A novel and hands-on approach to teaching about technology and society

On a sunny Wednesday morning in the Education Commons, undergraduates clustered in groups at two long tables around a standing rigid-heddle loom, portable tabletop loom, and small Loopdeloom weaving kit. A 3D printer and resulting fabrications, circuits, spools, beads, and paintbrushes lined the walls and cubbies of the makerspace, located in the George A. Weiss Pavilion at Franklin Field.

Elly R. Truitt, an associate professor in the Department of History & Sociology of Science in the School of Arts & Sciences, approached a group of students weaving lilac and red yarn into blue yarn to ask what they were representing with colors and patterns. Jajwalya “Jaj” Karajgikar, the applied data science librarian, noted that last year, the Penn Libraries’ AI Literacy Interest Group made a loom weaving representing how they felt about artificial intelligence.

The field trip to the Education Commons was for Truitt’s newly reimagined Technology & Society course, which follows the threads of communication and information technologies from the invention of writing to modern-day large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.

What do looms have to do with communication and information technologies? Truitt explained that the punch card technology used in weaving was vital to the development of early calculating machines and computers. In a previous class at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts on the sixth floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, the students viewed a rare early 19th-century book of hours that was woven from silk on a Jacquard loom using punch cards.

“My definition of technology before I came to the class was just digital. I never knew that things that were physical can be considered technology,” says Heer Patel, a third-year biology major from Philadelphia.

Justin Weisser, a fourth-year Wharton School student from Roslyn, New York, says he liked the practical applications in the class—that physically interacting with history appealed to him more than just reading about it. “It’s very easy to take for granted the things we have in everyday life, and what I’ll take away from this class is there’s a vast history—millennia of it—behind the world we live in today,” Weisser says.

Both he and Heer appreciated that the course brought them to places on campus they previously didn’t know existed and exposed them to different resources. “I wish I’d taken it sooner,” Weisser says.

Mission accomplished for Truitt.

“The syllabus is designed—and the assignments are designed—to give students this broader context to think about these pressing issues that are facing them, to introduce them to the wealth of the resources at the University, and to habituate students to using those resources,” Truitt says. Tex Kang, program coordinator for technology and play, encouraged students to return to the Education Commons, where they have up to 50 hours of free 3D printing per semester for personal use.

Contextualizing communication

Technology & Society is a longstanding class—one that is both a foundational course for the Science, Technology & Society major and a departmental elective for the Health & Societies (HSOC) major. In teaching the course for the first time this semester, Truitt—a medievalist by training with research interests in automation and artificial intelligence—opted to focus on communication technologies.

Students are “sensitive already to thinking about communication technologies. They’re in our face every day,” Truitt says, mimicking the act of putting a phone inches from her face.

She says she wanted to get students thinking critically about contemporary issues of technology but in a larger context, with another pedagogical goal of getting “students to really think about how technology has been naturalized in their lives”—and no technology more so than writing. She also wants to get students to think about how they learn.

“The idea is that by learning this longer history and with experiential engagement with the material, they’ll get a good sense of what kind of learning we do in the humanities and how to learn in different ways,” Truitt says. “And they’ll also have the intellectual tools to understand what kind of tool LLMs like Chat-GPT are, and what they are good at and what the costs and benefits of using them are—both personally and societally.”

In one class, students used Play-Doh to figure out how to represent goods they needed and trade them without speaking. They also had a guest lecture from Timothy Hogue, a professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures, who is teaching the course Visible Writing: History of Writing Systems.

Fourth-year chemistry major Sarah O’Konski says, “It’s so easy—especially within science—to have a narrow perspective,” but this course broadened her horizons. Until now, she had spent a lot of time learning about science without learning about its history. This semester, however, she took both Technology & Society and Medicine in History and became interested in science communication. In Truitt’s course, she says she found it fascinating how documentation of science has changed over time.

“I think we discount earlier cultures as being less advanced, but we’ve seen through this class that there have been so many advancements,” says O’Konski, who is from Sugar Notch, Pennsylvania. She also “really enjoyed getting this larger perspective that’s not entirely Eurocentric.”

Exploring Penn resources

“The history of Penn is really important in terms of the history of computing,” Truitt says. For example, the ENIAC—the world’s first general-purpose digital computer—was built and operated at Penn during World War II.

Then there are the many acquisitions that help scholars understand the evolution of communication technologies. The class visited the Penn Museum to view the early Mesopotamian tokens and cuneiform tablets that track the invention of writing. They also looked at quipus, Incan textiles used to convey information through a series of knots and colors.

In the Kislak Center for another class period, students examined (with freshly washed hands) materials that Alicia Meyer, curator of research services at the Kislak Center, laid out around the table and explained.

There was the Egyptian clay tablet from 400 BCE that a banking family kept as a debt record. There was a massive 19th-century horoscope roll for a family in present-day India. There was an astronomical rotula, a tool to predict the movement of heavenly bodies. There was an economic document on papyrus, a Japanese woodblock print, and posters from Central America made on sugarcane paper.

Truitt had requested a few specific items for this visit, showcasing how Penn’s collections illustrate the variety of communication technologies across centuries and how writing evolved, but Meyer also laid out materials Truitt hadn’t previously known about.

Some materials exemplify how people can control access to information and how our relationship to information changes over time. For example, Truitt quipped about a 17th-century book of ciphers from Spain, “If you are the Spanish Empire and you are ‘empiring’ over half the world, you gotta be able to keep your information secret.” She also showed that much of what the philosopher William of Conches wrote in one 12th-century text—on the cosmos, earth, and elements—was blacked out later, including a part about the female reproductive system and how babies are made.

“We have a lot of unique, one-of-a-kind materials here,” Meyer told the class, including items that “truly cannot be replaced.” But, she added, each can teach us a lot about its moment in time and the culture around it. “Working with rare materials and with special collections materials gives us access to innumerable aspects of history and stories we might not otherwise have,” she said.