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Meta Olin

Page history last edited by Andy Pethan 12 years, 11 months ago

During my first semester at Olin, I was an active fighter for a more self-directed, project-based learning experience than I was already getting (for a bit more on this, see the second paragraph of my reflection on service).  One night when meeting to discuss the Olin curriculum, a friend suggested an idea for a small group "independent" study, effectively a student-created course that would go down in the records as an independent study for each participant.  The idea was to study Olin College itself through a number of lenses by getting different professors to teach us, each for a few weeks, so that we could better understand Olin through the eyes of different academic disciplines.  I was easily intrigued.  We recruited a small team of six, including students from all four classes and a 4:2 men:women gender balance.  After going around to a number of professors, six agreed to teach us a two week segment in their discipline with a seventh serving as the overall advisor.  We called this course "MetaOlin".

 

We studied each of the six completely unrelated topics with a professor in two week modules during the spring semester of my freshman year:

  • Systems Engineering – Brian Bingham – stocks and flows, diagrams, feedback
  • Diversity – Zhenya Zastavker – backpack of privilege, epistemic privilege
  • Information Literacy – Dee Magnoni – exponential growth of information, lifelong learning
  • Communications – Raymond Yim – transmitters/receivers, linear algebra, applied to pedagogy
  • History – Robert Martello – synthesis of narrative and analysis
  • Pedagogy – Chris Morse – active learning, grades and assessment, misconceptions
  • (Independent Study Advisor – Rebecca Christianson )

 

For the rest of the writing, it may be helpful to refer to the giant PDF we generated as our final report for the semester.  Every project our group worked on during the semester is contained inside.  Note that it is 148 pages, 12MB, and takes a while to download!  Below is a quick preview of a few of the projects:

 

   
A flow model for passing knowledge between two people  A set of nodes re-broacasting a signal picked up from the central node (teacher) 

 

 

 
A basic system diagram of students, professors, school administration, and corporations interacting with the senior capstone (SCOPE) program A slide from a presentation on the history of the Olin website and how its changes affected the message the school was broadcasting

 

During the first few modules, each project was fairly separate.  We created a system model of Olin and analyzed it to identify burnout.  We wrote scientific autobiographies and re-wrote them as a different gender/race.  We built a co-curricular to teach information literacy skills.  But then something magical started to happen: as end of the semester pressures started to take a toll on the group, we no longer had time to finish the deliverable for each unit before the next one began.  We had a lot of ideas that seemed to correlate across topics, and began to use those as the basis for some of our new projects.  One of my favorites was comparing teacher-centric learning to peer-to-peer learning using digital communications models and equations.  As a clueless first-year student, I co-authored a short paper analyzing information loss from a broadcast tower to a set of distributed nodes, and then using electrical engineering equations to determine how much loss could be reduced by allowing the recipients to rebroadcast their messages to nearby nodes.  Beyond this, our group had countless discussions about approaches to learning and the many mental models we can use to understand our world.

 

In this student-generated course, we intentionally set ourselves up for an interdisciplinary experience with our eclectic set of modules.  However, I had never expected to create the variety of original ideas that our group came up with.  Looking back, I can point to a number of later projects at Olin that have drawn from ideas first conceived with this group.  I can also point to MetaOlin as the powerful spark behind my blazing passion for education.  The number of powerful ideas that we generated about learning, though often abstract, were enough to push me to take a course in education, read many books, and eventually co-found a software company in education.

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