Lecture: Playing well with others in a creative era
Sunday, April 12, 2009
| Apr ’09 |
| 17 |
| 12:00 pm |
iFoundry co-director David E. Goldberg will give a talk Playing Well with Others in a Creative Era from 12-1 pm in Lecture room C60, School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, on Friday, 17 April 2009.
Abstract. Cross-, inter-, and transdisciplinary education and research are all the rage, but the reasons for their ascendence and the conceptual and organizational hurdles to successful execution are rarely critically examined. This talk considers the rise of work across disciplinary boundaries since World War 2, and the missed revolutions that have transformed organizations outside the academy. Economic and technological forces underlying the missed revolutions are also examined, and these lead to a discussion the growing body of literature that recognizes the present as a time that values creativity over mere improvement or enhancement. The talk continues with a discussion of the ways in which the separation between what C. P. Snow called The Two Cultures are increasingly untenable, suggesting that the language used to defend the cold war paradigm of technology–language that includes terms such as “rigorous” and “the basics”–is itself a barrier to working across disciplines, that terms such as “soft” and “not rigorous” are a form of name calling, and that technologists have done themselves and their students a disservice by disregarding the missing basics of a proper technological education. These missing basics are identified as a missing link to successful interdisciplinary research, and a number of organizational innovations to successful discipline crossing are discussed, including pairwork and mesolevel dot connectors.
