How does gaming fit into the future of education? Will Wright and E.O. Wilson

Yesterday, I awoke, as usual, to NPR’s “Morning Edition” on my clock radio. Sometimes, I manage to snooze through the stories, but my curiosity was piqued by the interview on Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2009, with Will Wright, creator of “The Sims” and “Spore,” and E.O. Wilson, Harvard biologist and Pulitzer-prize winning author of “On Human Nature” and “The Ants” (with Bert Hölldobler).

Wilson’s interest in bringing together the sciences and the humanities, his development of sociobiology as a new subdiscipline in biology, and his ability to make his research accessible to laypersons should certainly interest University Scholars. Indeed, a discussion of his work would have fit in quite well for our symposium on “Two Cultures: 50 Years Later” in 2009. Which brings me to Will Wright, whose “SimCity” was an installation project at our USP symposium on “Cities in Evolution: Imagination and Reinvention” in 2006.

What really piqued my interest in the Wright-Wilson interview was their conversation on the role of games in education, which made me think about our discussion at the USP retreat on “Educating the University” as a symposium topic this year. Here’s an excerpt from the NPR story:

“So the first question he asked Wilson was if he saw a role for games in the educational process.

“I’ll go to an even more radical position,” Wilson said. “I think games are the future in education. We’re going through a rapid transition now. We’re about to leave print and textbooks behind.”

To listen to the whole interview, go to http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112203095

We have a lot of folks at Duke considering this very proposition, including some of our grad school Unis like Allen Riddell, Whitney Trettien, and faculty like Cathy Davidson, Kate Hayles, and Tim Lenoir, among others. Cathy Davidson is co-founder and director of HASTAC (incidentally, this is Whitney’s 2nd year as a HASTAC scholar) and co-author of “The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age.” She was also crucial in the creation of the University Scholars Program back when she was Vice-Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke. Kate Hayles is a professor in the Literature Program and ISIS and is interested in electronic literature. Here’s a link to a Duke News article on her work. Tim Lenoir is the Kimberly J. Jenkins Chair New Technologies in Society and works on history of science. Certainly, they’d provide a rich source of insight for continued discussion on the role of new media in higher education.

~Tori L.

The allosphere

I wish I had found this before the symposium:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/joann_kuchera_morin_tours_the_allosphere.html

-Ian

Did I mention they’re short?

Two interesting articles on two types of science crossover:

Let’s Not Crowd Me, I’m Only a Scientist (Newsweek)

Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy (NYT)

—Irene L.

Hi Everyone!

I hope you all enjoyed our meeting on Sunday as much as I did – it was so good to see so many of you there!

Below, I’ve provided a summary of what we decided at the meeting with regard to the Symposium. This is NOT a full summary of our discussion (which I encourage you all to continue on the blog!). Instead, I’ve recapped just the details related to Symposium structure.

Working Title: The Two Cultures: Fifty Years Later Date: Saturday, February 28

Seminar Groups: I. Name/topic: “What makes a culture/roots of the division/Language, specialization, and biological mechanism” Presenters: Chris, Anna, Drew, Carlos Group leader: Drew

II. Name/topic: “A case study: Body vs soul” Presenters: Chantelle, Ian, Charles, Ece(?) Group leader: Chantelle

III. Name/topic: “Two other cultures” Presenters: Melissa/Stephen/Runbin (Academia vs the public), Laura/Denver (Science vs religion), Beth/Kristina (Environmental science vs environmental activism) Group leader: Melissa

IV. Name/topic: “Where are we now?/Connections, communication, and community” Presenters: Anthony (+ general discussion) Group leader: Anthony…

Keynote Speaker Suggestions:

1. Public Relations/NY Times Science writer suggested by the Nic School (please post a name and possibly bio to the blog)

2. Professor Anthony Kelley (Dept. of Music, Duke)

3. Ray Barfield (Duke Div School/Med School prof)

4. Jeff Baker

5. Alex Roland

Other Responsibilities:

1. Poster/Chronicle ad design – Anna and Chris [suggested idea: tree]

2. Program – Runbin and Phyllis

3. Invitations – Louisa and Chinika

4. Nametags – Jodi-Renee and Ga-young

5. Food – Jodi-Renee and the Grad Mentors

If any of this information is incomplete or incorrect, please let me know (I was taking notes furiously and may have missed/miswritten something). Additionally, anyone who was not at the meeting or who has since decided that they would like to present is welcome to join any group. Please just let me know what you’d like to do and I’ll put you in touch with the right people.

Note that EVERYONE is expected to participate (by presenting, organizing, or at the very least attending) the Symposium. Finally, please continue to suggest any additional Keynote speakers on the blog. That’s it for tonight – happy evenings! ~ Melissa G.

Stanley Fish, “The Last Professor,” asks “Will the Humanities Save Us?”

Stanley Fish, a former professor of English and Law at Duke, now Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and a professor of law at Florida International University, in Miami, and frequent contributor to the editorial pages of the New York Times, has written several columns about the current state of the humanities in today’s American university system.  Three articles highlighted below segue well into this year’s symposium theme, “Two Cultures: 50 Years Later,” especially the challenges posed to the humanities in particular in today’s corporate-styled university.   The articles review recent publications addressing the crisis in the humanities, with Fish’s special spin on the topic.

In January 6, 2008 article, “Will the Humanities Save Us?”, Fish reviewed Anthony Kronman’s book, “Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life.”  Fish rejects Kronman’s premise that the humanities ennoble the human spirit and that this is the ultimate purpose of the humanities.  Fish counters by saying that the humanities are their own good and that there is no reason to justify their existence because justification diminishes this purpose.

In a subsequent follow-up article, “The Uses of the Humanities, Part Two,” Fish expands on this argument, in response to readers’ comments on his previous blog post.  He explains his own reasons for pursuing humanistic study, namely his delight in solving the puzzles of language and his admiration of the linguistic prowess demonstrated in literary texts.   Significantly, he distinguishes the “humanities” from works of “literature, philosophy, and history,” something that C.P. Snow failed to do in his “Two Cultures” lecture.  Snow pitted scientific inquiry against literary production, not against the study of humanistic texts.  It is the merits of the latter that Fish undertakes to articulate, merits difficult to pinpoint unless, as commenters pointed out, one highlights the importance of the humanities in cultivating critical thinking skills, which make people “more interesting and informed.”   The French hostesses of the salons of the 17th and 18th centuries would be delighted to have such skilled and intriguing interlocutors amongst their attendees.  Are we today?

This past weekend, Fish posted a review of Frank Donoghue’s new book, “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities.” In this article,  “The Last Professor” , Fish agrees with Donaghue, his former student, about the pessimistic chances for the humanities in the future.  Today’s corporate universities emphasize the importance of “usefulness,” of courses that deliver “the information and skills necessary to gain employment,” and pay mere lip-service to the ideals of the liberal arts education.  The humanities, in this universe, are not pragmatic or purposeful, and are thus doomed.  So, I guess the answer to this post’s titular question is, sadly, “No.”  Say it ain’t so, Stan!

Tori L.

Lots of free-time symposium thoughts

From my understanding, C.P. Snow’s critique of the two cultures breaks down into two lines of thought: in an abstract sense, science and art have a great deal to offer one another, and in a practical sense, everyone must receive both scientific and artistic education in order to bridge the gap between rich and poor.
For the first line of thought, I’m hoping to apply my Program II, theoretical neuroscience, and my research in Dr. Adcock’s neuroscience laboratory to make a presentation at the symposium.  My thoughts are still pretty sketchy though, so I’d appreciate some feedback.
Theoretical neuroscience is a new field of neuroscience that tries to understand the brain from a mathematical viewpoint as a dynamical system.  This stems from research exploring the peculiar “emergent properties” of complex, interacting systems.  The most culturally accessible part of this research is chaos theory, with the well-known proverb “a butterfly that flaps its wings in China can cause a hurricane in Cuba.”  This saying captures the phenomenon that small perturbations in densely interconnected systems can have surprisingly vast effects.  A useful mental picture for seeing how this applies to neuroscience is fractals:

Above is an example of a Julia set fractal which is in essence a graphic representation of the chaos inherent in the function f(x) =  x^2 + c.  One picks an arbitrary imaginary c value, in this case -.8 + .156i, and then iterates the function (plugging in the value of f(x) into x over and over) over all x values in the complex plane and coloring based on how fast f(x) goes to infinity.  One can see the “butterfly effect” by noticing how small shifts in certain areas cause drastic changes while in others they do not.  Most importantly for neuroscience, one sees incredible mathematical and aesthetic order and complexity from the simple function x^2 + c.  The idea behind theoretical neuroscience is that, if you model different aspects of neural function with differential equations, you get equations considerably more complicated than x^2 + c, which is accompanied by more ornate emergent structure.
These theories apply to neurons quite well, and new research shows that it can explain aspects of memory retrieval, decision-making, and emotional organization.  One can extrapolate (far beyond what is scientifically responsible, I admit) to suggest that all of human mental life, from memories to daydreams, can be viewed as the emergent structure that arises out of the chaotic, mathematically understandable interaction of billions of neurons.  This is where, I feel, theoretical neuroscience and art can communicate most fruitfully.
The task facing theoretical neuroscientists is somewhat equivalent to a pre-algebra student being given the above fractal and then asked to figure out what equation it comes from.  Unraveling the secrets of the brain will require innovative mathematics, but more importantly, it requires a deep understanding of the structure of the object we are trying to explain, in this case, the mind.  Neuroscientists, especially theoretical neuroscientists need the research and guidance of the most brilliant analysts of human nature there are: artists.  If you are skeptical, consider the example of economics.  For over a hundred years microeconomics research rested on the assumption that people always maximize utility, which resulted in hopelessly flawed models.  Only recently have economists considered phenomena such as altruistic punishment, which any reader of Hamlet would recognize as a universal human trait.  Likewise, early 20th century psychologists were convinced autism was cased by “refrigerator mothers”(mothers with cold, distant parenting styles).  Literature has explored the relationship between mother and child a great deal longer than psychiatry, and it seems that any poet could tell a psychiatrist that the “refrigerator mother” theory is misogynistic nonsense.  Philosophers, theologians, writers, musicians, and artists have been exploring the questions that frame neuroscientific research for millennia.  Without consultation between these fields, neuroscientific research may go the way of classical economics, operating based on an impoverished framework with outdated and oversimplified assumptions.
In the reverse direction, artistic thought can profit from the insights emerging from neuroscientific research.  What does it mean for thought to arise from the mathematical interaction of neurons?  Many people are disturbed by this idea, but I don’t think that it has to be disturbing.  Just as campfires are no less captivating knowing that they are merely energy emissions from chemical reactions, free will is no less powerful knowing that it results from predictable neuronal interactions (borrowing from Irene’s post).  It is not the aim of theoretical neuroscience to replace conscious life by equations and numbers, to do so would be drastically overestimating the scope of science. Rather, theoretical neuroscience aims to supplement our understanding of the mind with elegant and provocative mathematics.  It is an exciting challenge for artists to incorporate scientific discoveries of mind into public consciousness without reducing free will, morality, love, or any other treasured human trait.
On a different note, it is very depressing to read C.P. Snow’s prediction that the gap between rich and poor will have been bridged by the year 2000, when in fact it has widened, not just between rich and poor countries, but between the rich and poor in developed countries.  I don’t know enough history or economics to say exactly why this is, but I think it would be interesting to think about whether Snow’s complaint about education still applies. I do think, however, that a cultural hostility towards science has exacerbated the environmental crises we are now facing.  It will take the combined efforts of art such as Silent Springs and good science and policy making, such as what I hope to see from John Holdren and Steven Chu, to make the changes necessary to save the environment.  Hopefully the integration of science and art for environmental purposes will fare better than it did for economic inequality.

So I know that was pretty longwinded, but I’d love some feedback.  It would be usefull for both my prospective symposium topic but my Program II proposal, which I’m currently working on.

Thanks all,

Ian

Oh boy.

Another article that made me think of Unis (I can’t imagine why):

Four philosophical questions to make your brain hurt

—Irene L.

Wish I were heading back to Duke..

So I started writing a brief thing about how I wish I were going back to Duke instead of working a boring job, and how amazing everything everyone’s doing sounds, but it turned into some late-night, half introspective, half “i’m too tired to be in a happy mood” thing, so I’ve decided to spare you all from it and post it on my LJ instead.  For the curious, it can be found here.

Hope everyone’s having a great summer – I miss Duke already!

-Makiko

Hello from Abuja, Nigeria.

Ah, I see I am the third to post today. Tori. You write extremely effective emails.

Hello everyone, and a special hello to all of our new Scholars! Welcome to Duke! I hope this blog will provide us a means to connect before we meet for some heart-to-heart time at the September retreat.

I’m Jane, and I am a rising senior, currently using my Uni enrichment opportunity to have the summer of a lifetime. I spent the first month in Brazil, filming a documentary with my seven-person team from Students of the World, a 501(c)3 organization. We worked closely with the NGO Citizens for Democracy in Information Technology and documented the work they are doing to bring computer technology and education into the favelas. Millions live in the “slum hills,” so-called “invisible” communities steeped in abject poverty, violence and drug-trafficking. And yet, very little is known about these and similar unplanned urban sectors, spreading through Brazil and throughout the developing world. For more information on our work in Rio, Salvadore and Belem, you can check out blogs, videos and photos on our team’s “live site” at www.seechangenow.org/2008/Brazil.

I am spending the last two months of my summer in Abuja, the capital city of Nigeria, volunteering with the NGO Teachers Without Borders (TWB) to realize the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. It’s been a completely different kind of experience. In Brazil, as the interviewer behind the camera, I was part of collaborative efforts to bring outside, international attention to local crises. In contrast, I have come to Abuja as an individual volunteer and have found that everything rides on personal initiative. Here we launch projects and implement educational reform on the grassroots level, inside out, bottom up. We most recently launched our first Wall-less Classroom, which is a class I teach with another volunteer in the middle of the sprawling dirt expanse that is Jabi Motor Park. I don’t want to risking boring you with details, but if you are interested, you’re free to look up my daily scribblings at whereonearthisjane.blogspot.com. I’ve copied my most recent entry below, in the interest of not cheating and making this a real blog contribution.

I wish you all the best this summer, wherever you are in the world. I would also love to hear from you: let’s connect before it’s over!

Jane C, Trinity ‘09

Day 33. 07.23.08. Education is more than literacy.

We finished up late today and waited under the canopy for Mr. Oko to come from the office to pick us up. Amarachi and Ngozi were seated across from me, discussing today’s class –when behind them, a man in maybe his mid-twenties reached out and slapped a woman to the ground. Shocked, I stood there as she lay there, ten yards away, facedown in the dirt, shaking. Three men seated at a table inches –literally, inches –away from the girl, did nothing. They did not move to help her, or turn to ask how she was, or really, give any indication that they had witnessed what had just happened at their feet–or felt happen, from the tremors in their table legs.

All around, people sat around, on makeshift benches, on cars, all watching in that nonchalant way of the accidental, incidental spectator. A full ten seconds or so later, feeling entered my legs and I found myself rushing over; Amarachi realized what was happening and helped me try to get the woman to stand so we could assess the damage –she was sobbing and sobbing –and as I brushed off her arms, covered in that horrible dusty orange dirt, the dirtiest kind of dirt –I had a second shock. This was just a little girl. Though relatively tall, she was so skinny that my hand fit around her forearm. Amarachi began shouting at the man who had struck her, and at this point another man saw fit to come over and join in on chastising this silent man in the blue jersey. We eventually determined that the blue-shirted man hit her because he did not want to pay her the 10 naira he owed her. Ten cents.

The worst part. The man felt bad. I could tell. He did not move or say a word as we dusted the girl off, or when Amarachi issued him a warning, or even when others then began yelling, even jabbing at him. I looked at this man, a little older than me; his unchanging expression, how still he stood through it all, and I knew. He felt bad. It was strange, how horrible this was, this knowledge that he was sorry for what he had done. It would have been easier to digest, maybe, if I thought that he thought he was in the right. But “right” and “wrong” are not such clear things here. You act. You do. And when a foreigner gets into the middle, and then of course others get involved in the muddle, and you are forcibly held accountable for what is daily occurrence here in the Park, and you look at this girl, bleeding and sobbing, clutching thirty crumpled naira…I don’t know. I don’t know how that feels. How confusing, and tumultuous, and bad.

I feel sick writing this, hours later. Education is missing from Jabi Motor Park, and that doesn’t just mean the people who spend all the hours of the day here lack the opportunity to read fancy books and write fancy letters and pursue better salaries. There is a violent undercurrent in the motion of daily Park life, and even at the best of times, it is expressed in a kind of roughness, a brusqueness of the hands and of the feet. I know the beatings cannot be uncommon. Children and women are especially vulnerable. It is not a question of whether they are treated well or badly –they are not treated at all. They are handled.

Greetings from the Rocky Top Retreat

I open my eyes from a hazy sleep to see a spider above my head. It looks dangerous. It takes me a while to register what exactly is going on. I get a book, knock the thing from out of my tent and go back to sleep.

I awake forty five minutes later because the heat in my tent is unbearable. I crawl out of my tent, and walk barefoot to “the porch.” Roger, who’s accent is so thick I can barely understand him serves me an awful cup of coffee. I say “Roger, this stuff is so bad, it gives me the shits.” Roger’s reply: “Its good for you boy. Make you light and strong. You’ll climb better.”

No, im not somewhere fancy like New Zeland or Africa. I have been spending my last few weeks camping at Roger’s Rocky Top Retreat in Fayettville, WV. Its a simple place consisting of a field and a shack (pictured below.)

Rock climbers from all over the country come here every year to climb on the Nuttal sandstone that hangs high over the New River, ironically one of the oldest rivers in the world.

Tucked away in rural West Virginia, the New River Gorge is a little known haven for all who enjoy “human powered recreation.” Although the most popular activity is white water rafting (the New is considered one of the best white water rivers in the country), rock climbing, mountain biking and hiking are also very popular activities.

Some photos so far.

Hope everyone else is enjoying themselves,

Greg