Emily Wang recently asked me if I'd ever considered teaching a 1-credit evening course at Olin (which alumni can do, now -- it's a great idea to get multiple Olin generations interacting). Here's the resultant brainstorm. Note that these are things I'd like to teach, not things I will teach, because of the finite amount of bandwidth humans have...

  1. A Brief Survey of Engineering Education History and Philosophy (springboarding off the Purdue graduate class for inspiration, but with some major tweaks)
  2. Radical Tansparency (applying open source philosophy to both software and non-software settings)
  3. Somatic awareness and bodywork (I will probably do this informally in the dining hall or somewhere else on a semi-regular basis anyway, because MY shoulders need it)
  4. Using Engineering Analogies to Explore Learning and Pedagogical Theories (something I've wanted to do again since 2007, when MetaOlin delved into it; we were the first student-run course/StuCourse at Olin)
  5. Awkward Dialogues: Techniques and Practice (the topics we'd practice on would probably be stuff like feminism, spirituality/religion, leadership/politics, sexuality, etc -- the content would be "here are techniques and participation architectures that make it possible to dive deep into things without snapping into habits we may not want in the room")
  6. A Sign Language Subset for the Olin Campus (I'd need to have a co-instructor who was actually fluent in ASL for this, but basically -- I believe there's a fairly small subset of phrases, words, etc. that would make lots of sense to add to the Olin gestural language -- we already have a few Olin-specific gesture practices that we teach first-years when they come, like the thumbs-up during discussions.)