Lecture Notes
or, since everything these days has to have a trademark and a logo (see Naomi Klein's No Logo),
elviNotes®™
Elvin Wyly
Teaching is a wonderfully fascinating, exciting, and important privilege. But it is shaped by tensions and contradictions. Among the most important is the dialectic of dynamism. On the one hand, most everyone wants the teaching and learning experience to be dynamic, interesting, and relevant to current events: most people don't really care for those classes in which the instructor simply stands up and reads out of a textbook, or presents a lecture prepared a decade ago, and has nothing to say about contemporary issues, things that are always changing, always unpredictable, always disorganized and under construction. On the other hand, dynamism is the last thing people want when it comes to the transactional details of exams and grades. For these things, people want everything to be manageable, pragmatic, and easily accessible. What exactly is going to be on the test?
Fortunately, a simple web page like this makes it possible to balance the tensions of these two goals -- change and interest versus pragmatism and predictability. I write out fairly detailed lecture notes, and I revise them regularly, taking into consideration what I've learned from recent events, various things I've read lately, and helpful suggestions I've received from students. I'm always updating material and reorganizing my lectures right up to the last minute, when I post the latest version to the website and walk into class. What this means is that the course web page has an evolving record of materials covered in class that will help you keep track of what we've done, and to help you prepare for the examinations.
The multiple choice sections of the examinations are based primarily on the slides I show in class. These slides are regularly updated, and then posted to the class web page shortly before each time we meet in class.
The extended lecture notes, as well as the required readings noted on the course schedule, will help you in your work on the independent written project, and in preparing for the essay component of the final examination.
Terms of Use
1. All lecture notes are subject to change right up to the time of the lecture as noted in the course schedule. You're free to download all of the lecture notes whenever you'd like, but depending on when you do this, much of what you'll get will be last year's version. I try to make at least a few improvements to each lecture whenever I have the chance. If you need something polished, stable, and un-changing, then read the textbook.
2. Take -- and create -- your own notes. "Learn" is not a transitive verb. Perhaps the single most important threat to the daily experience of teaching and learning is the false assumption that "information consumption" is equivalent to serious study. This assumption was understandable in the age of information scarcity that lasted until the closing years of the twentieth century. In that old era, one of the primary functions of the university was to serve as a gatekeeper/storehouse for socially valuable information. But now we're all swimming in information everywhere we turn -- indeed, we seem to have too much of it, from an almost unlimited array of sources. For many people, professors at the university are just another media source, or what the infoedutainment industry calls "content providers." When the information is all there at your fingertips, quickly streamed through the Internet cloud from anywhere in the world using whatever advanced must-have gadget that might be invented tomorrow, it's all too easy to slip into the role of a passive consumer, waiting to be entertained.
I strongly recommend that you guard against this tendency in all you do at the university. One simple and powerful tool: take notes, by which I really mean write notes out with your hand. Transform the experience of passive media consumption into an active, creative, and productive process. When you take notes, you should be in a creative/productive, rather than recording/consumptive, mode. In other words, you should not try to create a perfect, objective, complete record of everything that happened inside the classroom; you already have access to the slides I'll use, as well as more extended written lecture notes. This liberates you to use the note-taking process for much more interesting and productive possibilities, including, but not limited to, a) drawing connections with theories and examples you've learned in other courses, b) reflecting on key strengths and limitations of the alternative approaches I've described in a particular area, c) brainstorming on interesting things you might wish to explore for projects in this course, or for other courses, and d) writing down questions you'd like to ask, either in class or during office hours.
3. Please do not regard these notes as substitutes for attendance. To be sure, if you miss class a few times, these notes will certainly help. But if you make a habit of never showing up, you will not see the many maps, photographs, and other materials that I show in class to illustrate key points. You will not have the chance to ask questions. You will not get a chance to make fun of me for my silly jokes. You will not have a chance to poke fun at me for my crazy collection of odd ties of various colours and designs (did you realize that Donald Trump launched his own line of ties? Bad hair, good ties).
Even more important, if you don't show up, you won't get the chance for those unexpected conversations with those talented, brilliant colleagues sitting right next to you. Look around you: these are your peers, your allies, and your teachers. You get the chance for unexpected, valuable learning experiences when you engage in real, live, human, face-to-face conversations.
It is also the case that if a sufficient number of our colleagues decide not to show up, sooner or later I will simply be forced to eliminate the convenience of making everything available. Allen Stewart Konigsberg's famous advice might not get you all the way to the mark of 80 percent, but showing up is certainly important ("Eighty percent of success is showing up" -- Konigsberg is also known as Woody Allen). UBC is not an online university (yet). In our frantic infoedutainment society, your most valuable asset is your attention. That's what I want. And not mediated through the intricate matrix of wired and wireless electronic impulses that now pervade our society. Please, do try to make it to class so we can share a presence as we explore the extraordinary fascinations and passions of cities and urban life.
4. If you have any questions, feel free to stop by my office hours for a chat. If you can't make my office hours, then just stop by my office whenever you're in the vicinity, and knock on my door to see if I'm available. I have an open-door policy, even when the door is closed: I close it only because there is often a very loud *bang* *bang* *bang* from the steam pipes in the hall ceiling right outside my office. Our building, built in the 1920s, has, shall we say, character.
Please think twice before sending me emails about the lecture notes. I began writing and posting my lecture notes as one way of coping with the many emails sent by students who missed class, then fired off questions like, "Did I miss anything in class today?"
Part of "To Do: An Interactive Installation," Orchard Road, Singapore, January 2010 (Elvin Wyly). "We all procrastinate way too much in our lives, and this is just a symbol to the world that we mean what we say," read the promotional material for the installation, a giant wall of Post-It Notes. Anyone and everyone was invited to stop by and write their personal entry on an evolving "To Do" list. The installation was created by Ape Communications, with support from a local commercial/retail business improvement district (Orchard Central), and 3M. Guess who manufactures Post-It Notes?
All I ask for is your attention. But, yes, I know, that's a lot to ask. In our turbocharged, overloaded infoedutainment society, your most valuable asset is your attention. It is also the asset most vulnerable to the assaults of nearly every technology in use today by private companies, public institutions, and individual and collective social groups. We are all complicit. Things have gotten so bad that there is now a nonprofit group, led by an engineer from Intel, called the Information Overload Research Group. There is a new field of study known as "interruption science." Gloria Mark, a leader in this field, has conducted research suggesting that the typical knowledge worker switches tasks every three minutes, "and, once distracted ... takes nearly a half-hour to resume the original task." Maggie Jackson, who authored "Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age," sums up the dilemmas this way: "Beeped and pinged, interrupted and inundated, overloaded and hurried -- that's how we live our lives today. We prize knowledge work -- work that relies on our intellectual abilities -- and yet increasingly feel that we have no time to think. ... The greatest casualty of our mobile, high-tech age is attention. By fragmenting and diffusing our powers of attention, we are undermining our capacity to thrive in a complex, ever-shifting world." Maggie Jackson (2008), quoted in Marci Alboher, "Fighting a War Against Distraction." New York Times, June 22, Shifting Careers section. Things just keep getting worse. Facebook status updates, it seems, require attention spans that are, like, just way too long - so now we have Twitter. On the Canadian launch of the iPad, the National Post financial section highlighted the extraordinary new possibilties for wealthy investores eager to tap the flood of real-time information. But while "market enthusiasts can get market intelligence 24/7, and track market developments overseas when domestic markets are closed," market researcher Murray Leith notes, there is a serious danger of "information overload." The average stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange has been held for only six months, down from about two years in the early 1990s, and six years during the 1970s. "This seems like the investment equivalent of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder," according to one money manager. All quotes from David Pett (2010). "Too Much Information: iPad Just the Latest Way for Investors to Drown in Information Overload." National Post, May 29, FP8.
Taking notes on The City. Graffiti, Macao, February 2010 (Elvin Wyly). Graffito comes from the Italian and French graffio, "a scratching."
CopyLeft 2013 Elvin K. Wyly
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