Introduction to GNED 101

Hi

I'm Dr Jim Nielson. I'll be your teacher for this elective. I like it when people call me "Dr. Jim" because I used to want to be a DJ, and I try to be a bit of a DJ as a lecturer and a writer of these review essays too.

The challenge of GNED 101 is to learn how to learn better. The keys are paying attention, thinking, asking questions, and being open-minded as you try to understand how someone else is thinking. Each week's topic is coming from a slightly different angle and asking for different skills from you in understanding and thinking about the material.

If you don't like one week's topic, stick around. You may well find the next week's topic of greater interest.

How to succeed in this class

Come to class, pay attention, ask questions, raise issues.

I strongly encourage you to read these review essays as your study method. You may want to take notes about the topics listed under Be sure you understand at the beginning and end of the review pages.

The early computer scientist Norbert Wiener once wrote: "The human brain evidently operates on some variation of the famous principle enunciated in The Hunting of the Snark: 'What I tell you three times is true.'" The Hunting of the Snark is a long absurdist fantasy poem, by Lewis Carroll who wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. What Wiener was saying was that it is a proven principle that if you hear something three times you are likely to remember it. Three is the magic number. You have three options for learning the material in this course.

1. Come to class and listen.
2. Read the review essays, which are basically written versions of my lectures.
3. Study your notes.

Those who want to learn the material in this course fully and remember it accurately will consider doing all three! You will certainly have a better understanding if you both attend class and read these review pages.

What is GNED 101?

This course is a taster’s menu in GNED (General Education) elective subjects: philosophy, psychology, sociology, history, politics, and so forth, using issues-based readings to get you to practice taking in and processing ideas and stories. I’ll explain more about that later. The course doesn’t have a central theme. It is a series of exercises in understanding and thinking. Each week’s topic is a bit different, but the topics are generally focused not around skills or practical methods, but around ideas about how human beings are, why they are like that, and what the challenges are if we want to succeed and be good and be happy, individually and as a species.

The importance of Blackboard

It is very important that you check Blackboard daily and have configured it with an email address that you check regularly. I will be communicating with you through Blackboard announcements as well as in class, and your assignments and quizzes will be completed in Blackboard.

Textbook

There is no textbook. Readings are provided for you within each week’s lesson. Generally they are Word docs or PDF files.

Weekly work

Each week there will be a lesson and a reading on a new topic, and you will usually either take a quiz, make a discussion post, or do an exercise for 5% of your mark. There will be a four tests, two in the first half of the course and two in the second half . I encourage you to take each week as a new challenge and an exercise in understanding, thinking, and communicating. That’s what the course is for.

There is no work to do for this first week. After next week's class you will need to take a Blackboard quiz on that material.

What are GNED electives?

GNED stands for General Education. The idea behind these electives is to provide every student with a bit of the kind of liberal arts education they might get at a university, alongside whatever career training they are primarily getting at Humber.

GNED 101 is intended to help you become acquainted with how GNED electives work and what most other GNED electives will expect of you. The course is also designed to give you a taste of various disciplines and approaches that other electives go into in more detail, for instance psychology, philosophy, history, politics, and the arts.

The Ministry of Education and Humber believe these elective courses can help make more well-rounded and responsible individuals and also nurture the kind of critical thinking skills that many employers are actually increasingly asking for. Believe it or not, employers say they want workers who can think outside of the box, learn, adapt, communicate, and above all think and understand. They say they don’t just want robots. Whether these courses can actually cultivate those abilities remains to be seen, but I don't think they do any harm. Some people love electives (or some electives); others are inclined to think they are a meaningless hoop that needs to be jumped through. I encourage you to keep an open mind. I don't like sounding paternalistic at all (it reminds me how old I am and that I am man etc ;-), but there is profound truth in the adage that you will get as much out of this (or any other course) as you put into it. I have put a lot into it. And I get a lot out of it.

GNED 101 is a course taken by almost every degree student at Humber, and it is taught by dozens of different profs. The course is designed so that we can teach material we are interested in, within certain very limited parameters. There are roughly 40 possible readings we can choose from, and most profs then choose 10 or 12 of them and construct a unique course from those.

My lessons come from my own personal perspective, and you aren't expected to agree with that. But you are being tested on your ability to understand the material I'm presenting. You don't have to agree with it, and disagreement will be productive, but you have to show that you understood the basic ideas, even if you don't always approve of them or agree with them personally.

I encourage you to keep an open mind and also to treat these lessons as exercises in understanding. That's how I teach the course on the whole, and how I will evaluate your work.

Information, Knowledge and Understanding

Here's something I would like you to understand (I could put it in a quiz ,-). As a teacher, I’ve come to think that there is a difference between information, knowledge, and understanding. Much of education seems to be focused on memorizing information. But information is now dirt cheap, and you certainly don’t need me to help you get it. I tend to think that information is just (meaningless) facts or data, without any context or understanding. Knowledge is the combination of various facts and ideas to create a meaningful “story” or a coherent set of interconnected pieces of information. Understanding involves an engaged appreciation of knowledge as something that makes sense, even if you don’t agree with it or feel it personally.

These distinctions are explained more fully at the end of this document  --- and you should study that part carefully, as it could appear on a test. If you don't agree with the way, I'm thinking, by the way, that's fine - and I will even be interested in hearing how your views differ. But what I'm evaluating you on, when it comes to test, is that you have accurately understood, not that you agree.

In-depth: Why Humber makes students take GNED electives

Various rationales are given for the value of these electives. The first is that employers actually do complain to the Ministry of Education about having a hard time finding people to hire who are capable of paying attention, fully and deeply understanding things, and doing independent critical thinking for themselves. (I was skeptical too. I assumed employers just wanted obedient robots; but I’ve now seen some of the evidence for this new focus on employees who can think critically, and these electives have recently been given a more central place in Humber’s structure.)

Many employers say they appreciate it when their employees have the thinking and communication skills that these electives are designed to promote and help you practice. With offshoring of manufacturing jobs to the developing world and the increasing role of AI and robots in work, there are fewer and fewer well-paid jobs that don’t require an ability to understand complex things, think critically, and communicate effectively with others. Employers favour applicants who show they can understand, think, and think outside of the box when it's called for.

 “Squee” Gordon’s desire to give everyone a bit of education

A second argument (one that might never cross your mind) has to do with the kind of thinking that “Squee” Gordon – president of Humber for 25 years – had about education. Like the Ministry of Education, he strongly believed that you deserve to get a bit of an education at college, and not just training. He genuinely thought he was doing something good for you by making these electives part of your diploma.

The argument here revolves around whether the college system has done its job if it has trained you to be an employable cog in the machinery of capitalist labour, or whether it has a responsibility to try to open your minds to other ways of thinking, give you context and some understanding of the history of our current world, expose you to alternative attitudes, etc, and provide you with some language to understand your own values and prejudices more fully and critically.

Someone with values like President Squee Gordon’s might say, for instance, that just because someone didn’t do that well in high school, or just because they are lower class and really need to get a job, or just because they may come from a background culture where broad critical thinking is not encouraged, it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have access to at least some of the “liberal education” that more privileged people get in their university degrees. Everyone deserves to learn about other ways of thinking, explore their own ways of thinking, and grow in school, not just get “trained.” You may not agree with this view – and there are plenty of arguments that can be made against it – but it is central to the Ministry’s view of college education, Humber’s view, and my own values.

We want responsible fellow citizens who can understand and think

So the purpose of elective classes like these is not really first and foremost to make more employable graduates or to do you a favour, but to encourage people to think carefully outside of their own boxes, understand other perspectives, practice creative problem solving, understand themselves and their own biases, and respect and appreciate the diverse society in which we live. Squee Gordon's belief was that you deserve this, and he presumed that whoever you are if you are here you are rich enough to be able to appreciate it.

The Ministry of Education, Squee Gordon, me. Are all of these just presumptuous bastards? Do we really think that we know what will make better people, and that it is critical thinking, understanding, and communication, and that you need our help with it? I'm not sure. But we like to think that we mean well. It's a question to be discussed and we can discuss it in this class,or at least it's a question that I am interested in and care about. One of the reasons I like teaching is that I feel like I am doing good in the world, but on another level I'm aware that I am a part of an institution that represents privilege and power.

A course by and for the privileged?

Yes, at least somewhat. This course started out as a kind of old-school liberal look at old school questions, most of them originating from a privileged white Canadian perspective.

More recently the course was updated to make content more inclusive and progressive, but it still suffers from being largely designed and written by white Canadians for white Canadians (though often trying to get us to see outside our own bubble). Meanwhile, more and more of my students have been becoming non-white, and an increasing number are not Canadians either! At the same time, thanks to social media, the general awareness of the average person has come to include many of the topics that were included here when they were less familiar in pop culture: from the Climate Crisis to Indigenous Experience, from the limits of privileged white consciousness to the struggles of those who are not part of the privileged class - whether economically, or in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, etc - the average student is much more awake to the issues than many of these readings and topics seem to assume. The world caught up with GNED 101, quickly, and has in many ways surpassed it. It's ready for a revamp, and one is coming.

In the meantime, you will probably notice the bias of these topics and reading: white, leftist, "Western.." A lot of this material we will be looking at, even if is not necessarily written by straight white men, still seems to be directed primarily toward us, whether it talks about preoccupations we are privileged to have, or it is trying to make us understand our blindness and privilege. Most of you, however, are not straight, white Canadian males. I, on the other hand, am. And I am aware of the ways in which this could lead me to make mistakes or even hurtful assumptions in my teaching. If you feel this is happening, I genuinely hope you will call me on it, and we can discuss.

Humber College is interested in making both its curriculum and its faculty more inclusive - or at least my department appears to be genuinely interested, at least right now. I am cautitiously optimistic. I have seen my faculty evolve in the twelve years I've been here. The last ten years, though they have been hard, have seemed to me to be the most progressive since my childhood. (I was a little boy during the 1960s and came of age in the 1970s.) I don't think it's just a nostalgia for my youth when I am excited by the real changes in mass consciousness that are happening now.

The 2010s have been a revolutionary time in the explosion of insight about privilege, above all white and male privilege, here in Canada. Even before movements like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, just teaching at Humber and living in Toronto made me more conscious of the beauty of diversity and the partiality and occasional poverty of my own privileged perspectives.

I'm not always aware of the bias and unquestioned assumptions in our topics and readings. The course needs to be redesigned, but I like to think that many of the ideas are worth sharing with all people or at least exploring. They aren't just misguided white ideas. But I am ready to learn; I am ready to have my own attitudes and the ideas in the reading challenged (at least I hope I am) - including by you. For me, the purpose of the course is to practice understanding, critical thinking, and communication. Some of the topics we will look at will be more relatable than others for you. But we can't have a conversation if you don't start by being open to considering the views and understanding the information. That is learning. Hopefully we both will grow a bit. If you come out of the course not having changed your mind about anything, one or both of us have failed in our goal.

Memorization is not enough in a class like this

GNED classes are not primarily about learning a specific skill and even less about memorizing facts. This class is about engaging with ideas, understanding them, thinking about them, and having informed and responsible opinions about them, instead of just whatever automatic prejudices or personal interests you may feel.

You will need to remember some facts and words to do well in this class, but memorizing information that is otherwise meaningless to you will not get you very far. You need to “memorize” meaningful information. In order for information to be meaningful, you need not just to remember it, but to "take it on board" (into your head), understand it, and think about it.

It has to have some meaning and context for you; you need to care about it a little, even.

Your job in this class, then – what you are supposed to be practicing and getting better at – is to do your best to understand the material you are being exposed to - and ask me for help when you can't. Only then can you think critically about it or form valid and accurate understandings and opinions. Therefore, I encourage you to fight against apathy and alienation in your attitude toward the class. You will find that the more attention you pay, the more meaningful ideas are and the more you care about them, while the less you pay attention and care about them, the more meaningless (and incomprehensible) they will seem. In my experience, this is true in life generally. ,-)

Information, Knowledge, Understanding

Please try to understand what I say in the following and think about it. It's the kind of thing I might ask you to apply in a quiz.

Many critics have worried that the Internet, by making information so cheap, is serving to devalue knowledge. People have become less and less inclined to remember any information in their “meat minds”: not just phone numbers, appointments,  or mathematical formulas, but also facts about history or the wider world, the meanings of words, who said what and when (and why), etc. There is a growing sentiment that we don’t need to know stuff in our brains, because if we need the information, Google will have it for us when the time comes. This is sometimes called “Google Knowing,” to distinguish it from the kind of knowing where you have the information in your head and can retrieve it without using your phone.

I would like to encourage you to consider possible differences between the concepts of information, knowledge, and understanding. And to understand these terms as I will use them in this class. (Again, you might have different ideas, and I would be happy to hear them.)

I like to define these terms as follows:

Information
(meaningless) facts or data, without context or understanding

Knowledge
Connected, meaningful arrangements of pieces of information, stored in a person’s mind; facts and data with enough connections to other contextual facts to become meaningful

Understanding
knowledge of information in context and with the kind of engaged, perhaps even empathetic, appreciation of why they might matter enough to someone to understand and explain them to someone else, enter into a conversation about them etc

The sentence Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his "I have a dream" speech in 1963 is an example of information. Information on its own is meaningless. When people memorize that factoid, they have understood nothing. Too much of school is treated as though memorizing factoids is an end goal.

What more would be required to make this information into knowledge, and what in turn would convert the knowledge to true understanding?

Understanding is seeing information in context, seeing information as meaningful.

Without having knowledge that is already in your head (as opposed to knowledge that is sitting on Wikipedia or dutifully copied into your class notes without any comprehension, or available as semi-meaningless factoids in a PowerPoint bullet-list), information remains meaningless.

To my mind, the reason it may still be valuable to know things in our meat memory - that is, actually to remember and understand them, and be able to recall them even when our phone's battery is dead - is because if you don't know anything you can't know or understand anything else.

For instance, you would be right to say that there is little point in memorizing the year that Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his speech. Taken in isolation, as a factoid to memorize, you would certainly be correct – the date is just meaningless information. But if I tell you that King delivered the speech near the culmination of the American civil rights movement, which had lasted for eight bitter years already and was not over yet (and is not over now), it may actually mean something to you. A date like that will mean something if you know other dates meaningfullly. If you already know - personally, individually, in your head - what else happened around 1963, the circumstances in which King was speaking, and so forth – in other words, if 1963 means something to you. If you have an idea when American slavery was abolished (1865), what happened to African Americans in the next hundred years, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, when King was born, when King was assassinated, and any number of other "meaningless dates" (and other "meaningless" data) that could provide a meaningful context for the date of King's speech - then the information becomes meaningful, becomes knowledge. If we never commit any “meaningless” information to memory, it seems possible to me that we can never build up any real knowledge and understanding.

PowerPoint does not empower learning

Even when I am teaching live, I don’t upload my PowerPoint slides, instead making you read something like this. Critics have begun attacking PowerPoint because, as one article’s title put it, “It makes students stupid and professors boring.” (This was in Business Insider, just in case you immediately assume that it was in Liberal Arts newsletter or something!)

PowerPoint, I suggest, has many shortcomings when it comes to genuine learning. PowerPoint

• Gives you key words or phrases that are meaningless without context and understanding.
  
• Distracts from listening and thinking.
  
• Doesn’t represent logical connections well.
  
• Is only as reliable as the person who made it.

I use PowerPoint mostly as reminders of what I want to say and multimedia delivery systems for things that I want to show you or have you hear.

I believe that you cannot learn anything in this class from memorizing PowerPoint bullets. Instead, I expect you to read stuff like this, listen and talk in class, pay attention, understand, ask questions, learn. When I am evaluating you I am assessing your learning.

Although things seem to be changing, when I first started teaching here, it felt like many people were making it a point of honour to get through every class learning as little as possible. If you've taken that approach yourself in school (and there are lots of perfectly understandable reasons why people may do that), that attitude to learning will be tested here!

Verbum sat. Look it up.