Category: Education and Administration

Richard Florida, who has made popular the phrase, the Creative Class, recently published an article, “America’s Looking Creativity Crisis” in the Harvard Business Review of October, 2004.
In a report prepared for the Ontario Ministry of Enterprise, Opportunity and Innovation (who comes up with these awful titles), he and others, argue that,

Creativity has replaced raw materials or natural harbours as the crucial wellspring of economic growth. To be successful in this emerging creative age, regions must develop, attract and retain talented and creative people who generate innovations, develop technologyintensive industries and power economic growth. Such talented people are not spread equally
across nations or places, but tend to concentrate within particular city-regions. The most successful city-regions are the ones that have a social environment that is open to creativity and diversity of all sorts. The ability to attract creative people in arts and culture fields and to be open to diverse groups of people of different ethnic, racial and lifestyle groups provides distinct advantages to regions in generating innovations, growing and attracting hightechnology
industries, and spurring economic growth. (Competing On Creativity: Placing Ontario’s Cities in North American Context, Meric S. Gertler, Richard Florida, Gary Gates, and Tara Vinodrai. November 2002. Report prepared for the Ontario Ministry of Enterprise, Opportunity and Innovation and the Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity.)

It is depressing where Hamilton is in many of the indexes in the report – usually below the Canadian average, except in the “Diversity and Mosaic Index.”
Continue reading Florida: “America’s Looking Creativity Crisis”

ideo, a design company, has a neat site up on their ideas for the Stanford Center for Interactive Learning. The site shows different types of learning spaces they are designing for Stanford. I like how they imagine pods and walls. The site design is also clean and easy to explore.
Stanford has their own site on Wallenberg Hall (where the Center is) that gives lots of details on the rooms. See Wallenberg Hall – especially the section on “exploring WH”.
These links are courtesy of Audrey Carr.

Arts, Media and Engineering is an interdisciplinary focus that crosses a series of departments from Engineering to Theatre. It is hard to tell if it is a real intersection or a naming exericise. There don’t seem to be any new programs, just “concentrations” in existing ones. There do, however, seem to be shared spaces built to bring them together.

The goal of the Arts, Media and Engineering Program is transdisciplinary research and education in the integrated development of media technologies and content with a focus on experiential media.

This was from Andrew Mactavish.

Here is an interview by a McMaster student with my new colleague Henry Giroux that puts well the challenge we face in teaching civic and moral responsibility. (DV) Rahmani: Interview with Henry Giroux.

McMaster is capable of attaining the highest quality of excellence in the traditional sense, but I think it is also providing a new model of excellence, one that measures a university in terms of how it addresses the needs of civic society on both a national and global level. There is a certain worldliness about McMaster, a sense of being in the world, being attentive to the civic quality of a larger global public sphere. This means, in part, taking seriously what it means to educate students to be critically engaged, civic citizens of the world.

Applied Arts has a nice list of the Greater Toronto Area education programs in applied arts and computer graphics.

KMDI is a neat interdisciplinary institute at the University of Toronto on Knowledge Media Design. They have a graduate study/collaborative program that spans Architecture, Computer Science, Information Studies, Medical Science, Mechanical Engineering and Sociology. I wonder if it works?

Bob Rae has been commissioned to advise the Premier of Ontario on our postsecondary education system in January of 2005. A Discussion Paper is now available. The Resource Room has links to a number of useful documents.
Continue reading Rae Discussion Paper

Bob Rae mentioned an OECD document, On the Edge: Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education from the Institutional Management in Higher Education (IMHE) programme of the OECD. (I’m not sure of all the acronyms, departments, and programmes.)

New Media in Academia is a set of interviews with representatives from 18 universities like Carnegie Mellon and Rensselaer about the history and design of their programs. There is an introduction by Jan Ekenberg who identifies two main models, the classroom model and the studio model.

SFU News – SFU integrates TechBC students – Feb 21, 2002 is an article about how Simon Fraser University is taking on the students stranded when TechBC was closed. TechBC was an interdisciplinary university set up in 1999 and soon closed due to budget and student issues. One of their undergrad programs was in Interactive Arts (for more on the program, see the interview from Switch.)
So what was the full story on TechBC?