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Bea Lehman, Molly Williams, and Abby Kusmin

CAP Research Seminar


Pd. 9
12/1/19
The Wave Project Lesson Plan Reflection: Social Relations

This project allowed us to dive deep into the potential effects of emerging technologies

on social relations. It also helped us understand The Wave better, and exploring these ideas

through the format of class lessons taught by students made it a lot easier to get everyone

involved and hear from a variety of different perspectives, as opposed to just class discussions.

It’s a bit hard to make a lesson on something that is so broad and hypothetical, especially since

genetic modification and artificial intelligence have not yet reached the level of complexity that

we described. Social relations is an incredibly broad topic and it doesn’t have defined

boundaries. Its influences on human life are so deep and complicated that it’s often difficult to

recognize them. The broadness of our topic and the rapid progress in the technologies we

researched did allow us a lot of flexibility in the content we covered, because we were able to

choose what areas of these technologies we wanted to focus on.

We were each able to learn a lot about the effects of a specific technology on social

relations because we each researched a different one, and then shared what we had found with

each other to build the foundation of what we would use for our lesson. We evaluated both the

positives and negatives of the effects of social media, genetic modification, and AI on social

relations. We found that although it might be easy to think cynically and assume they have only

negative effects, there are also important positives to be considered, including promotion of

global social connection, accessibility of knowledge, and eradication of disease. It’s interesting

and incredibly important to think about and discuss the effect these technologies will have on

mental health - social media allows lonely people to find communities in relatively low-stress

environments, but it also opens the doors for more complex and intense cyberbullying, as well as
jealousy and perceived isolation. Increased interconnectivity inherently leads to increased levels

of anxiety and depression because it’s easy to see the worst sides of people as well as the bad

happening everywhere in the world. Genetic modification will increase societal elevation of the

wealthy as superior, but will people be able to tailor their children to be at a lower risk of mental

health conditions? Artificial intelligence has the capability to provide lonely people with instant

companions or therapists who are designed to have incredible emotional intelligence, but will

they ever be able to replace real humans? Will talking to only AI increase feelings of isolation

and worthlessness? These are the kinds of hypotheticals we tried to explore with our

presentation, and it actually helped broaden our perspective to hear from our classmates and

what they had to say during discussion.

The main feedback we received from the class was that although we were well-

researched, our slides and our explanations were too wordy, and that the simulation we created

was too complicated. We spent more time on research than we did on creating the actual

presentation, which led to it not being as engaging or well-made as it could have been. People

from class said things like “you guys clearly know your stuff” and “good explanations.”

Concerning the simulation, they said that it was “a little confusing but you put work into it and it

had a lot of nuance.” Some people liked the simulation a lot, others liked it but thought it was

confusing, and others just thought it was confusing. We also spent a lot of time on the

simulation, and tried to go very in-depth and cover different aspects of social relations, which is

what made it so complicated and hard to follow.

If we were doing the project again, we would spend more time working on the

presentation to make it more concise and more aesthetically engaging. We might also choose ona

area of focus for the simulation so we could create an engaging class activity without making it
confusing and time-consuming. It would’ve been a good idea to do a practice run on the

simulation so that we could have foreseen any possible difficulties - instead, we just assumed it

would all work out.

It’s important to consider the perspective of the people you will be teaching when

creating a lesson. When you have researched something in-depth or spent a lot of time creating

something, you know it well, and it is easy to assume that others will too. We should have taken

a step back when we had our presentation and simulation and asked ourselves what it would look

like and feel like for people listening or participating. If we had made a greater effort to do this,

we might have caught some of the features that made our lesson less engaging or easy to

understand and have been able to correct them.

Some of our mistakes from this project illustrate the difference between learning and

teaching. When learning, you can find and take in as much information as you want in a way that

suits you personally. When teaching, you have to choose the information that is most important

and find a way to get it across that will allow the most people possible to learn the material and,

if possible, will also keep them engaged.

Overall, this project taught us both about the lifeboat and technologies we researched and

about teaching. The research phase allowed us to find areas that interested us and find

information to help us get a comprehensive view of our lifeboat and technologies. The lesson-

making phase gave us an opportunity to look at the vehicles through which an instructor can

convey information to students. We chose to include a Google Slides presentation to cover basic

information, a simulation to help students analyze the nuances of the effects technologies can

have on social relations, and a discussion to allow students to get their questions answered and

share their own ideas about our topic. The feedback we received from classmates gave us a
chance to see the pros and cons of the teaching tools we chose, and how you can maximize their

effectiveness.

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