This course deals with the diversity of world cultures, how technology in particular is shaped by, and in its turn shapes, the vision informing a specific culture and its curriculum, how at the same time, the global sharing of technology is inexorably contributing to more homogeneity among cultures, and finally, how this same sharing seems to be giving rise to a common "global" curriculum.

This course is designed to help participants prepare for the educational future by becoming better informed about: (1) how distinct cultures have arisen and shaped human understanding and therefore curricula in the past; (2) how technology has, for some time, played an increasingly important role in shaping both that understanding and that curriculum; and (3) how and why that role may increase. This includes helping participants appreciate the dominant characteristics of the emerging curriculum and how technology, because it is increasing shared at the global level, will play an increasingly homogenizing role in it, determining some of that global curriculum's most prominent characteristics¹. The overall aim is to focus attention on some immensely important implications of technology for education that are rarely addressed either in standard courses on technology or on curriculum.

Participant learning is illuminated by: (1) readings on history, culture, technology, and education, (2) interaction with video, audio, and computer software of various kinds, (3) field trips to various museums, concerts, technology implementation agencies, and educational institutions, and (4) interaction with peers from other cultures, both in the class, face-to-face, and around the world, through international telecommunication.

In 1996, the major work of the course will be to design a TC home page for global curriculum that will at least:

1. establish a visible home for those working to change the world's curricula to reflect the accelerating globalization we are experiencing.

2. indicate what the global curriculum is as we see it,

3. indicate how the internet can be used to support global curriculum units of various sorts,

4. provide several prototypical global curriculum units, and

Sub-goals of this work will be to establish a collaborative presence for Teachers College, Columbia University in this important subfield. This collaboration would be with a network of domestic and foreign partners who share our general outlook and our concern that curricula must be adjusted significantly to reflect global reality if school leavers and graduates are to be prepared to live in the world technology has enabled us to reshape.

This is an enormous task and can only be begun in this course. Participants will work on aspects of the problem, individually and in teams. In the effort to create a first version of this site, they will also be joined the students in TU6031, who will help with the design and will actually implement at least the skeleton of the prototype as their major work for that course.

As individuals, students will be required to produce: (1) at least one brief reflective paper on experiences such as museum visits² or field trips that clarify what globalization is and why there is a need for global curricula, (2) at least one brief review on interactions with media³ including internet surfing⁴ and use, and (3) a brief summative personal assessment essay on the implications of the global curriculum trend. In addition,, students teams will also draft the design for appropriate components of the global curriculum home page, and each student's contribution to the team task will be specified⁵.

Books

Barraclough, Geoffery, ed The TIMES concise historical atlas of the world   (third edition) London: Times Books Ltd 1992 (ISBN 0-7230-0386-6)

Ehrlich, Paul R. and Anne H. Ehrlich The population explosion   New York: Simon and Schuster 1990 (ISBN 0-671-68984-3)

Johnson, David W. , Roger T. Johnson, Edythe Johnson Holubee and Patricia Roy Circles of learning - cooperation in the classroom   ASCD 1984 (ISBN 0-87120-123-2)

Kidron, Michael and Ronald Segal The state of the world atlas   New York: Penguin 1995 (ISBN 0-14-025204-5)

Ponting, Clive A green history of the world: the environment and the collapse of great civilizations   Penguin: New York 1991 (ISBN 0-14-017660-8)

¹ Because the course directly deals with a number of major cultures and the interplay among them, students deal directly and extensively with the major issues of cultural diversity.

² For example, students may be required to compare the vision/technology interplay as manifest in the Metropolitan Museum's Cloisters with that evident in the Islamic section of the Metropolitan's main collection on Fifth Avenue.

³ For example, students might be required to compare the clash of visions and technologies explored in the films: The Mission   or The Black Robe   or Cabeza de Vaca.

⁴ For example, a student working in this capacity might document where certain global topics are found and how to research them on the internet, or might design a section of the global curriculum page that will guide users outside TC on using the internet for this effort.

⁵ This might be one of the prototypical units included in the page, such as a unit focused on the period of Western European exploration (1450 - 1600), exploring how this period in history can be studied at both the global and local level. It would suggest what students around the world using this unit would be required to study (a selected set of common materials (video, readings, software, etc) on the period), what activities they might engage in (conduct some local research to enrich the insight obtainable from local sources or perspectives), and how local participants might contribute to revision of the unit's material for the future, (by telecommunicating with peers elsewhere in the world who are working concurrently on the same unit).