COURSE CONTENT

 THEMES & AREAS OF STUDY

 

One's identity has always been shaped by one's environment, one's culture, one's education, one's relationships [parents and peers] and one's experiences. Technology has reshaped a person's interactions with all of these factors. 

 

•      ILLUSIONS AND DELUSIONS :

Never before has individual identity been so empowered, nor has personal empowerment relied so much on others. This is the paradox of the hyper-connected digital era.  

          

 

•   TRUTH, LIES and FAKE NEWS

 Not only do increasing numbers of people lack basic knowledge, they reject fundamental rules of evidence and refuse to learn how to make logical argument. In doing so, they risk throwing away centuries of accumulated knowledge and undermining the practices and habits that allow us to develop new knowledge. "The Death of Expertise."

 

•     THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

"Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have." - Margaret Mead

 

• CHANGE

"Be the change you want to see in the world." - Mahatma Gandhi

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LITERARY RESOURCES:

• LITERARY TERMINOLOGY BOOKLET
• POETIC DEVICES
• TYPES OF POEMS
• ELEMENTS of the SHORT STORY

 

COMPOSITION & WRITING

• COMPOSITION BOOKLET  

 

SYNTAX AND MECHANICS

•     Mechanics and Editing
•     Sentence Combining

 

The following texts and articles were examined in the development of this course :

• Democracy in America by Alexis de Toqueville
• Sapiens and Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari
• The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt
• The Death of Expertise by Tom Nichols
• The Brain by David Eagleman
• The Self Illusion by Bruce Hood
• On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder
• Teaching Students to Drive Their Brains 
• The Power of the Adolescent Brain by Thomas Armstrong

 

• New Science of the Brain by Carl Zimmer
• The Age of Disbelief by Joel Achenbach
• Rethinking Gender - National Geographic
• The Science of Addiction by Fran Smith
• The Search for Happiness by Dan Buettnar
• The Golden Age of Free Speech by Alice Gregory
• Awake  by Bill Wasik
• Hello my Score is 549 by Mara Hvistendahl
• What Lies Ahead - Wired Magazine
• How Social Media Got Weaponized by Emerson T Brooking and PW Singer
• Silicon Valley is Addicting Us to Our Phones by Bianca Bosker
• Better Watch What You Say by Greg Lukinoff and Jonathan Haidt
• That's Not Funny by Caitlin Flanagan
• The 100 Greatest Innovations of the Year - Popular Science
• The State of Truthiness by Michael Scherer
• Dawn of the New Brain - Newsweek