Monday, May 31, 2010

End of Spring 2010 Course



This is the final post for the Spring 2010 HUM 246: Creating Thinking class.

Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind remained the core text for the course, and additional exercises from the book were added to the "Pink Portfolio" submitted at the semester's end; the lack of a Pink Portfolio is the single greatest contributor to the low grades seen in the statistics below.  This semester saw the inclusion of additional reading materials over last fall's pilot course, including Tim Brown's Design Thinking article from the Harvard Business Review, Dan Pink's The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need, and Jeff Jarvis' What Would Google Do.  Additional activities including a student-driven Improv Everywhere performance at WalMart, collaborative presentations, student-designed study guides, and the return of the Egg Protection Device added further variety to the class.  Discussions this semester, as in the pilot course, were at times spirited and engaging.  Moving forward, in the third iteration of this class I aim to add more hands-on activities, accelerate the readings, and return to the self-selected 20% projects from the inaugural course syllabus.  Projects from the semester remain linked to in the Online Course Materials at left.

If you have any questions about this course, you can reach me at bencapozzi at mac dot com.

~mrc

Statistics for the course:
24 students first week
21 students final week
8 As
1 B
3 Cs
6 Ds
2 Fs
and 1 Incomplete