Day: 1 December 2017
Teaching Digital at HKS: A Roadmap
This is the entry page for a series of posts about teaching digital at the Harvard Kennedy School (of government). This isn’t the course itself, but a series of reflections on designing and delivering it. It is though filled with insights about what it is useful to know and to think about, and how the various components fit together and reinforce each other to meet the needs of students with different backgrounds and interests in government.
The Problem With Finding Answers
There are some who argue that the only test of progress is delivery and that the only thing which can be iterated is a live service. That is a horribly misguided approach. There is no point in producing a good answer to a bad question, and lots to be gained from investing time and energy in understanding the question before attempting to answer it. Even for pretty simple problems, badly formed initial questions can generate an endless – and expensive – chain of solutions which would never have needed to exist if that first question had been a better one. Characteristically, Paul Taylor asks some better questions about asking better questions.