The powerpoint below was presented at the 2009 meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Technology in a plenary panel session on the forthcoming handbook, Anthonie Meijers (Ed.) (in press). Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, Volume 9: Philosophy of Technology & Engineering Sciences, Elsevier.

The handbook is in press and more information is available on the Elsevier link above or the Amazon link here.

The presentation Engineering Rigor and Its Discontents: Philosophical Reflection as Curative to Math-Physics Envy is available in the viewer below:

This talk was presented Wednesday at SPT 2009, the 2009 meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Technology.  The abstract is available here.

Pairwork, teamwork performed by teams of two, has been an important ingredient to iFoundry and its precursors.  A preprint of a paper by iFoundry co-director David E. Goldberg accepted for publication at the 2009 IEEE Frontiers in Education (FIE) Conference to be held in San Antonio, The importance of pairwork in educational and interdisciplinary initiatives, is available at PhilSci archives here.

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.