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Add-drop time has come and gone for the fall semester. However, if you are still looking to pick up a class, Pop! Tech, a class on popular culture and new technologies, starts this Friday.
The class has been around for eight years and is taught by an array of professors teaching in all different areas at the University of Maine. The class counts toward interdisciplinary credits and is designed to meet the requirements in three categories – new media, technology in society and public administration. Students from any major are invited to take the class.
The course is conducted mostly online and partially in a classroom. Although the class starts late in the semester and ends with the rest of them in December, the class isn’t cutting any corners. Pop! Tech’s main focus is the three-day conference held via video in the Soderberg Center at UMaine. Each of the three sessions is 10 hours long. The class is recommended, because of its workload, to students with junior or senior standing, or those with permission from an advisor.
Outside the three days of the conference, Ken Nichols, one professor of the course, considers Pop! Tech very flexible. It is held largely online and students decide where in their schedules to fit it in. This is good for nontraditional students, parents and students with jobs to juggle, or even students who prefer sleeping until noon.
This year, the theme of the conference is “Grand Challenges.” It will focus on globalization, global warming, the development of new energy sources, the transformation in the global social order brought about by new communication technologies, along with many other topics. Speakers will also touch upon how technologies, demographics, economics, environment and governance can help people prepare better for the future.
“Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath are an in-our-face example of the powers, consequences and limitations of both material and social technology impacts,” Ken Nichols said.
Pop! Tech is a hands-on course encouraging students to think of aspects from many different angles. Each professor will bring a different perspective to the class, whether it is science, communication, psychology or reality.
“This is one of the greatest classes I have taken. It was on politics, adventures and global issues. It had a little bit of everything for everyone,” said Serena Beemis-Goodall, a public management major who took the class last year.
Nichols said students tend to come away from the class with a different outlook on technology. It is more than science and the future. It is also about yesterday’s effect on today and today’s effect on tomorrow.
“As we shape technology, it, in turn, becomes a major force in shaping us,” Nichols said. He pointed out farmers who were forced to become mill workers during the industrial age. He raises questions of what constitutes being human. Will computers be able to think and talk like us one day?, he asks.
“How does technology help us deal with – and also generate – unavoidable challenges in our futures? That’s what this eccentric course is about,” he said.
