Unit 1
How David Eaves teaches Unit 1 (part 1)
Introduction & How We Got Here
What is this page?
This is a detailed breakdown of how David Eaves, a Lecturer at the University College London's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (UCL IIPP), teaches the contents of Unit 1 of the open access syllabus developed by Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age. Read how part two of Unit 1 is taught here.
This page is part of a series of twenty-five classes that David developed originally for the Harvard Kennedy School's master and executive education programs, where he taught for eight years, and are now taught at UCL's master and applied learning programs.
We believe presenting diverse ways to teach the syllabus will help others adopt and teach the material in various contexts. See here how Konstanz University's Prof Ines Mergel teaches the same unit.
Who is this page for?
This page was developed for university faculty who teach public administrators or master's levels students in public policy and public administration. This material may also be suitable for teaching to upper year undergraduates.
Class Overview
This first class has two main sections. In the first part, David gives a brief overview of his course (originally called DPI-662 Digital Government: Technology, Policy, and Public Service Innovation). The second part is dedicated to situating digital government in the broader history of the public administration. It explores how past innovations have shaped the evolution of bureaucracies and why the resulting institutional forms impede the rapid adoption of new technologies .
This Class' Learning Objectives
By the end of this class students should be able to:
Situate the emerging 'Digital Era' of government theory and practice as just the latest in a wave of government practices, and explain the key values-based difference between the current wave and the last.
Define what is meant by digital for the purposes of this syllabus.
Understand why it is hard to advance changes in digital transformations in governments.
How this class relates to the Digital Era Competencies
💡 As an introductory lecture, this class does not focus on one specific competency, but rather lays the ground for the course and touches upon each of the eight competencies.
Assigned Reading and Practical Resources
As they work through the readings in advance, students should have in mind the following questions to help them prepare for class:
What are the previous dominant management theories for government? How do digital technologies reinforce or challenge these ideas?
What are the types of challenges do governments face as they engage in digital transformations? Relate challenges you've experienced in your own work to the readings.
Required Readings
Digital Era Governance: IT Corporates, the State and e-Government (2006), Book Chapter by Dunleavy, Margetts, Bastow, & Tinkler
The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), Book by Marshall McLuhan
Digital Government: Not Complicated, Just Hard (2014), Video from Code for America performing Tom Loosemore, Deputy Director of the U.K.'s Government Digital Services
Optional Advanced Reading
Public value creation in digital government [pages 13-17] (2019), Article by Panos Panagiotopoulos, Bram Klievink, and Antonio Cordella
Building the Virtual State [Chapter 4] (2001), Book Chapter by Jane Fountain
Detailed Class Breakdown
Class plan: 75 minutes
The sections below describe the dynamics of each part of the class. The videos were edited to only display the most relevant parts of each section:
Introduction – 15'
The goal of this section is to introduce the main purpose of the class, the logistics of the course and set norms and expectations.
As this is the first class, it is critical to set norms and expectations for teaching, learning and the classroom environment. Each teacher will approach this differently, David likes to:
Transmit a message of confidence in each students’ potential;
Explain the learning process requires intellectual discomfort and that this will be stimulated by design in the class;
Foster a diverse and respectful learning environment;
If the class is online, set norms for how to use the chat and ask questions.
The comic on the opening slide is a signal to students regarding the class's purpose - that a minimum viable knowledge of technology can help students understand the significant difference to seemingly similar questions.
For this course, readers of this content should understand that HKS students have a wide range of backgrounds, some with limited digital experience. The simple pre-class survey (which asked participants to answer: i) Have you worked in a government?; ii) Have you worked in Technology?; iii) Do you know what an API is?) is designed to showcase that range back to the students. The goal is for students to get a sense of their peers experiences and situate themselves among them. Critically, the purpose is to establish differing goals for differing students. For students new to digital government, the course will give them an introductory grounding in core concepts. For more experienced students, it will expose them to new ideas and concepts and integrate less technically savvy colleagues into their work more effectively.
Video of David teaching this segment
What is Digital Technology to you? – 15'
In this section there are two goals. The first it to explore the challenges of defining "digital" technologies. The second is to have students self identify their current level of competence in digital technologies and make them comfortable to learn more regardless of their starting point.
Before laying the historical foundations of digital government, David likes to try to get his students to recognize the pervasiveness of technology. Particularly that technology is more than just a tool. To introduce this idea, he relays an analogy from David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech “This is Water” in which Wallace tells the story of two fish that ask themselves what water is.(1) Similarly, digital technologies can be seen as the water in which we now all live: it is all around us, yet it is hard to describe.
The goal is to enable students to articulate their own understanding and comfort with technology. For example, self identifying as someone:
who is in water and wants to learn to swim faster
who's aware they are in water, but feels like they are drowning
who's not even aware of the water, and is trying to walk.
The polls purpose is to start forming a honest and safe learning environment. A poll allows students to anonymously identify which of the above groups they feel apart of. Building on this, David invites a volunteer to explain their choice to encourage student to become more self aware of their knowledge and comfort level and to begin thinking about their learning objectives. A final objective is to showcase the diversity of experience and affirm that regardless of where they stand, they all bring important perspectives to the class and enrich each other’s experiences.
This analogy was shared with David by John Lilly.
Video of David teaching this segment
What is the medium of government? - 20'
The aim of this section is to reflect on the importance that paper and text have played in enhancing the power of, and shaping the structure of, government. Indeed the role of paper is so influential that the inertia of its influence can make the adoption of digital approaches difficult.
Purpose
In this section, David describes how paper and the printing press have allowed for standardization and storage (memory), enabling governments to organize information and act consistently over time. They both helped shape the state as we know today by standardizing not only the language, but rules, culture, and identities. David also explores how codification and standardization - enabled by text - can shape society in ways that can hurt or harm citizens.
The purpose of this discussion is to highlight how centuries of thinking and accumulated practices built around paper create powerful inertia that prevent the adoption of digital first approaches. Indeed so powerful is trapping of thinking in terms of paper that for some governments, "digital transformation" means simply moving from paper forms to PDFs. These types of lessons are often best hammered home with anecdotal examples.
Examples
David does this by showcasing the cost and inefficiency of his own recent experience with a government tax office. Finally, he also talks about how the COVID-19 crisis highlights the limit of the paper driven government and the added pressure to adopt digital era practices.
Video of David teaching this segment
What does digital government mean to you? 10'
This section highlights the challenges around developing a common understanding and definition of digital government.
Discussion and Debrief
To start, David asks students to reflect on the question: "What does digital government mean to you?". The purpose is to get students to start to think about what the goal of digital government. Is it about automation? Efficiency? Better service? Improved outcomes?
The purpose of this prompt is to get students to recognize that while these outcomes may be positive externalities of digital government, what digital government really represents is the adoption of the "culture, practices, processes & technologies of the Internet-era to respond to people's raised expectations."(1) Is the creation of a new set of public administrative capacities, not a specific outcome, that will define success.
Tom Loosemore's definition of digital transformation.
Video of David teaching this segment
Breaking the paper trap 15'
This sections explores the causes and consequences of governments struggle to overcome the inertia of paper based processes and adopt digital approaches even when confronted with raised expectations from citizens.
In pursuit of explaining the dilemma outlined above David provides three explanations:
The organizational structure marginalizes digital technologies: In organizational charts, it is common to see IT as a support service that is not seen as strategic.
It takes time for new tools to remake how we work: The world is filled with new collaborative software that enable co-creation, and yet policies and culture of government often prevent such tools from being used at scale within bureaucracies.
Policy often trumps administration: Policy creation has been seen as a more important skill than delivery and public administration. As a result it been harder to get senior decision makers to be interested in competencies, skills and culture needed to improve government operations in a digital era.
Video of David teaching this segment
Common questions from students faculty could prepare for:
- What is the difference between E-government and Digital Government?
How can you get support teaching this unit?
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Send a message to mailbox@teachingpublicservice.digital if you want to book in a call or have any questions.
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We are proud to use the Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age syllabus in our curriculum and teaching. Developed by an international community of more than 20 professors and practitioners, the syllabus is available open-source and free at www.teachingpublicservice.digital
Why was this page created?
This teaching material forms part of the Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age project. Read more about it here.
Acknowledgements
David Eaves would like to note that this material was made possible by numerous practitioners and other faculty who have generously shared stories, pedagogy and their practices. David is also grateful to the students of DPI 662 at the Harvard Kennedy School for enriching the course and providing consent to have the material and questions shared. Finally, an enormous thank you must be given to Beatriz Vasconcellos, who helped assemble and organize the content on this page.