better test of whether you really understand something than trying to teach it to someone else.
Another formal part of your teaching is your final project. Each of you will design a museum exhibit explaining nanotechnology, perhaps building on the answer that you present to the class. To support your effort, we will visit the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose to meet with an exhibit designer and their director of education, as well as to explore the museum and see an IMax movie. The Tech Museum's approach and techniques for explaining technology to a general audience may spark your own ideas for explaining nanotechnology in your exhibit design. The specifications for your design are quite flexible, as we don't wish the mechanics of a museum exhibit to distract you from the concepts you are conveying to your audience. If you would like to team up with a student colleague to develop this project, we are receptive to proposals. Whether alone or in a team, you will be creating something that has never existed. The creativity, insight, inquisitiveness, openness, and energy you bring to your project can make it valuable...perhaps so valuable that it inspires a future exhibit at the Tech Museum. To amplify a theme of this course: you will not memorize answers; you will create value.
Start by reflecting on what you want to get out of this unique experience. Energetically look for intriguing, surprising, and exciting concepts. Pursue them to see how they connect to other concepts. Consider the nine questions about nanotechnology that frame our course. During the course see which questions grab you. Adopt as your mission the discovery of answers to these. Use discussions with instructors and other students, library research, web browsing, and any other reasonable and safe process. Synthesize information and create anew. Surprise us with your insights.
Lecture Slides
See Schedule for links to all lecture slides