History Keeping in a Synthetic Age (Zoom)
Winter (4 - 8.5 hours) | Registration opens 11/23/2026 12:00 AM EDT
The brain in later life evolves to prioritize, integrate, and crystallize decades of lived experience, propelling us to document and share our history with future generations. This impulse to reflect, record, and keep our story is universal, despite a contemporary culture that discounts the inherent power of ordinary life. This course explains why later-life inquiry and documentation matter, how oral history methods bring integrity to memory, and why AI lacks the embodied experience necessary to make history for us. We examine the limitations of commercial AI tools that collect and re-tell our stories and introduce practical, hands-on, human approaches to remembering, forgetting, recording, and finding significance in an era of data overload.
- There are no required books for this course.
Stephen Mucher
Stephen Mucher, PhD, is a social historian and the former Director of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UCLA, with earlier faculty and administrative appointments at Bard College and UC Berkeley. He holds a doctorate from the University of Michigan, where his research explored the development of universal public education in the nineteenth-century United States. He is currently a visiting research fellow at Cornell’s Digital Tech Initiative and the founder of Sondage, a governance standard for later-life historical inquiry and preservation.