The Faculty Story: Vincent-Antonin Lepinay
When seeking truth, our society tends to believe that scientific truth – such as research results and experimental findings – are incontrovertible. Yet, scientists themselves are constantly disputing each other’s findings. How can something be considered true while it is still actively being tested and revised? It is this paradoxical nature of scientific findings that confront young students on entering college.
One aspect of MIT’s excellence in science and technology is the institute’s practice of promoting objective and reflective studies of scientific and technological initiatives. This reflective process, this stepping-back and understanding the impact and implications of science and technology, helps students better understand the nature of scientific research, and helps keep innovation vital at MIT.
A recently introduced course in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society offered in the Spring of 2008 called Mapping Controversies, is a good example of how MIT helps students better understand the nature of science through focusing on controversial scientific research. In this course, students learn to see science more realistically.
Vincent-Antonin Lepinay, the MIT professor who taught the course, said the idea for this course started in Paris when his mentor Bruno Latour realized that “students had a very biased understanding of how science is conducted, because their only exposure was to textbooks. Therefore, they had a very purified vision of what science is.” Latour and Lepinay and his MIT colleague Verena Paravel, along with colleagues at Sciences Po (The School of Political Science) and at Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation Ecole des Mines de Paris (The School of Mines), realized that students needed better preparation for the actual science or engineering they would be doing after school.
When Lepinay joined MIT, “I realized MIT was going to be the best place to do the scientific controversy course because the students are smart and MIT is also a place where scientists are either part of a controversy or know of one.” The possibility of having first-hand perspectives on a controversy right on campus or down the street enticed Lepinay into developing the MIT course.
To help students gain better insight into how science really works, Lepinay developed a course where students would search out the different perspectives around a controversy as journalists and researchers over a semester and create a Web site presenting the two or more sides of a scientific controversy the issue. The students would adopt different roles during the semester as part of an investigative team: Web master, journalist, statistician-scientamatrician, and manager.
To help guide the students, Lepinay collaborated with DUE’s Office of Educational Innovation and Technology (OEIT) to construct a Web site – “Mapping Controversies” – that would guide students to potentially useful sites for learning media response and public opinion on a particular controversy, for exploring tools and resources to help visualize and display the various viewpoints and perspectives, for researching institutions, sites and repositories that contain contextual or historical insight, and for providing a searchable archive for the students to add more resources to the site. Students contributing additional resources as they do their own research represents the “collective intelligence” aspect of this project.
Using this site, and carrying out the four team functions, the students “follow a controversy through its publication. The students are trained into the skills needed. It’s something that students really like because it’s graph theory, it’s about mapping complex data, and even with a small controversy the students may have to assess information from a thousand publications.”
To do this, students say “ok, let’s try to first make a list of all the positions, all the points of view, all the voices that have been heard and maybe even some of the voices that have been shut up. And see where they come from, what they say, what their interests are, what their alliances are, what their resources are. Let’s do a very thorough journalistic story of a controversy. Let’s not assume the scientists are right and the non-scientists wrong.”
The goal of the course is not to undermine science, but rather “to make scientists and engineers much more aware of the world out there so they are not narrow-minded. Pick any scientist or engineer. They are extremely good promoters of what they do. They are not just narrow and do what they do. They know how to speak the language of people who do not speak science.”
“Scientists who have been trained in the scientific method just disagree, and they have been disagreeing for a long time. These are the wheels of science. They disagree to get science great.”
The students in “Mapping Controversies” learn that science is as much about the disagreements as about the findings. They see how certain statements from the controversies emerge in publications and then how society interprets those statements. By understanding the real-world process of scientific controversy, the students will become better scientists and engineers.
The course is gaining currency at MIT: Professor Lepinay expects not only more MIT students to enroll in the course but more collaborators internationally. Currently, the course involves the two schools in Paris and MIT, but in the 2008-2009 academic year will also include Oxford University and Lausanne University. Another possibility is Kaist University in South Korea. “The network is growing,” Lepinay says.
OEIT Response
A new course in Spring 2008 at MIT, Mapping Controversies, offered through The Program in Science, Technology, and Society, needed a Website with more functionality to help students with their research. The course instructor, Vincent-Antonin Lepinay and his colleague Verena Paravel wanted to upgrade their Web-accessible flat-file database significantly to be able to offer, instead, a dynamic, searchable, collaborative research tool for students in the course.
Students new to the study of scientific controversy would not know of the hundreds of starting points to go to. They would not know the domain structure of the different fields involved in the controversy. They would not know key terms to search for. The file that Lepinay and Paravel already possessed provided the framework for students to start their research. But it did not have the added ability to create ongoing collective intelligence. It was just a starting point, not a tool to work within, and it did not provide a digital repository to support student work over the semester.
Lepinay and Paravel turned to Molly Ruggles, an educational technology consultant in OEIT, to see how OEIT could help. Over just a few months, working within the financial confines of a small grant, Ruggles was able to create a working team of technical project coordinator (herself), Web developer and designer, and the two academic leaders to produce the research tool needed. Proceeding from needs to requirements to specifications and on to pilot all happened in a relatively short time.
Between technical needs and final technology instantiation, as we all know, a lot can happen. Academic goals do not automatically translate as PHP scripts in a MySQL database presented in an HTML Website and finally, then, working as the faculty member expected. These goals did. Successfully shepherding the Mapping Controversies Website through the various stages of development is an example of the key work that OEIT does at MIT: connecting external and internal resources to complete an innovation cycle that includes consideration of and arrangements for ongoing sustainability.
Office of Educational Innovation and Technology
Building NE48, Cambridge, MA 02139-4044
Phone: (617) 252-1981; Fax: (617) 452-4044
