Unit 1
How David Eaves teaches Unit 1 (part 1)
Introduction & How We Got Here
What is this page: This is a detailed breakdown of how David Eaves, a Lecturer at the University College London's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (UCL IIPP), teaches the contents of Unit 1 of the open access syllabus developed by Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age.
This page is part of a series of twenty-five classes that David developed originally for the Harvard Kennedy School's master and executive education programs, where he taught for eight years, and are now taught at UCL's master and applied learning programs.
We believe presenting diverse ways to teach the syllabus will help others adopt and teach the material in various contexts. See here how Konstanz University's Prof Ines Mergel teaches the same unit.
Who is this page for?
This page was developed for university faculty who teach public administrators or master's levels students in public policy and public administration. This material may also be suitable for teaching to upper year undergraduates.
Class overview
This first class has two main sections. In the first part, David gives a brief overview of his course (originally called DPI-662 Digital Government: Technology, Policy, and Public Service Innovation). The second part is dedicated to situating digital government in the broader history of the public administration. It explores how past innovations have shaped the evolution of bureaucracies and why the resulting institutional forms impede the rapid adoption of new technologies .
Learning Objectives
By the end of this class students should be able to:
Situate the emerging 'Digital Era' of government theory and practice as just the latest in a wave of government practices, and explain the key values-based difference between the current wave and the last.
Define what is meant by digital for the purposes of this syllabus.
Understand why it is hard to advance changes in digital transformations in governments.
How this class relates to the Digital Era Competencies
💡 As an introductory lecture, this class does not focus on one specific competency, but rather lays the ground for the course and touches upon each of the eight competencies.
Assigned Reading and Practical Resources
As they work through the readings in advance, students should have in mind the following questions to help them prepare for class:
What are the previous dominant management theories for government? How do digital technologies reinforce or challenge these ideas?
What are the types of challenges do governments face as they engage in digital transformations? Relate challenges you've experienced in your own work to the readings.
Required Readings
Digital Era Governance: IT Corporates, the State and e-Government (2006), Book Chapter by Dunleavy, Margetts, Bastow, & Tinkler
The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), Book by Marshall McLuhan
Digital Government: Not Complicated, Just Hard (2014), Video from Code for America performing Tom Loosemore, Deputy Director of the U.K.'s Government Digital Services
Optional Advanced Reading
Public value creation in digital government [pages 13-17] (2019), Article by Panos Panagiotopoulos, Bram Klievink, and Antonio Cordella
Building the Virtual State [Chapter 4] (2001), Book Chapter by Jane Fountain
Detailed Class Breakdown
Class plan: 75 minutes
See David's slides for this class [Forthcoming]. The sections below describe the dynamics of each part of the class. The videos were edited to only display the most relevant parts of each section:
Introduction – 15'
The goal of this section is to introduce the main purpose of the class, the logistics of the course and set norms and expectations.
As this is the first class, it is critical to set norms and expectations for teaching, learning and the classroom environment. Each teacher will approach this differently, David likes to:
Transmit a message of confidence in each students’ potential;
Explain the learning process requires intellectual discomfort and that this will be stimulated by design in the class;
Foster a diverse and respectful learning environment;
If the class is online, set norms for how to use the chat and ask questions.
The comic on the opening slide is a signal to students regarding the class's purpose - that a minimum viable knowledge of technology can help students understand the significant difference to seemingly similar questions.
For this course, readers of this content should understand that HKS students have a wide range of backgrounds, some with limited digital experience. The simple pre-class survey (which asked participants to answer: i) Have you worked in a government?; ii) Have you worked in Technology?; iii) Do you know what an API is?) is designed to showcase that range back to the students. The goal is for students to get a sense of their peers experiences and situate themselves among them. Critically, the purpose is to establish differing goals for differing students. For students new to digital government, the course will give them an introductory grounding in core concepts. For more experienced students, it will expose them to new ideas and concepts and integrate less technically savvy colleagues into their work more effectively.
Video of David teaching this segment
What is Digital Technology to you? – 15'
In this section there are two goals. The first it to explore the challenges of defining "digital" technologies. The second is to have students self identify their current level of competence in digital technologies and make them comfortable to learn more regardless of their starting point.
Before laying the historical foundations of digital government, David likes to try to get his students to recognize the pervasiveness of technology. Particularly that technology is more than just a tool. To introduce this idea, he relays an analogy from David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech “This is Water” in which Wallace tells the story of two fish that ask themselves what water is.(1) Similarly, digital technologies can be seen as the water in which we now all live: it is all around us, yet it is hard to describe.
The goal is to enable students to articulate their own understanding and comfort with technology. For example, self identifying as someone:
who is in water and wants to learn to swim faster
who's aware they are in water, but feels like they are drowning
who's not even aware of the water, and is trying to walk.
The polls purpose is to start forming a honest and safe learning environment. A poll allows students to anonymously identify which of the above groups they feel apart of. Building on this, David invites a volunteer to explain their choice to encourage student to become more self aware of their knowledge and comfort level and to begin thinking about their learning objectives. A final objective is to showcase the diversity of experience and affirm that regardless of where they stand, they all bring important perspectives to the class and enrich each other’s experiences.
This analogy was shared with David by John Lilly.