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.

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

More on keynote speakers

On the topic of recycling and the connection to the environment, here are some possibilities for keynote speakers, courtesy of my friend Tom Buhrman. He’s currently working on an environmental art exhibition called “re|THINK” (got your “re” in there, Lisa!) to encourage visual artists to design posters to encourage Carolinians to care about and protect the environment. When I mentioned our symposium topic to me, he suggested a few possible speakers. Some are artists, others are professors, some are local, some are not (from Tom’s email to me):

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

(2) Noah Scalin, graphic design professor at VCU, specializes in socially
conscious design
alrdesign.com (read his philosophy)
noahs@alrdesign.com
*** Noah is one of the AIGA judges (for the re|THINK show), and his design philosophy is
outstanding — not just thinking about sustainability, but about
political choices in general.

(3) Amy Chapman-Braun
www.brauncreative.com
amy@brauncreative.com
creative director, Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth
Sciences at Duke
*** One of our AIGA judges. Our only local judge.

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

(5) This show of political posters is similar to our concerns.
Any of the 3 curators would probably be good.
http://www.thegraphicimperative.org/

(6) Mike Salter
(designer/visual artist I used to know, he used to live in NC, now
lives/teaches/creates in Oregon)
http://www.copyrightsalter.com/
http://art-uo.uoregon.edu/index.cfm?mode=faculty&page=msalter
*** One of our AIGA judges. Uses recycled materials/objects. Special
note: did some of the wall murals in the Duke Coffeehouse.

(7) Marc Alt (NYC) or Phil Hamlett (SF), Co-Chairs AIGA Center for
Sustainable Design

(8) Jonah Sachs, founder/ pres. of Free Range Studios, design firm
specializing in socially conscious design
Named to Fast Company’s Fast 50: 50 Profit-driven solutions for what
ails the planet (along with Arnold Schwarzeneggar & Nike)
Lots of experience/ awards in environmental and social change
http://www.freerangestudios.com

Also, we could consider some of the fellows in the Franklin Humanities Institute’s “Recycle” seminar as possible keynote speakers:

http://www.jhfc.duke.edu/fhi/seminar/sem0708.php

Franklin Humanities Institute Co-Conveners “Recycle” Seminar:

Neil De Marchi, Professor of Economics, has interests in the emergence of art and financial markets and cultural economics.

Mark Anthony Neal, Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Program in African and African-American Studies works on black popular culture, black feminist and queer theory and black intellectual production.

Annabel Wharton, William B. Hamilton Professor of Art History, works on art, architecture and material culture from late antiquity to modernity.

Duke Arts and Sciences Faculty Fellows:

Pedro Lasch, Assistant Professor of the Practice, Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Peter M. McIsaac, Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor, Germanic Languages and Literature
Rebecca L. Stein, Assistant Professor, Cultural Anthropology
Susan G. Sterrett, Assistant Professor, Philosophy
Kenneth J. Surin, Professor and Chair, Program in Literature

Duke Professional School Faculty Fellow:

Catherine Fisk, Professor, School of Law

UNC-Chapel Hill Institute for the Arts & Humanities (IAH) Exchange Fellow:

Richard Langston, Assistant Professor, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures

Duke Library Fellow:

Ernest “Erik” Zitser, PhD, Librarian for Slavic and East European Studies, Bostock/Perkins Library

Postdoctoral Fellows:

Jane E. Anderson, PhD (2003), Law, University of New South Wales
Andrew Russell, PhD (2007), History of Science and Technology, Johns Hopkins University

- Tori