STV 100: Society, Technology, and Values

Module 0: Welcome and Orientation

How the Online Course Works

Campbell describes the design philosophy clearly: the lectures are limited to straightforward text and short audio clips, with no graphics-heavy PowerPoint slides that would be unreadable on a smartphone screen. The course is built with principles of universal design in mind — it should work as well on a five-inch phone screen as on a dual-monitor desktop.

Each sub-module consists of a set of pre-recorded audio lectures paired with written study guides and required readings. Sub-modules start on a Friday and end twelve days later. In a given week, students would typically spend one to two hours on study material, take a short quiz, and contribute to a group discussion forum. The expected time commitment is about six hours per week, spread across several smaller sessions of thirty to sixty minutes each.

An important structural feature is that sub-modules overlap. While one sub-module’s discussion is ongoing, the next sub-module’s participation survey comes due and its new material is posted. This design increases flexibility and avoids clustering deadlines on weekends, but it requires students to pay attention to the schedule.

Advice on Taking Notes

Campbell is unusually direct about note-taking strategy. Students in previous terms consistently reported that taking notes made a significant difference in their grades, particularly for the quizzes. His advice: listen to a single audio clip — typically two to five minutes — then summarize it in a sentence or a few points before moving on. The goal is not to transcribe, but to capture impressions, questions, interesting examples, and anything you might want to discuss in a group. Definitions and any sections explicitly flagged in the lecture are especially worth noting.

The same principle applies to readings. Write in the margins of a printout, or keep a running document of reactions, study question answers, and ideas. Taking notes in chunks — study for twenty to thirty minutes, then take a five-minute break — prevents mental fatigue and makes it easier to return to material later without losing your place.

The Instructor’s Setup

Campbell uses entirely open-source software: Ubuntu Linux, Emacs, Org-mode, Pandoc, Audacity, Inkscape, GIMP, and custom bash scripts. He avoids cloud services and browser-based tools entirely — nothing is uploaded to a foreign server. He also keeps a Rhodia notebook and Lamy Safari fountain pen for day-to-day planning, finding the physical experience of writing useful for avoiding digital distractions.

Scott Campbell’s working area. Look for a CD-ROM, a hand-carved gnome, and a 25-year-old UWaterloo pencil case.

This behind-the-scenes detail is itself a miniature case study in how technology reflects values. The instructor who teaches about the relationship between technology and society has made deliberate, principled choices about which technologies he uses and why — choices grounded in openness, accessibility, and respect for student bandwidth.

Module 1.1: Two Cultures

Lecture A: Better Students and Broad Perspectives

The first lecture opens with a question that is, as Campbell puts it, “a very STV 100-like question”: Do computers make you a better student? Before seeing the lecture, students submit a participation survey with their own answers. The compiled results become the starting point for the first discussion.

Results from a typical survey show that about 85 percent of students say yes — citing convenient access to unlimited information, greater efficiency and productivity, and the flexibility to find other perspectives or work at their own pace. Some respondents go further: “computers make your life better in every way.” The remaining 15 percent push back: efficiency is not the same as becoming a better student, and plenty of people with computers are not, in fact, good students.

The most interesting responses, however, are the conditional ones. Several students noted that it depends on how computers are used; that a computer might help one person and not another; that the question itself hinges on how we define “student” or “better.” These hedging answers turn out to be exactly the right instinct for an STV course, because they point toward the course’s central insight: questions about technology often end up with “it depends.”

Why does “it depends” keep appearing? Because technology is not just devices or gadgets — it is a contextual human activity. Contextual means that in a different time or place, for a different person or purpose, you might get an entirely different answer. Was your survey answer a universal one? Would an engineer, an economist, an artist, a child, an elderly person, a wealthy person, a person with limited internet access, a Canadian, or a person from a developing nation all answer the question the same way? Almost certainly not.

This leads to the first key lesson of STV 100: Technology matters, but how and why it matters is different for everyone. To study society, technology, and values meaningfully, we must first recognize that there are many different perspectives on all three of those things. The task of the course is not to find the single correct perspective, but to learn to navigate among them thoughtfully.

Lecture B: Two Cultures, C.P. Snow, and the Bronze Rat

Who Is in the Room?

STV 100 attracts a highly distinctive student body. In any given term, approximately 78 percent of enrolled students come from Engineering, with the remaining students distributed across Mathematics, AHS, Science, and Arts. There are often more first-year students (30 percent) than any other cohort, which makes sense: STV 100 is one of the few genuinely interdisciplinary courses that attracts engineers, mathematicians, and scientists in large numbers early in their undergraduate careers.

Campbell typically opens this part of the lecture with an informal exercise: asking students to list what distinguishes engineering from arts. The responses are predictable — math, physics, chemistry, programming on one side; English, philosophy, history, languages, and political science on the other. But when he digs into skills and aptitudes rather than subject areas, the two columns become complementary rather than opposed:

The word “Design” appears in both columns intentionally. The point is that the perceived gulf between engineers and humanists is narrower than it first appears, and that both groups have genuine needs for what the other knows.

C.P. Snow and the Two Cultures

The intellectual framework for this observation comes from C.P. Snow, a British novelist and scientist who delivered a famous lecture in 1959 at Cambridge University called “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” Snow’s argument was that educated society had split into two mutually incomprehensible groups: the literary intellectuals on one side, and the natural scientists on the other. (More broadly, this can be understood as any two specialist groups who have lost a common language.)

Snow saw this split not just as an intellectual curiosity but as a dangerous practical problem. In his words:

This is leading us to interpret the past wrongly, to misjudge the present, and to deny our hopes for the future. It is making it difficult or impossible for us to take good action.

Consider the world’s largest problems. In STV 100 participation surveys, students consistently list climate change, COVID-19, poverty, racism, war, wealth inequality, water scarcity, automation, and AI risk as among the most pressing challenges humanity faces. Can any single discipline or social group solve these problems? Clearly not. Climate change requires scientists, engineers, economists, policy experts, historians, sociologists, ethicists, and affected communities all working together. The same is true for pandemic response, for AI governance, and for virtually every other major challenge.

Snow’s remedy was what might be called intellectual bilingualism — the ability to participate meaningfully in more than one disciplinary culture, to speak the language of both the technical and the humanistic, the quantitative and the qualitative. STV 100 is explicitly designed to help develop that bilingual capacity.

Two quick mental exercises sharpen the point. First: Consider your professional destination or the kind of life you hope to live, especially in light of the world’s biggest problems. What skills and knowledge are needed there that are not taught in your home department? Second: Imagine explaining to your grandparents a core course you took last term. Can you explain why you learned it? What makes it useful? How it fits into your degree? Why they should care? If you cannot, that may be a sign that the course is not yet meaningfully integrated into your broader understanding.

The Bronze Rat

The lecture closes with a joke — or rather, a story that is both a joke and a lesson. Campbell shows students a photograph of a small bronze rat sculpture.

The Bronze Rat, used to illustrate the lesson of curiosity and care.

The joke goes something like this: a tourist buys a small bronze rat at an antique shop. As she walks away, she notices real rats following her. More and more appear, streaming out of alleyways and buildings, until she is being pursued by thousands of them. Terrified, she runs to the nearest bridge and throws the bronze rat into the river. All the real rats follow it in and drown. She goes back to the shop. The shopkeeper says, “Ah, you’re back! Come to buy another bronze animal?” She says, “Actually, I was wondering — do you have a bronze politician?”

Campbell does not dwell on the punchline. The lesson of the Bronze Rat, he says, is simply to be curious and to care. If you are not curious about how technology and society interact — if you are not genuinely interested in understanding why these things matter and to whom — then the course is not likely to be useful to you. Curiosity is the precondition for everything else.

He also frames the Bronze Rat as a metaphor for the two cultures. The shopkeeper and the tourist each understand the situation differently. The shopkeeper grasps the whole pattern — the rat, the river, the joke — while the tourist sees only her own immediate experience. This is exactly what happens when specialists from one culture encounter the thinking of another: both are intelligent, both have expertise, but they are operating from entirely different frameworks. Becoming intellectually bilingual means learning to see more of the pattern.

Required Readings and Resources

David E. Nye, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With

The primary textbook for the course is David E. Nye’s Technology Matters: Questions to Live With (MIT Press, 2006). The Module 1.1 assignment focuses on the Preface (pages ix–xi). An electronic copy is available through the University of Waterloo library.

Nye opens the book by arguing that technology genuinely matters — it shapes human possibilities, relationships, and self-understanding in profound ways. But rather than providing definitive answers, he organizes the book around questions: How did we get here? Is technology neutral? Does technology control us? These are questions to “live with” rather than resolve, because the answers depend on historical context, cultural perspective, and what we value.

Nye’s intended audience is not specialists but educated generalists — people who want to think carefully about technology’s role in human life without retreating into either uncritical enthusiasm or reflexive suspicion. He assumes that readers can tolerate complexity and ambiguity, which is exactly the disposition STV 100 is trying to cultivate.

Study questions for the preface:

• According to Nye, why does technology matter?
• Why does Nye encourage us to learn to live with questions?
• Who is the audience for the book? Are you among that audience?

Bruce Schneier, “Why Technologists Need to Get Involved in Public Policy”

Bruce Schneier, “Why Technologists Need to Get Involved in Public Policy,” 2019.

Bruce Schneier is a prominent cybersecurity expert and author who argues in this talk that technologists and policy-makers inhabit two separate worlds that desperately need to come together. Schneier identifies what he calls the supply problem (too few technologists engaged in policy work), the demand problem (policy-makers who don’t understand technology), and the market problem (the institutions designed to connect the two are underdeveloped).

Campbell notes a point of disagreement: he believes Schneier over-simplifies the 1950s and 1960s, glossing over the role of the Cold War in shaping relationships between technology and policy during that era. This is a useful reminder that even expert commentators have blind spots, and that historical literacy matters for evaluating contemporary arguments.

Discussion questions:

• What does Schneier mean by “technology”? What does he include or exclude? What about “technologist” — are you one?
• Does the University of Waterloo have a home for public-interest technologists? Does it need one?
• What does the phrase “we need people who can speak tech to power” mean? Can you speak tech to power?

David Epstein, “Generalise, Don’t Specialise”

David Epstein’s 2019 article in The Guardian, drawn from his book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World (Riverhead Books, 2019), challenges the prevailing assumption that deep specialization is the surest path to excellence. Drawing on research across sports, music, science, and business, Epstein argues that many high performers — in fields as diverse as chess, medicine, and entrepreneurship — actually develop their skills through a period of wide sampling before committing to a specialty.

The article sits in obvious dialogue with Snow’s Two Cultures argument. Both Epstein and Snow are concerned with what gets lost when people specialize too deeply and too early. Epstein adds the empirical dimension: not only does narrowness create the cultural gaps Snow described, it also may limit individual performance in complex, rapidly changing environments.

For UWaterloo students — enrolled in one of Canada’s most intensely specialized research universities, pursuing credentials in fields that are themselves highly technical — this raises genuine questions. Does your program specialize too much, or not enough? Has it provided a “sampling period” or does it need one?

Course Atmosphere and Teaching Philosophy

The syllabus ends with a photograph of Campbell’s dog, Bingo, a part Border Collie, part Labrador mix who loves chasing rabbits, squirrels, and the occasional skunk.

Say hi to Bingo!

This gesture is not incidental. The course explicitly invites students to share their own “good things” — pets, art, favourite meals, jokes, good stories — in the course discussion forum. In a fully asynchronous online course run during a global pandemic, building a sense of warmth and genuine human presence is part of the pedagogy.

Campbell’s mental health policy is equally direct: he takes mental health concerns seriously, invites students to reach out at any time, and insists there is no shame in asking for help or an extension. The course is designed so that no one is required to work on weekends — there are no Sunday deadlines — and the instructor takes weekends off as well. This, too, reflects a set of technological and pedagogical values: that a well-designed system respects the humans using it, rather than demanding that they adapt to its rhythms.

The territorial acknowledgement at the top of the syllabus — recognizing that the University of Waterloo sits on the Haldimand Tract, land promised to Six Nations — is another deliberate act of contextualizing. Technology does not exist in a vacuum. It exists on land, within institutions, embedded in histories. STV 100 begins by naming that context explicitly.