What We Do In Class - the Thursday fun day

So, what exactly is it I do in class with these poor students, anyway? And why does it get so loud sometimes?

I meet with the IS200, Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies, class twice a week. On Tuesdays, we spend 75 minutes going over concepts in the chapters of our text books, thinking through examples for complex problems, defining "intellectual dexterity" and "metacognition," and discussing the consequences of accepting "epistemological pluralism" - pretty much what you would expect from a group of 10 freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors bringing 12 different majors of origin, in 7 different combinations, to the round table.

On Thursdays, we actually have some fun, though. We work out some of the theoretical concepts by putting them into action. I have a handy little book I picked up at the AIS conference in Ottawa a couple of years ago - it describes about 25 group exercises (some with props) put together by graduate students in Interdisciplinarity at the University of Amsterdam. We have put Walt Disney's creative strategies to the test, compared biases against pet owners (fish, cat, dog), and responded to Breaking News about corn in Iowa (is it a good thing? is it a bad thing? Turns out it very much depends on the news you are getting, and who puts them out...).

Today we pretended to be Agents of Development and Creation, Agents of Marketing, and Agents of Labor and Business as we approached the challenges of introducing the alternative energy sources of wind and solar power to South Carolina. One team decided what kinds of analyses developers of new technologies would need to complete (turned out we need some data on sun and weather patterns, noise, resources, and education) while a second team considered what it would take to develop a labor pool to build and maintain wind and solar equipment. The last team looked at the marketing: what data would agents of marketing need? what would it take to approach the existing market and create interest in alternative energy sources?

All their ideas went onto large sheets of paper, and then all agents stepped up to consider every team's results and trace connections, parallels, and overlap between the three approaches.

"It's a complex system!"


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And then, just like that: process done. Class dismissed. And it's quiet again in DH207. Thanks, everyone, for your great work! (Next: Recycling?)

Stay posted for some internship reports - because it's not all book learning and blackboards in IS200, of course. Sometimes we actually do something.