National University of Singapore

This course focuses on the development of students' ability to communicate on fairly complex topics of general interests. It will continue to adopt an integrated approach to language learning and cultivate students' proficiency in all areas of language learning, including their learning competence. Strategies to be developed include writing and speaking strategies such as brainstorming, arranging ideas and collecting linguistic expressions prior to the writing or speaking tasks. 

Oceans cover most of the globe. Yet once we venture even a few meters from the shore, our understanding of the marine environment is necessarily mediated by technology, from the rudimentary underwater goggles used by divers for centuries to the latest remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) that are transforming our understanding of ocean ecologies. The ocean thus provides a perfect opportunity to explore the relationship among technology, society, and science. Science is often defined as a process of posing, testing, and producing increasingly refined hypotheses with data generated by experiments and measured with instruments. Yet if we look more closely, it becomes clear that rather than playing a subordinate role, instruments and technologies operate to confer scientific authority, to allow knowledge to “travel,” to mediate between science and popular culture, and even to define the method and content of science. This course examines how different “machines,” or technologies have produced understandings of the ocean across history, and places these technologies in their social, cultural, economic, and political contexts. It relates these technologies to key problems in the study of science, like authority, networks, translation, and representation. The result is to complicate our understanding of what science is, and to reveal the complex and evolving interconnections that link technology, and society and our understanding of the oceans.