1) 
Introductions and Opening Speakers
Here are my notes from the “Opening Speakers” portion of the day. Please feel free to share your thoughts or respond by either comment or a post of your own!
Christine Greenhow:
- Introductions of executive committee
- Minnesota Futures Program
- The nature and implications of Networks & Neighborhoods in cyberspace
- Let’s find partnerships (speed-dating for ideas),
Ann Hill Duin
- Clarity of purpose
- Comittment
- Clear means of communication
- Establish partnerships
- Build technological capacity
Dean Darlyne Bailey
- Interview on MPR site
- 3M Vision: Multidisciplinary, model for education, …
- “Multi-disciplinarity” (quite distinct from “Inter-disciplinarity”)
- Inter is an admirable relationship between differnt fields. Ind’s share perspectives and lead to informed folks.
- Multi is folks working to engage and reflect all relationships (changes people)
- Multi - folks come together and risk sharing ideas and risk being open to eachother. This sin’t a “blending” but a creation of something that didn’t exist before.
- Donald Swanson: “Undiscovered public knowledge” - he had to cross multiple disciplines in med. science to learn how to look at “numb hands” issue in medicine.
- 2 teachers stand in their own discipline, are open to the ideas of each other, and create a sylabus with the “fruits of” their relationship. Create something that has NEVER been created before. They stay open to the students’ influencing their syllabus.
- You stay in your discipline, but you let others influence you. And you seek to be changed by other ideas. Allow for “permeable boundaries” where “information can go in and information can go out”.
- “Knowledge economy”
- Practicality: How are we doing this at the college? People are coming together. Find a neighborhood (i.e. “Education”). We have “blocks” within our neighborhoods. “Blocks” are where 2 or more folks come together to create something new and better understand each other. People in CI are doing this: Aaron Doering, Charlie Miller, Christine Greenhow, etc.
- Tie together multiple colleagues (faculty, stud’s, and staff) coming together to work towards one mission and vision.
Professor Ann Waltner
- Studies scandal and gossip
- Interdisciplinary Research
- Darlyne is talking about using networks and neighborhoods to put together something concrete, whereas Ann is talking about something much more vague and amorphous, a place where people come together and interact.
- Many are now doing work that no longer fits into standard college departments.
- Revolutions in how we communicate, store, and analyze information.
- “The History of the Book” - How does the manner change the way it is used. i.e. how does the medium influence the types of interactions? Marshall McLuhan - the medium is the message?
- When assembling a team, do not assume that your ideal candidates are, in fact, your ideal candidates. Try to get the word out about what you are doing and meet new people who might be interested in helping you. Lunchtime brainstorming meetings are a great way to get projects off the ground; you always meet new people.
- “The more pervasive online communication becomes, the more effective face-to-face is.“
- Be patient with language difficulties.
- Integrate language difficulties into the design of your project rather than looking at language as an obstacle to overcome.
- Go public or semi-public before you have your results. This can be a great experience for the scientist and the audience.
- Be savvy about how you assemble the team.
COMMENTS:
Q: Brad Cohen - How do we make multi-disciplinarity happen?
A: Darlyne Bailey - Figure out who your audience is and break your research down in a way that they can use it. This can help others to understand and be changed by your research. The U needs promotion and tenure policies that support multi-disciplinarity.
A: Ann Waltner - We need to figure out how to be creative within the institutional structures that exist.
Q: Audience Member - We always need to rediscover public knowledge. There’s a lot of momentum at the U to fund new initiatives, but what about funding the old initiatives? How do we convince people to do “the work” once those research dollars are awarded?
A: Ann Waltner - Managing success and failure at the U is an issue we need to address.
February 11th, 2008 at 8:10 am
Excellent, perceptive discussion of multidisciplinarity. I do think it’s important to recognize, as we praise multidisciplinarity, that a lot of academic work will always be within particular disciplines. There is a reason why disciplines exist, and why “silos” have developed, in other words. In the ones I’m familiar with, it often takes a graduate seminar, or several years of study, even to understand what the questions are that people are investigating.