Seminar#

no new case, on purpose#

Instead, the seminar runs on cases the class brings: each student presents one situation, found outside this syllabus, read through the framework built in weeks 1–11. The point is not to find a twelfth dramatic example as good as FOGBANK or the F-1. It’s to find out whether the framework still does useful work on a case nobody chose for how well it would illustrate the argument.

revisit the week 1 guesses#

In week 1, everyone guessed “documentation problem” or “capability problem” for each of the eleven cases ahead, before reading anything about them. If the framework earned its keep, those guesses should be easier to make now — and wrong, where they’re wrong, in more interesting ways than they were in week 1.

discussion: the protocol#

Each student presents one outside case in five minutes: the claim, the record track, the capability track, and a one-line diagram sketched on the board using this course’s own vocabulary.

The class asks one question each: where does this case press on a distinction the syllabus drew too cleanly?

activity: present your own case#

Loop, five minutes per student. Claim, record track, capability track, one-line board diagram, then one question each from the class.

As many rounds as the roster allows inside the time budget — if the class is large, pre-assign an order and a strict timer; if it’s small, let later rounds run slightly longer.

debrief#

Look across the presented cases: did any of them press hard on a distinction the syllabus drew too cleanly? Revisit the week 1 guesses one more time — where they were wrong today, was it a more interesting kind of wrong than week 1’s guesses were?

wrap-up#

Institutional memory is the thing this course is nominally about, taught by an institution, in a seminar, using slides that will themselves eventually be old records of a practice. If this course stopped running for a decade and then restarted from these files alone, what would the person restarting it be missing that these pages don’t say?