A few weeks ago I was invited to do a lecture at a mandatory faculty course organized for my colleagues, and for me. The course was organsied by TUR. 

At first I thought that I would talk about the IT in Society course which I have been teaching for 15 years. It is a great course, but I have presented our work with it several times, so instead I chose to describe the pedagogic underpinnings of the new course that I am teaching together with Diane Golay.

I started my presentation by describing that working wich complex IT systems in large organizations equals addressing a wicked problem. A wicked problem is defined like this in Wikipedia, and by Rittel and Webber (1973):

A wicked problem is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize.

I then continued to present the many course elements that we have designed iteratively since October. The course has many different pedagogicak underpinnings related to student activating pedagogy:

• Student contributing pedagogy, as defined by John Hamer
• Roleplay when learning how to do interviews
• Interview of a practitioner in the field
• Flipped Classroom looking at instructional videos before lectures.
• Peer review of another groups’ work
• Self-flipped classroom producing learning materials for yourself and others.
• Discussions based on the framework of constructive controversy
• Informal learning support on Facebook
• Home exam with a special section for those who aim for a higher grade.