By dan on 13 February 2010 under recommended reading
Interdisciplinary is a term of art in several professions concerned with education and training that refers to the qualities of studies that cut across several established disciplines or traditional fields of study. This involves researchers, students, and teachers in the goals of connecting and integrating several academic disciplines, professions, or technologies, along with their specific perspectives, in the pursuit of a common task. Interdisciplinary approaches typically focus on problems felt by the investigators to be too complex or vast to be dealt with the knowledge and tools of a single discipline, for example, the epidemiology of AIDS or global warming. The term may be applied where the subject is felt to have been neglected or even misrepresented in the traditional disciplinary structure of research institutions, for example, women’s studies or ethnic area studies.
The adjective interdisciplinary is most often used in educational circles when researchers from two or more disciplines pool their approaches and modify them so that they are better suited to the problem at hand, including the case of the team-taught course where students are required to understand a given subject in terms of multiple traditional disciplines. For example, the subject of land use may appear differently when examined by different disciplines, for instance, biology, chemistry, economics, geography, and politics.
In a sense, interdisciplinary involves attacking a subject from various angles and methods, eventually cutting across disciplines and forming a new method for understanding the subject. A common goal of understanding unites the various methods and acknowledges a common or shared subject or problem, even if it spreads to other disciplines.
[From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]
By dan on 24 May 2009 under recommended reading, trivia
I’ve been doing some reading on copyright and I was shocked to learn more about how long it actually lasts, and how that has changed over time.
All works published in the United States before 1923 are in the public domain. Works published after 1922, but before 1978 are protected for 95 years from the date of publication. If the work was created, but not published, before 1978, the copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years. link
Category:Author died more than 70 years ago public domain images (wikimedia.org)
…
Question for the Day: How much does the public domain weigh? (lbs)
By dan on 26 March 2009 under recommended reading, the future
Here’s a quote from a new book about about art education, filed under recommended reading. It’s a problem, clearly stated, about where to focus.
Established Media versus Emerging Research
If one defines an artist’s role as innovator and anticipator, then the curriculum must reach out beyond today’s new media. Indeed, in our kind of culture every area of scientific and technological research is a potential focus for the arts. This approach poses major challenges. How does one decide which emerging fields are worth investigating? How does one prepare to teach in such rapidly developing fields? How does one reconcile the need to teach students mastery of contemporary media while also preparing for more imminent futures?
Steven Wilson, “Beyond the Digital: Preparing Artists to Work at the Frontiers of Technoculture” in Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology, and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2008), 36.
By dan on 30 September 2008 under recommended reading
I’m taking the infamous Hardware Hacking class with Nicholas Collins, author of the book Handmade Electronic Music. So far, we’ve gone over speakers, radios, tape players, and circuit bending. Last week we made simple oscillators out of hex schmidtt triggers.
The class is a blast. I commented to Robb Drinkwater the other day that I now want to take a part everything and listen to what it does. He gave me a nod, a nod which he has probably given to numerous past students who have taken the class. Probably a lot of other people as well because before it was even a class Nic was doing workshops on the subject…
in the USA and Europe, including at The Watershed (Bristol, UK), University of East Anglia (Norwich, UK), Sonic Arts Research Centre (Belfast, UK), BENT 2004 (NYC), STEIM (Amsterdam), x-med-k (Brussels), Mills College (Oakland, CA), California Institute of the Arts (Valencia, CA), Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst (Zurich), Harvestworks (NYC), T-U-B-E (München), and the Central Conservatory of Music (Beijing).
By dan on 13 August 2008 under recommended reading
Approaching graduation, I find myself thinking about my years at art school and the things I’ve learned there.
We had this assignment in my first ever class at SAIC. It was a reading that basically said (at least, this is my memory of it 4 years later) just because it’s art that doesn’t mean it’s good. Looking back it was the perfect article for a first year class—welcome to art school you young punks. It’s a perspective I now take for granted. At the time, however, I remember it coming as a bit of a blow. It certainly went against a lot of what I thought of artmaking at the time.
The reading was “frivolity and unction” from Dave Hickey’s book Air Guitar.
