2017
I am Professor of Teaching of Arts, Technology, and the Business of Innovation at USC's Iovine Young Academy. I teach in the Academy (currently designing The Garage Experience) and in the Law School (teaching "Justice Innovation Startup Lab" and co-teaching Legal Design Lab).
Some other courses in my current teaching portfolio:
Simulation and Modeling for Policy
An advanced, hands-on class in computer-based simulation and analysis in social science, public policy, and business. Topics include logic models, flow charts, project management, decision analysis, game theory and strategy, cost-benefit analysis, discounting, queuing models, Markov models, stock and flow, system dynamics, intelligent agent models. Along the way students develop advanced skills in Excel.
Innovation in Business
Can innovation be taught? Can it be promoted? Can it be managed? Building on a foundation of human-centered design principles, this course will answer each of these in the affirmative via theory, empirical research, and hands-on practice. We use case studies, problems, and labs to teach you to participate in, and lead, innovation in for-profit, non-profit, government, and social enterprise. We will learn how to recognize significant problem opportunities, grow from failures (our own failures and those in the historical record), foster our own creativity and that of others, and listen to the feedback that the world offers when we prototype our ideas.
Design Thinking in Higher Education
An introduction to design thinking with a focus on innovation in higher education. The course will teach design thinking as a discipline, human centered design as a mindset, and innovation as an ethos, along with substantive background in the history of innovative education and the social science of innovation. Workshops on identifying important problems, working effectively in teams, cultivating empathy, using anthropological techniques to discern user needs, iteration, and low resolution, rapid prototyping techniques. We will motivate and equip you to be an education innovator, someone who looks at higher education, thinks "why not?" and then makes it happen.
Geographic Information Systems
Students learn fundamentals of cartography and gain practice making digital maps on three platforms: Open Street Map, QGIS desktop mapping, and JavaScript-based web mapping. Final projects include data acquisition and analysis and the design and implementation of simple spatially-enabled web app.
Data Visualization
This course is required for the data science major and is an elective for several other majors. We will learn the basics of graphic design and visual perception and how these inform the visual communication of quantitative information. After learning to dominate desktop data tools (e.g., Excel, PowerPoint, Keynote) we will learn to build interactive visualizations using d3, JavaScript, and related tools. Students with no coding background will need to do ancillary exercises to prepare for the second half of the course.
Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
A hands-on interdisciplinary seminar in which we learn to program intelligent agent models to study of complex systems, emergence, and non-linear dynamics. Computer science and mathematical material are complemented by ideas drawn from social science and humanities.
Research Methods
This is a laboratory-based course in social science research methods. We learn the basics of the scientific method, data collection techniques ranging from ethnography to survey design to capturing digital exhaust, and the use of analytical tools drawn from social science, marketing, literary studies, and natural sciences.
Research in Sociology/Anthropology
Students propose and carry out an original research project. This two semester capstone uses a sequence of structured exercises to take students from initial interest in a topic through definition of a problem and research question, background research, development and testing of methodological tools, execution of research, analysis of data and communication of results.
Academic Experience. I have taught undergraduates and graduate students at Mills College for 17 years with previous teaching experience at Yale University and New College of Florida. At Mills I have served as department chair, run searches, and was for three years the chair of the Faculty Executive Committee (cf. faculty senate). I am on Program Advisory Committees for graduate programs in Interdisciplinary Computer Science and Public Policy. I am an effective and sought after academic advisor for both undeclared undergraduates and majors as well as graduate students. At Mills I have taught, advised, and supervised research of students in the social sciences, public policy, the graduate school of business, music, and interdisciplinary computer science. At New College I had stints teaching computer science and sociology. At various institutions over the years I was a teaching assistant in chemistry, mathematics, physics, computer science, sociology, and philosophy.
Curriculum Development and Design. At Mills College I am known as an innovator in teaching; I introduced laboratories into social science methods courses, experimented with "flipped classrooms," converted a course into a self-driving format, converted my entire teaching corpus into open educational resources, created a network science course, an interdisciplinary course on agent modeling, GIS for liberal arts, and mathematical modeling and simulation for the social and policy sciences. I have been a part of working groups that redesigned general education, developed sane assessment tools, and revised curricula in sociology, public policy, and our new "Politics, Economics, Policy, and Law" major. This summer I will be working with colleagues on curricular connections between graduate public policy and MBA programs.
At Yale I worked with School of Management faculty to develop curriculum (and teach) for HUD management fellows program and with Management and Yale Law School faculty I helped to create and run the Professional Schools Neighborhood Clinic – a clinic that drew members from all of Yale’s professional schools to work in inter-professional teams on real world community problems in New Haven.
During academic 2014-2015, of course, I worked with the team that implemented the inaugural curriculum at the Academy. Since leaving Los Angeles last May, I visited innovation education organizations in Ireland and Germany, worked with colleagues from top US colleges on an American Association of Liberal Arts Colleges initiative on design thinking and the liberal arts, and taught courses and workshops using IDEO curricula at the Mills Innovation Lab. Inspired by my experience at IYA and what I’ve learned since, I recently drafted a curriculum for program at Mills tentatively called “Technology, Business, and Design.”
Non-Academic Experience. I was one of the first 104 webmasters: in the first year of the world wide web I was the founder and director of “The City Room at Yale,” an early attempt at open data, and interorganizational collaboration to solve urban problems, and a co-founder of the Regional Data Cooperative for New Haven. From 2006 to 2015 I was on the advisory board of the global open innovation platform InnovationExchange (John Seeley Brown was also on the board). After my undergraduate degree in mathematical, physical, and computer sciences I built hardware and software at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Lab in a group that made the world’s second scanning tunneling electron microscope, and I worked in London at Bank of America on pc-based communication software and at an in-house startup at Chemical Bank developing foreign exchange netting software.
Technical Competencies. I have coded in C, Pascal, assembly language, PL1, Python, R, JavaScript, have a passing familiarity with Java and Ruby, and have been doing web design since the web was invented. I can make most desktop software perform beyond spec. I have taught compiler design and machine language programming. I have advanced skills in geographic information systems, data visualization, and information system design. I was trained in digital electronics and still tinker in my home workshop and have taught mini-classes on microcontrollers. I was an early adopter of 3D printing and have dabbled in 3D design and fabrication. I mess around with animation, video, radio journalism, all phases of home repair. I am comfortable using, maintaining, and sometimes building machines of many descriptions.
Communication. I have given talks to swim coaches and armed police officers, seniors and children, prospective students and prospective donors. I have written op-eds, blogs, academic journal articles, magazine articles, voice-over scripts, and a book, and produced instructional videos and animations. Over the past several years I have given numerous public addresses and workshops on innovation in higher education and the deep connections between liberal arts and innovation education.