Last time I already wrote the final-exam commentary and presentation of excellent papers. In fact, there was another component: the reading notes. This time the reading notes were reduced from more than 6,000 characters in previous years to around 3,000 characters, but there was nothing particularly new in the basic requirements or in my grading impressions, so I won’t say much more about that. The rough grading standards were: 1. plagiarism, 0 points; 2. anything clearly not meeting the course requirements is a fail (for example, not a reading note at all, too few characters, obviously borrowed from an assignment for another course, and so on); 3. anything very perfunctory, with incoherent language and a confused, upside-down structure, below 70; 4. anything that obviously shows perfunctory work, not attending class, not reading carefully, or contains serious flaws, around 70; 5. anything that consists entirely of summarizing plot or section headings, with no thought or discussion, below 80; 6. anything middling and standard, between 80 and 90; 7. anything with a problem-oriented awareness that discusses a topic in depth, engages in critical discussion with the author or the teacher, cites more reliable sources to form an academic argument, or connects with one’s own life or major to produce good divergent thinking, and if the language is also fluent and the meaning has not been misunderstood, then above 90; beyond that, anything with particularly striking highlights and a distinct personality, above 95. Of course, in actual grading there are many subjective factors, and the rules cannot simply be applied mechanically.
What follows is the real focus of this summary: or rather, the focus is not so much a summary of this semester’s course as a staged summary of the five rounds of the course as a whole.
The course History of Technology in Its Entirety has been offered since spring 2018, then in spring 2019, spring 2020, fall 2020, and now fall 2021. That makes five rounds exactly. My colleague Wang Chengwei from our department once said that he never keeps a course going for more than five years before replacing it with a new one. I very much agree, but History of Technology in Its Entirety is one of the flagship courses I want to build, and it also occupies a place in the teaching plan of the history of science department, so this course will not be discontinued. I had originally hoped to keep renewing it in the manner of the “Ship of Theseus”: replace 30% of the content in each round, so that after three or four rounds it would have become a new course.
But in actual practice, this idea did not come to fruition. On the one hand, there is my own inertia: although I keep updating it, the scale of the updates is not all that large. On the other hand, the course design has gradually taken shape; I have more or less worked out a complete thread, and within that thread there are many crucial links that I have become increasingly reluctant to remove, so the room for flexible modification has become smaller and smaller.
Last year I launched a new course, History and Philosophy of Media, and I separated the units on the history of media such as writing, printing, telegraphy, and the internet from the history of technology survey. As a result, the remaining history of technology course now places greater emphasis on “machinery” as its main thread.
In the eighth week of this semester, I invited Professor Wang Zheran to give a guest lecture. The original intention was to coordinate with the Leonardo mechanical exhibition being held by the department, but in practice Professor Zheran lectured on the medieval history of technology, which was also quite meaningful.
In fact, my syllabus this semester was: 1. Introduction; 2. The Stone Age; 3. Cities; 4. Exchanges of technology between East and West; 5. The mechanical clock; 6. Navigation; 7. Experiment; 9. The steam engine; 10. The Industrial Revolution; 11. Mass production; 12. Electric light; 13. The computer; 14. Blockchain.
Looking back on it myself, among these class sessions, the first three lectures could be compressed into two, the fourth and sixth lectures could be skipped, the fourteenth lecture was an additional one, and the other content was basically very difficult to compress any further.
Overall, I was still satisfied with the course itself this semester. Although most of it consisted of old material I had already taught, through continuous refinement my own thinking has become clearer and the before-and-after echoes across the course have also taken more definite shape. The regret, however, is that there was not much room left to fit in new material. I had actually prepared several new topics (by “prepared,” I mean that I had something of a plan in mind and had roughly figured out what content to cover; in actual teaching, though, I would still need several days to prepare the PPT). So in the penultimate week I put out a questionnaire for the students to fill in. The first question was about what content should be covered in the final class, and I also took the opportunity to ask students about their impressions of the course and for their suggestions.
Because the questionnaire was not mandatory, not many students participated. The first question was time-sensitive and closed within a few days, with a total of 30 votes. The remaining questions had a total of 35 votes. Although the participation rate was somewhat low compared with the total of 132 students, these participants should all have been relatively active listeners in class.
I’ll paste the questionnaire results directly here, along with my comments:
Question 1 What should be covered in the final week?
| Option | Total | Percentage |
| Food (modern agriculture and the food industry) | 6 | |
| Atoms (the atomic bomb and nuclear energy) | 3 | |
| Flight to the skies (aviation and aerospace) | 5 | |
| The internet and blockchain (with emphasis on blockchain, which had not been covered before) | 10 | |
| Genetic technology (GMOs, gene editing, synthetic biology) | 6 | |
| Simply free discussion or other suggestions: | 0 | |
| Valid responses for this question | 30 |
—The runaway lead for blockchain was something I hadn’t expected. Personally, I had originally been leaning toward food or flight to the skies. But that was actually perfect for following the current. The run-up to finals happened to coincide with the period when I started seriously studying NFTs, so the process of preparing the lesson was like the final push that helped me sort out my own thinking.
Question 2 In this semester’s course, I think the following lectures could be cut back [multiple choice]
| Option | Total | Percentage |
| (1) Introduction | 1 | |
| (2) The Stone Age | 3 | |
| (3) Cities and the major ancient civilizations | 5 | |
| (4) Exchanges of technology between East and West | 0 | |
| (5) The mechanical clock | 4 | |
| (6) Navigation technology | 3 | |
| (7) Experimental science | 0 | |
| (9) The steam engine | 1 | |
| (10) The Industrial Revolution | 0 | |
| (11) Mass production | 1 | |
| (12) Electric light | 3 | |
| (13) The computer | 0 | |
| None can be spared; none can be cut | 19 | |
| Valid responses for this question | 35 |
—The students’ choices about what could be cut were basically in line with mine, except that I was more inclined to keep the mechanical clock, and I thought exchanges of technology between East and West could be cut. I also thought the first three lectures could be compressed, and navigation could be folded into experimental science. Finally, although electric light is important, it does deviate a bit from the main thread of “mechanization,” so it really could be cut as well.
Question 3 In this semester’s course, I think the following lectures are very worth keeping [multiple choice]
| Option | Total | Percentage |
| (1) Introduction | 9 | |
| (2) Stone Age | 6 | |
| (3) Cities and the Major Ancient Civilizations | 11 | |
| (4) East-West Exchange of Technology | 13 | |
| (5) Mechanical Clock | 15 | |
| (6) Navigation Technology | 11 | |
| (7) Experimental Science | 21 | |
| (9) Steam Engine | 13 | |
| (10) Industrial Revolution | 18 | |
| (11) Mass Production | 18 | |
| (12) Electric Light | 15 | |
| (13) Computers | 13 | |
| None of them are especially good; they can all be cut | 0 | |
| Valid responses to this question | 35 |
— First of all, thank you for everyone’s support. Overall, it is obvious that the students who voted are fond of this course. The “best-rated” list far outnumbers the “can be cut” list; in the previous question, 19 people voted for “none of them can be cut,” while in this question, 0 people voted for “they can all be cut.”
The best-rated list is not completely the mirror image of the can-be-cut list. For example, the two classes on East-West exchange of technology and computers had no votes for being cut, but the number of votes strongly insisting on keeping them was not high either. That is to say, they were rather unremarkable. Experimental science, the Industrial Revolution, and mass production were the most popular classes; in fact, these are just the period of transformation from the Scientific Revolution to the Industrial Revolution, and this span of time is indeed important. In addition, the two classes on the mechanical clock and electric light had quite a few votes for being cut, but also quite a few votes in favor, so it should be said that these two classes were still rather distinctive.
Question 4 I would more strongly support reforming this course in the following forms [multiple choice]
| Option | Total | Percentage |
| Increase it to 3 credits (3 class hours per week) | 6 | |
| Turn it into a two-semester sequence totaling 4 credits | 6 | |
| Keep the 2-hour main lecture and add 1 hour of small-group discussion | 6 | |
| Keep the 2-hour main lecture and add 2 hours of small-group discussion | 2 | |
| Split it into courses on different themes (such as history of mechanical technology, history of information technology) | 12 | |
| The current 2-credit course still needs to be retained | 12 | |
| Other suggestions | 1 | |
| Valid responses to this question | 35 |
— Looking back now, the vote on course reform may have had a systematic bias. Since the voters were all students who had already taken the class, if they liked this course, they would be more willing to choose one of my new courses next year. If this same course number were reopened in a new form, they would not be able to take it again, so they would naturally rather I offer a new course title, right? But overall, it is still clear that students were not very enthusiastic about the options of adding more class hours or discussion-section assignments; 2 credits still seems to be the standard configuration for a general education course.
According to the students’ suggestions, I might as well just keep things as they are. “History of information technology” could in fact, to a large extent, be taught under the umbrella of the “History and Philosophy of Media” course I have already been offering. The current “General History of Technology” is in substance centered on “the history of mechanical technology” as its main line.
Still, since this course has been included in Tsinghua’s program for building high-quality general education courses, I may nonetheless, based on the support of that program, pilot a discussion section.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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