Welcome to the Educational Psychology 792: Tools for Thought course website for the Fall 2007 semester at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. This site contains student work from the course, so access is currently restricted to members of the class.
If you are interested in the course but are not enrolled, please feel free to look over the course description below as well as the online syllabus. You can also write to the instructor for more information.
This course is about emerging educational technologies in historical and psychological perspective. We will look at theories of cognition and tool use, as well as specific examples of tools and their impact on thinking, learning, and teaching.
The course is divided into roughly two parts. The first part is a rigorous examination of theories of tools and thinking. We look at Brosterman (an overview of Froebel and the development and impact of the kindergarten movement); Cuban and Postman (noted techno-agnostics); Dewey (his work on school as an environment designed for learning); Donald (a examination of the development of thinking on an evolutionary scale); Illich and McLuhan (classic works on the impact of tools on culture and society); Papert (a disciple of Piaget and one of the leading advocates of computation-in-education); Vygotsky (a leading theorist of development as a cultural -- rather than merely individual -- phenomenon); and Turkle (foundational work on the psychology of computation).
The first half of the course addresses the fundamental question: what is a tool, and how to tools relate to thinking? This is the question posed in the midterm paper. Along the way to answering that basic question, we explore examples of tools for thinking: the Gifts and Occupations, Logo, film and television, and School itself.
In the second half of the course, the emphasis moves from understanding tools and thinking in general to understanding specific tools. We look at writing, literacy, and communication technologies as a case study of a domain that has been influenced by the development of new tools. Readings explore how typewriters, email, hypertext, and presentation software change what we learn, how we think, and the ways we communicate.