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.

Potential Keynote Speaker – Jeffrey Baker, MD, PhD

Here are some of the background information on Dr. Baker below. I had Dr. Baker for History of Medicine (FOCUS: Prospective Health Care) last semester and really enjoyed his class. His teaching style is very dynamic and we (students) almost always engage in very lively conversations and debates regarding the course material of the day.

~ Runbin

Dr. Baker is a pediatrician who is also a historian.  He describes his research interests on his webpage as follows:

“My formal training (PhD) is in the history of medicine. I am particularly interested in the history of Pediatrics in the following areas of study.
- Neonatal Medicine
- Preventive Pediatrics
- Childhood Immunizations
-Autism

My current work focuses on childhood vaccine safety controversies, and their relation to broader social and cultural forces in the United States and Britain.”

You can see more information on his profile pages for four different departments/centers with which he’s affiliated (each has a somewhat different profile!)

http://csmeh.mc.duke.edu/people_baker.html

http://spiritualityandhealth.duke.edu/faculty/baker.html

http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/history/faculty/jeffrey.baker

http://www.dukehealth.org/physicians/2BA0F01DEC3A594A85256DFD006A9318

~Abhijit

Keynote speaker nominee: Margaret Humphreys

Another possible good keynote speaker for our “Two Cultures” symposium would be Margaret Humphreys, Josiah Charles Trent Professor in the History of Medicine & Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine.  Professor Humphreys was affiliated with the USP in its early days and is exemplary in her approach to interdisciplinarity.  She describes her research interests as:

My major research interest is the history of disease in America, especially in the South. Until the last half of the twentieth century diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, pellagra, and hookworm marked the south as tropical, impoverished, and strikingly different from the rest of the United States. My recent work concerns the history of medicine in the American Civil war. I teach and read broadly in the history of public health, medicine, race, biology, and infectious diseases.

Professor Humphreys has numerous publications, including books and articles.  Among her books are Yellow Fever and the South, (Rutgers University Press, 1992), Malaria: Poverty, Race and Public Health in the United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) and most recently a book called Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

She teaches at the undergraduate, graduate and professional school level with undergraduate courses in History, including through the Focus program; graduate courses through History and the graduate certificate program on History and Philosophy of Science Technology and Medicine; and in the School of Medicine.

For more on Professor Humphreys, see her bio on the history website at:

http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/history/meh

Tori

Symposium Speakers – Divinity Magazine article on Ray Barfield, M.D., Ph.D.

winter 2009 15

Ray Barfield’ s Epiphany of Presence
LEADING LIVES OF CONSEQUENCE
by Jonathan Goldstein
Divinity Magazine
When Ray Barfield was a second-year resident at Eggleston Children’s Hospital in Atlanta, he learned how parents and doctors alike can lose sight of what’s most important when a child is terminally ill.  Barfield was part of a team at the hospital—affiliated with Emory University School of Medicine—treating the 3-year-old son of an Emory pediatrician and faculty member. The child was in the intensive care unit, suffering from a relapse of neuroblastoma, an aggressive childhood cancer that is nearly always fatal when it recurs.

Barfield watched as other doctors, especially the boy’s mother, proposed increasingly invasive treatments—even some that are clearly ineffective against neuroblastoma. Meanwhile, the child was sullen, stuck in a sterile intensive care unit, connected by uncomfortable leads and tubes to monitors, intravenous fluid bags and other equipment. All the while he was running out of time.

“We were just desperate to treat this child,” Barfield says. “He was in pain because of what we were doing, and no one was dealing with the fact  that he was going to die. Almost no one survives a relapse of neuroblastoma.”  Finally, the boy’s mother—a mentor to Barfield—realized that medical intervention wasn’t working. She took her son home, where he could spend his final hours with loved ones in familiar surroundings, his pain controlled by morphine.

“At home, his grouchiness went away,” says Barfield, who is affiliated with the Institute on Care at the End of Life at Duke Divinity School. “He had two or three good days with his family, and then he died peacefully.”

It was a defining experience for Barfield, who last fall joined the faculty of the Divinity School and the Duke Medical Center and is developing a new model of pediatric care.  Cooperating with physicians, nurses, faculty and administrators from across the university, Barfield is working to help practitioners and families make better choices for children who are chronically or terminally ill.

Symposium Group I ideas

Hey Unis,

Here is a brief summary of the Group I ideas.

Group I Description:

Our group aims to describe the factors influencing culture and specialization within cultures, including language, regional, and discipline-specific influences. If you’d like to join our group, think about ways you can describe the factors that affect culture formation and the reasons why we create cultural or specialization divisions.

Here is a summary of our notes from the first meeting (brainstormed):

1) Define culture
- tools you use to investigate/describe/solve problems
- elements of culture:
- identity
- language
Book: Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn- Carlos, could you follow up with this?
- paradigm defined by people in it, what they’re looking at
- isolation of a particular field
- Why do people draw dichotomies? – Drew, could you follow up with this?
- value of specialization and practical use of categorization
- Why do we study?
- academic vs. non-academic
- “less practical” vs. practical applications of knowledge
- natural philosophy —> science
- “Western” philosophy
- continual process – changing classifications of fact vs. speculation
- microcultures

2) Possible structure for Presentation
- history
- phylogeny
- microcultures

segue from the definition of culture and the elements therein to focus on specialization and microcosms of culture within the umbrella structure

I hope this will spark some thoughts! Feel free to post directly to the blog with comments/ideas/suggestions/presentation ideas, or feel free to email me at anna.brown@duke.edu as well. I also have an email list with all of the members of Group I, which I have posted below in case you’d like to contact the other members in our group.

Take care,

Anna

Here are the emails of everyone in Group I:

anna.brown@duke.edu,
Carlos <cm136 [ at ] duke.edu>,
cjw22 [ at ] duke.edu,
David Honig <david.honig [ at ] duke.edu>,
Drew Marticorena <drew.marticorena [ at ] duke.edu>,
pdm6 [ at ] duke.edu

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.

New York Times Contact

The contact I mentioned at the meeting that was interested in hearing more about our Two Cultures symposium was Cornelia Dean, Science Writer and former Science Editor of the New York Times. For a lecture at Nicholas last fall, she used “The Two Cultures” as a springboard for a discussion of science writing and public understanding of science. I spoke to her about our symposium and she wanted me to get in touch with her with more info when I could, as she does find “The Two Cultures” of interest.

Video of the lecture is posted here.

She also wrote the book, “Against the Tide: The Battle for American’s Beaches” which was published in 1999 by Columbia University Press and was a N.Y. Times Notable Book of the year.

Here’s links to her recent articles.

I couldn’t find a full bio, but some might find interesting her essay on being a female science editor and the experiences of women trying to break into mathematics in academia, written in the wake of Larry Summer’s unfortunate remarks a couple of years ago:

I’m not sure what her situation would be regarding a keynote. She may require travel, though I know she has family in the area and so may come down frequently. I would like to let her know about the symposium in advance, whether she is interested in the keynote or not.

Cheers,

Beth

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

Possible symposium thoughts

I was thinking about how I could convert some of the work I’m already doing (i.e. working in a neuro lab looking to repurpose Alzheimer’s drugs for glaucoma) to something relevant to the Two Cultures for the symposium.  One thought I had was that we needn’t limit ourselves to just the two cultures discussed in the paper (“scientists” and “humanities”/”everyone else”).

For my field, there’s actually a lot of interplay between scientists and the lay public.  In particular, the people making drugs/searching for new drug candidates/hoping to explain how or why drugs do or don’t work attempt to get grants from foundations (I’m talking something outside of NIH or NSF here; local foundations like the “Cure Huntington’s Disease Initiative” offer HUGE sums of money to labs pursuing ideas they deem worthy, whereas other smaller ones like local Autism foundations offer a precious few thousand to eager labs) that may not be scientifically-minded.  It’s quite an experience – and I suppose one could say it’s interdisciplinary – to work with people outside the field and even outside of science in general while fundamentally addressing a single goal.

While Science vs Public is related to Snow in a straightforward way, we could expand further on that idea.  There are multiple “cultures” (‘modes of thought”, “theories”, actual cultures) in virtually every discipline, and focusing on a literal interpretation of the phrase ‘Two Cultures’ may open up the discussion to some of you in history/polysci/other fields.  That way, we might also add in variety and avoid getting too stuck discussing Science vs Humanities.

My ideas aren’t complete yet, but my telephone is ringing and so I’m going to post this and be off.

Just my two cents,

Melissa G

Nominations, cont’d.

In the interest of consolidating all the names in one place, I’ve taken the liberty of doing so, culling from the various posts and comments, plus adding a few more:

Anthony Kelley and Jennifer Jenkins (they could even do a “team” keynote presentation). They co-taught a course last fall in the law school with law professor Jamie Boyle on “Music Composition: Borrowing and the Law.” Very interdisciplinary and a great fit for our topic. Boyle and Jenkins are featured in the graphic comic “Bound By Law”: http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/ about documentary film making, fair use, and intellectual property and copyright issues. A sequel is supposedly coming out on music featuring Kelley.

MUSIC AND LAW:

Anthony Kelley is a professor in Music: http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/Music/faculty/antk
For an interesting discussion of musical borrowing, see “The Splendid Thievery of Anthony Kelley”

Jennifer Jenkins directs the Center for the Study of the Public Domain and is a lecturing fellow in the law school, specializing in intellectual property law: http://www.law.duke.edu/fac/jenkins/

COMICS:

Brooke McEldowney: Wikipedia article on him, which links to further Wikipedia articles on his two comic strips
9 Chickweed Lane (his main comic strip, the one seen ’round the world)
Pibgorn (his online-only comic strip – featuring a re-working of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream)

ENVIRONMENT AND ART:

Bryant Holsenbeck, environmental artist from Durham www.bryantholsenbeck.com/
Does workshops to make your own journals.

Noah Scalin, graphic design professor at VCU, specializes in socially conscious design
alrdesign.com (read his philosophy)
noahs@alrdesign.com

elin o’hara slavick
(teaches at UNC, does strong/political work)
http://www.unc.edu/~eoslavic/

HUMANITIES

Franklin Humanities Institute’s “Recycle” seminar fellows: http://www.jhfc.duke.edu/fhi/seminar/sem0708.php

Mark Anthony Neal, Professor of Black Popular Culture, AAAS, co-convener of FHI “Recycle” Seminar:
In order to attack old assumptions of the relationship between “high” and “low” culture I consider the ways that cultural texts and icons are recycled in the service of popular art. For example, the music industry reformulates previously recorded songs and random mass media utterings for contemporary consumption through the practice of sampling and remixing. This practice has been particularly common in hip-hop, which can be described as a sonic collage brilliantly exhibiting producers’ broad musical palate. Sampling and remixing also extends to the recycling of popular iconography and vernacular language use, including figures like the “pimp” (and the act of pimping) and pejoratives like the word “nigger”.

Pedro Lasch, Professor of the Practice of Visual Arts, FHI Faculty Fellow in “Recycle” seminar: http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/AAH/faculty/pedro.lasch

and also: George Gopen (English)

ENVIRONMENT AND WATER – THE DROUGHT
Possibly city or NSOE folks involved in the Durham town hall meeting on the drought earlier in January. http://www.nicholas.duke.edu/news/ns-watertownhall2.html

For example, among others:
Bill Holman, senior visiting fellow at the Nicholas School

Ted Voorhees, Durham’s deputy city manager: theodore.voorhees@durhamnc.gov

PHYSICAL (MATERIAL) RECYCLING

George W. Roberts, retired professor of chemical and biomolecular Engineering, and/or Dr. Saad A. Khan, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering (NCSU): http://news.ncsu.edu/releases/2007/feb/025.html

EXPERIENTIAL RECYCLING (PSYCHOLOGY):Beth Marsh (psychology) - works on human memory
Roberto Cabeza (psychology) - works on neural correlates of memory and cognition
Kevin LaBar (psychology) - works on the cognitive neuroscience of emotional learning and memory