Purpose of the Book
This book was written by students in STS 1010: Science, Technology and Society, a course taught by Dr. Mary Kate Fidler at Clemson University, South Carolina during the Fall 2020 semester. It is also the outcome of the creative collaboration between Dr. Fidler’s course and Clemson Libraries’s emerging open pedagogy program. An innovative approach to teaching that has combines the constructivist approach to education with cutting edge internet publishing technology, open pedagogy seeks to motivate students and stimulate their learning through engaging them to showcase their class projects as a web publication. It challenges students to work together to create a work for the public, gives them flexibility in deciding what they produce, and teaches them skills that apply to real life, such as professional writing and editing, peer review and copyright. Open pedagogy result in works that have value beyond traditional assignments, which are evaluated only by the instructor and have value to students only as a grade. Assignments produced through open pedagogy can be available for the long term on the internet, continuously edited by students, and they can also be used by students to highlight their personal creativity and professional writing skills. Students work in teams to write online publications under the instructor’s guidance, offer feedback for each other’s work, and open pedagogy can help stimulate a collaborative spirit and sense of community in online educational settings, where student interaction is difficult.
During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, when students were forced study online and face many uncertainties, the novelty, creativity and student centered nature of open pedagogy has the potential help improve the quality of learning at a difficult time for education. The book is an exploration of open pedagogy in new educational environments by Dr. Fidler and Clemson Libraries.
Book Structure
This book is organized into 4 parts, each based on a larger topic that students have chosen to study and write research papers on. Each part contains several short student papers, all related to the larger topic of the course, the interaction between science, technology and human society. Students highlight key concepts they wish for the reader to learn in their chapters, and also provide questions to tests the reader’s knowledge after reading the chapters.
