The Wireless Revolution: Teaching Advanced Techology to Diverse Audiences

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The penetration of advanced technologies, and in particular information technologies, into every day life has proceeded at a breathtaking pace over the past decade. Such technologies will touch and transform the personal and working lives of current and future generations of students for many decades to come. This is true not only for students in the SMET disciplines who are developing this technology, but also for students in the many disciplines spanning the breadth of academia. A significant fraction of all students need to learn about such technologies in order to conduct their professional lives and to live as informed citizens in an age that will be defined by advancing technologies. Moreover, SMET students need to learn about the non-technical implications of technology in economics, politics, society, and business, and about the corresponding influences of such non-technical spheres of activity on technology. This project addresses these needs by developing pedagogy and pedagogical materials suitable for teaching advanced technological subject matter to undergraduate students across a broad spectrum of academic discliplines, not only within SMET isciplines, but also within the fine arts, humanities, and social sciences. This approach takes advantage of the greater computer and mathematical literacy of today's students to offer course material with technical substance, but also with a view toward the greater role of technologies in shaping society and commerce. The project focuses particularly on telecommunications technology, in order to exploit the Principal Investigator's experiences in teaching such material to Princeton undergraduates in his recently-developed course, "The Wireless Revolution: Telecommunications for the 21st Century." This course, which covers the technical, social, economic, and political aspects of wireless, has been very successful in attracting a large and diverse audience from across the University. This holistic approach to the subject, and the teaching of both SMET and non-SMET students in the same classroom, has resulted in significant educational benefits for all of the students involved. Although telecommunications is, of course, widely taught worldwide, there is little available material for the teaching of the subject in a holistic manner, and particularly to a mixed audience at the undergraduate level. This makes it difficult to export the model of "The Wireless Revolution" to other institutions, or even to other instructors. This is due in part to the very dynamic nature of the field, which renders conventional textual materials inadequate because it needs to be updated very quickly. It is also partly due to the breadth of disciplines needed to adequately address the subject and to uniformly challenge students with very diverse interests. This difficulty has been addressed in the "Wireless Revolution" course thus far through the use of guest lecturers, a solution which is not necessarily portable to other universities or instructors. The principal goal of this project is to develop useful pedagogical materials that can address both the breadth an dynamism of this field. These materials combine the traditional textbook format, where the subject matter is relatively stable, with Web-based resources for the more dynamic subject matter. The objective of this development is to allow the successful format of this course to be used in a sustainable way by other instructors at Princeton, and to be exported to other institutions. The scope of these materials will reach beyond wireless communications to the field of telecommunications in general, so that the subject matter will fit the needs and interests of a greater number of students and institutions. The updateable and flexible nature of these pedagogical materials will allow for the content to shift from year to year as new telecommunications technologies wax and wane. This will further allow for the content to vary from institution to institution, as different instructors may wish to emphasize different aspects of the field. Finally, it is hoped that this development will provide a model for the holistic teaching of other advanced technologies to broad undergraduate audiences.