Along the way, there should be “checkpoints,” which could involve biweekly reflection papers, evaluations, powerpoints, etc
I like this because instead of just learning about phenomena all the time, you would actually get to work with them and get first-hand experience.
Students could embark on multi-field projects within a cluster and get experience working in a variety of fields, not just the one main one they are majoring in. We hope that projects won’t just involve students; we hope that students will be able to have input in the design of projects as well
The opportunity for students to not only collaborate with others, but to collaborate with different disciplines is huge. A team of scientists can now be a team made up of biologists, chemists, etc. instead of just one strict discipline.
clusters is the opportunity to further internship and experiential knowledge in organizations and businesses outside of PSU
Such a great idea with limitless potential, however it is dependent on its implementation and limitations.
Our goal is for students to find their passion while at the same time discovering how their interests fit in with the challenges and needs of the twenty-first century global economy,” Birx explains
In a rapidly growing work environment, learning how to adapt to never before seen challenges is important.
PSU students can collaborate with community members to solve real-world challenges. From the time they enter the University, students will have the opportunity to work side-by-side in open laboratories with practitioners in business, industry, government, and non-profit agencies, seeking solutions that benefit both the University and the region.
This is so important to the college experience, that you get out there and do something to affect the world around you. For a time is was only through research, but now we are getting practical.
by 2030, Plymouth State will be powered by 100% renewable electricity. “It’s an impossible mission, yet it’s a great cluster project for precisely that reason. These types of challenges create an incubating environment where great things can happen. The task will draw together individuals from across the University community
I don't think there is a bigger way to let students apply their education to real life than by having them problem solve a transition to 100% renewable energy in 13 years!
Work now, play later” sends the message to students that now is never good enough; that education will be relevant later.
I like how the framing was dissected. Even though "Work now, play later" doesn't seem like a negative thing to say, it can allow students to feel like they are trudging through school and feel like it's forced not chosen.
but the decision should come from them for it to be a meaningful, beneficial experience
This is a really big concept that can be lost, that if a student isn't invested into their education then they won't enjoy it. Sure you can try to do things to aid that process, but at the end of the day if someone hates math they will probably never enjoy math class.
First, what does it mean for something to be relevant
I like how there is just a little bit of time taken out so everyone is on the same page. Everyone knows what relevant means, however now we all have the same idea when reading this.
Unlike interdisciplinarity, specialization may be in harmony with Western tendencies "to compete, excel, dominate, and control" (Gusdorf, 1979, p. 147). People educated in our universities find it difficult to conceive of anything other than the current departmental structure
Nice perspective, I also feel like this way is 'easier'. Instead of having to go out and create your own curriculum, you just follow an already made one instead. It also allows you to get extremely focused into one area without interruption.
Even under the best circumstances, an interdisciplinarian is unlikely to gain as complete a mastery of her broad area as the specialists upon whose work her own endeavor is based. She must risk dilettantism to gain her bird's eye view. She may become jack of all trades, master of none. Literary critics, for example, often borrow a theory from another discipline, even though they fail to "first understand what it means in that discipline and how it is judged there"
This is a good premise, however this probably only really applies to certain interdisciplinary programs. Anything involving Neurology would be where this point stands strongly as the brain needs to be fully understood before you can start working on it.
a discipline can be conveniently defined as any comparatively self-contained and isolated domain of human experience which possesses its own community of experts
Really correct definition, but this is also a really complicated way to define what a discipline is.
Disciplinarians often commit errors which can be best detected by people familiar with two or more disciplines
This. So many times do ideas fail because there was an enormous mistake that no could actually see, because they could only look through one lens.
According to Greenwald, and from my own personal experience more and more students have shown an increasingly large interest in interdisciplinary students
I feel like this is because people want to be more in control of what their classes are. People want to become 'x', but often times don't like a lot of aspects of becoming 'x' due to the amount of classes they have to take. For example, Musical Theatre Majors have take Music Theory 1. Although it could be useful, they would be much better off with a music theory class tailored for just them, and not thrown into the Music Theory 1 designed for Music Ed majors.
If every single person build his or her degree from the bottom up, how creative and amazing would that be
If people get to choose what constitutes their education versus them choosing an already made curriculum, people will be more likely more invested into their education.
Engaging in this study has had me step back from each discipline of my choice, and relate the assumptions of both, which has ended up teaching me a lot about myself
I love connected learning, which I think what IDS is all about. I really like Psychology because of it's connectedness, you don't learn one thing at a time but learn how one thing affects an entire system.
Secondly, being able to think abstractly, is very significant to me. It is so important to have different ideas that may even seem impossible
People talk about Critical Thinking a lot, but I feel like people need to start thinking about Abstract Thinking as well. It has shown the world to me a new way, and others should be able to see through new ways as well.
The unique environment created by residential college life is an incredible experience for most young, college-aged students
Another big thing that contributes to the big shift in college is the fact that you essentially live with your peers.
the negative consequences of a specialized education are becoming more apparent, demonstrating that graduates need more than one kind of skill if they want to compete in today’s job market
I remember as a kid always being shocked at how people studied one thing and got a job in something similar but not the actual field itself. i.e. I had a math teacher who's B.S. was in like Nuclear Chemistry or something. They were an amazing Math Teacher, just surprised me that their B.S. wasn't in Math Education or something like that.
Many educators disagreed with Eliot, arguing that schools exist to guide students through the established hierarchy of education
I feel like in high school you need to have some constructed program to go off of, but even then you ought to be able to have some say in your course load. However, at the college level, I feel like people ought to control their education. With interdisciplinary you get all the things you want out of your education and not the hopes of what you want.
In order to break apart and reorganize a system, a preliminary system must already exist
We talked about this a little bit in class before Spring Break. Something that can be forgotten, but essential to know.
Considering this, I already know that nutrition, age, and mental state all contribute to the health of one’s skin, and I would love to be able to study these interactions with other specialists outside my discipline one day.
I feel like a lot of people want this, but don't know how to or are unsure about its 'practicality'. My program is similar to this, and I think that if someone wants to then they should go for it!
The disciplines, where we find wealths of specific knowledge and, on occasion, narrow-minded specialists, are the very building blocks of interdisciplinary studies.
What an amazing introduction. I feel like some people feel like interdisciplinary studies is here to take away disciplines, when it's actually to bolster them and create new ones!
Also they most likely are part of an association that probably hosts conferences
I never really knew about associations/societies until I got to college. The only societies I knew of before college were just the honor societies, but there are so many here at PSU.
It never really came to mind that teachers of the same subject were together during the school day simply to discuss developments in their field, I just thought it worked out that they were friends.
Never thought back on this until reading this, interesting perspective. I imagine my teachers were probably friends, as well as people discussing their fields.
In literature, however, the dominant epistemology is one of subjectivity and relationships.
I like the analogies presented, and how math and english are used to contrast. I feel like it also explains an idea that can be extremely complicated with extreme ease.
qualitative, using interviews, case studies, and observations of human behavior to understand its content.
I feel like psychology uses this a lot, unless you get into more anatomy and physiology. The scientific process seems to fall under this too.
That makes Plymouth sounds so much safer, but in order to know for sure, we have to set the numbers into context,
I feel like a lot of numbers or statistics avoid this part of contextual thinking, they forget to explore the background a bit. It's good to be able to not only information that lacks support, but to then find it out for yourself.
We can also think of breaking a larger whole into its parts in order to understand the whole more fully, and this is called “systems thinking.”
This system of thinking can be good, but also has a drawback too. If you go too far down the hole, then you completely lose the big picture.
For example, if you can gain fluency in a language, is it worth the extra time to achieve the perfection of a native speaker, or is it more rewarding to branch out into other areas to add to your language proficiency?
Interesting thought, either option is good however which one is better? Something that may not be able to be answered right away, but now there is opportunity to have a dialogue about it.
For example, a literature student might begin a paper about a feminist story, “Ever since the dawn of time, women have been struggling against patriarchy.” An anthropologist might be able to sharpen up that overstatement, and explain that gender roles are tied to both history and culture.
Amazing example. Even though I do interdisciplinary work, I always get amazed hearing how two disciplines can come together to make something incredible.
When people are trying to avoid the cookie cutter pathway to how an outcome may seem.
New solutions to common problems seems like an amazing thing to have.
It is the process of integrating knowledge in order to solve problems
The process of going from classroom to real world. Application can be hard to achieve sometimes, but hopefully with interdisciplinary perspectives it won't be the case for much longer
“multidisciplinarity” is like a fruit bowl
Great analogy. Interesting to see the analogies used later too, amazing!
Interdisciplinarity: Incorporates several fields of study to allow collaboration among diverse disciplines to either specify or broaden students’ education, to gain understanding, and/or to problem solve.
Really like the collaboration portion, something that I feel that can really push people to new heights. Being able to have multiple perspectives on complicated issues is always good!
The domains project isn’t revolutionary to the traditional classroom, but it is revolutionary to a classroom reimagined around public scholarship
Definitely going to be a huge challenge for some teachers to navigate. How do you go from having students producing work that displays competency of the material, to producing work that, in addition to displaying competency over material, also allows there work to be appealing to a larger audience than the classroom.
Can ‘ownership’ and ‘assignment’ go hand in hand?
Yes they can, but the difference may not be very clear at this moment. Digital Scholarship is a very new thing, so it could be a long time until there is an established pedagogical approach to this.
The web is a network for conversations, and if students still see their audience as a teacher with a red pen, then nothing changes.
This is a great statement from the author. If ePorts are treated like an online poster, then can we truly say we have established a digital place for our scholarship?
radical act
Is it radical, or is it innovative? Similar meanings, but definitely two extremely different nuances. Also, is something 'radical' if the general populous supports that change? Although the movement for digital ownership is small, it's growing and will definitely continue to do so until it becomes a part of common curriculum.
And if a student owns their own domain, as she moves from grade to grade and from school to school, all that information – their learning portfolio – can travel with them.
Innovative idea, but I feel like it could have as many repercussions as benefits. Sure you'd get to see if the student's progress has been astronomical over time. However as a student I wouldn't really want to do this until senior year of high school, or freshman year of college. The reason is because I don't know how I would feel if someone could look back at my work from freshman year of high school or even earlier.
Schools routinely caution students about the things they post on social media
If you tell people all the bad things about something and nothing about the good things, then how are people expected to take initiative to try something on their own accord? Instead of telling about all the bad things that could happen, tell people about how to be in control and all the good things that will happen.
It isn’t simply a blog or a bit of Web space and storage at the school’s dot-edu, but their own domain
This sounds similar to something I've heard of at my college, oh wait . . . that's what we're doing right now! I think it's great that there is now a slow movement in higher education to help better prepare students establishing a professional online presence.
restrictions on data might hinder research
Always at least two sides to an argument. Although student privacy is important, what about the people who need their data to do research? In my opinion this is definitely a topic that can be debated in terms of the ethics of both sides.