Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Living in a Digital Age
Full course description
What is digitalization? Where did it come from? This course explores the origins of digitalization and asks: what is the point of researching the history of digitalization?. This course trains students to independently research and write an essay that answers this question. This course also develops students’ skills in self-evaluation, and finishes by asking students to pick their own grade for their final paper.
Course objectives
Upon completion of this course, students will be able to write an essay on the purpose of the history of digitalization by:
- Finding and choosing relevant and significant literature on the history of digitalization.
- Reading this literature synthetically and comparatively.
- Writing their interpretations of this literature in the form of a scholarly essay.
- Self-evaluating their researching, reading, and writing skills in order to revise and improve their work.
Prerequisites
None
Recommended reading
- Ensmenger, Nathan. ‘The Digital Construction of Technology: Rethinking the History of Computers in Society’. Technology and Culture 53, no. 4 (2012): 753–76. https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2012.0126.
- Misa, Thomas J. ‘Understanding “How Computing Has Changed the World”’. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 29, no. 4 (October 2007): 52–63. https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.2007.4407445.
- Tosh, John. The Pursuit of History. 5th ed. New York: Routledge, 2009.
ACU2018
Period 4
3 Feb 2025
4 Apr 2025
ECTS credits:
9.0Instruction language:
EnglishCoordinator:
Teaching methods:
PBL, Assignment(s), Lecture(s), Paper(s), Research, Skills, Work in subgroupsAssessment methods:
Final paperKeywords:
digitalization, history, Philosophy