The ACTLab at the University of Texas at Austin offers a Weird Science Course.
ACTLab classes are about learning to think for yourself, to work creatively, cooperate in complex endeavors, and question received knowledges.
This semester, students made a laser harp, a water bridge, and a smoke cannon. In high school physics all we got to do was drop eggs off the roof and shoot rockets.
The ACTLab currently offers 13 courses, including these two for next year:
Disruptive Technologies (New for Spring 2008): What constitutes disruptive technology, history of disruptive technologies, techniques of intervention, oppositional and emergent discourses, media and subversion, political power and postmodernity, hypothetical future medias.
The Uncanny (New for Fall 2008): Things, situations, sounds, and discourses that give you the creeps. Beginning with Freud’s theory of the “Unheimlich”, the Uncanny Valley effect in extreme digital animation, Nineteenth Century fascination with spirit communication, and technology in science fiction/fictions of science, we’ll study and practice making things that evoke that sense of something hovering just beyond comprehension.
Sounds like fun!
Tags: Critical Thinking, disruptive-technologies, Education, university-of-texas-at-austin, weird-science
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