Week 1: Opening lecture
What a note is, why most feedback isn't one, and why this course tests the claim across six domains instead of one.
22 February 2027
A note is a claim about a piece of work, specific enough to point at and falsifiable enough to argue with. Most of what gets called feedback is neither: a reaction dressed as an assessment, unfalsifiable because it never said what would change its mind, and usually aimed at the person who made the thing rather than the thing itself.
That’s a strong claim to make about something as old as criticism, so this course doesn’t just assert it once and move on — it tests the same claim against a drawing, a pull request, a paragraph, a blind proposal, a restaurant, and the brief you were handed to do all of that. If the method only survives in the domain it was invented for, it isn’t a method. It’s a habit that happens to work on one kind of work.
Outline#
- what makes a note different from a reaction: specific, falsifiable, about the work
- why “the work, not the person” is harder than it sounds, and gets harder in prose than in code
- the plan for the semester: one new domain most weeks, the same three-part test applied to each
Teaching team
- Marisol Quaye — convenor