The mySF Project is an ongoing project to improve the teaching of Science
Fiction (SF) for secondary school students.
Using a thematic approach and research based around online and flexible
learning instructional design, the
mySF Project
discusses texts that may be useful to teachers and students of SF in middle
and upper secondary school. Deriving from several years teaching SF with
students in Canberra, Australia and elsewhere, as well as recent studies,
the mySF Project comes out on this website from the darkness of education
intranets and is presented as another resource for secondary English and
other teachers, as well as inviting feedback on the materials as part of an
ongoing educational dialogue with teachers, authors, film-makers, blog and
podcast creators, and students. More can be read about the project as part
of the
Microsoft Innovative Teachers website from 2007 at the following link:
http://www.microsoft.com/australia/education/pil/innovativeteachers/innovteacher_winners06.aspx#7
The main focus of this site is the
mySF Project blog that looks at new and
established print, digital and online texts that may (or could not possibly be)
useful for teachers and students working with SF as a critique of society
according to the five themes found in the mySF Project theme area. The blog
entries are accompanied by
mySF podcasts,
some for students but mostly for teachers. This site also offers samples of a
thematic approach for teaching SF in a
Computer Supported Intentional Learning Environment (CSILE). In 2016 a new
area of the mySF Project was launched, looking at the subgenre of the
generation ship in SF, the
GS Project.
Tunnelling down even further, the
mySF Project
uses an old and simple definition of SF as involving pseudo-science and
pseudo-technology but there is a definite predilection towards hard SF and,
with the inclusion of the
GS Project,
more sociological scenarios, trapped for generations within an all-too thin
shell of science.
ends
Michael Sisley
mySF Project is licensed under a
