Category: Education and Administration

The BlackBerry Brain Trust is an article in Wired, Issue 13.01, by Duff McDonald about the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics that was set up in Waterloo with funding from Mike Lazaridis of RIM. Here is what the article says about the new building:

Made largely of patterned glass, the 65,000-square-foot complex has a soaring atrium, multiple fireplaces, a bistro, a squash court, and a 205-seat auditorium for lectures and string quartet performances. It looks more like a resort than a think tank where some of the smartest people in the world are contemplating the foundations of quantum physics. The elegant structure answers the question (as the architect put it), How do you design a place in which to think?

Good question! How do you design a place to learn and discover?
Continue reading Perimeter Institute

Canadian Centre of Arts and Technology is a resarch centre at Waterloo with a number of interesting projects in the early phase. From the sounds of this press release, UW’s new centre studies human response to technology, Waterloo is investing in this area with funds and CRC chairs.
Continue reading Canadian Centre of Arts and Technology (CCAT)

Herberger College of Fine Arts is the college at Arizona State University for arts, theatre, music and dance that is collaborating with the school of engineering on the Arts, Media and Engineering research and education program that I blogged before. (See Arizona State: Arts, Media and Engineering.)
It looks like they have MFAs in Art, Dance and Theatre (and PhD in Music) each of which can have a concentration in “Interdisciplinary Digital Media” or “Interdisciplinary Digital Media and Performance”.

In the Fall we went to Ithaca and toured Cornell. I took my digital camera as I was beginning to think about learning and space. Today I finally got my pictures uploaded. They aren’t great, and the spaces are hard to parse, but it s a start, see Learning Spaces.

The Department of Communication at the University of Washington is starting a Master of Communication in The Digital Media. It looks like it is focused on policy and legal issues, not creative issues. This link is thanks to Terry Flynn.
Continue reading Master of Communication (M.C.) in Digital Media

International Cultural Studies is an interesting program at Aalborg University that is offerred in multiple languages and which is taught through Project Themes:

Projects take their starting point in practical problems or theoretical topics, which are related to your course work. Each study programme investigates a different topic each semester. Lectures and seminars are offered to prepare students for project work on problems within that topic.

Apparently 50% of the instruction is through project work around themes. They seem to have short two week intensive themes and longer ones. A colleague in Political Science pointed me to this program.

The Da Vinci Effect is a fundraising campaign by Carnegie Mellon that is touring the US and which bills itself as a “multisensory theatrical event”. From the digital video is seems to involve an actor dressed up like Leonardo who coordinates a multimedia show.
What is interesting is how Carnegie Mellon is focusing on the intersection of arts and technology and using Leonardo as an iconic figure for that interesection. They aren’t promoting Italian studies or Renaissance studies, but the combination of entertainment and technology. I wonder what Leonardo would have pushed as a curriculum for effect?
Continue reading The Da Vinci Effect: Carnegie Mellon Gift Tour

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.