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This is the introduction to a report that I've placed at my SSRN page. You may download the PDF there: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2177965
Abstract: The human sciences encompass a wide variety of disciplines: literary studies, musicology, art history, anthropology (cultural and physical), psychology (perceptual, cognitive, evolutionary, Freudian, etc.), sociology, political science, economics, history, cultural geography, and so forth. In this paper I process to organize courses and curricula aso as to include: 1) material from three different methodological styles (interpretive, behavioral or social scientific, and structural/constructive: linguistics, cognitive science), 2) historical and structural/functional approaches, and 3) materials from diverse cultures. The overall scheme is exemplified by two versions of a course on Signs and Symbols, one organized around a Shakespeare play and the other organized around traditional disciplines.
My first and only faculty appointed was in the Department of Language, Literature, and Communication at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, a very good engineering school, the oldest in the country. During the summer of 1985 the school of Humanities and Social Sciences embarked on one of those periodic soul-searching exercises academic units undertake in order to revitalize their mission and–hope! hope!–increase the budget. Accordingly, the school offered a number of faculty small stipends to develop innovative brand-spanking new courses which they would present at a faculty retreat.

I took one of those grants despite the fact that I would not be returning in the Fall and developed, not a course, but an approach to curriculum design which is camouflaged as a strategy for designing a large lecture-based introductory course. I understand that such courses have been getting a bad rap, and I even understand why, I think. Nonetheless if I had to do it again in this new millennium I would. But that’s neither here nor there.

What’s important is the method I used. It’s a method that could be used in designing any course in the human sciences whatsoever, though its interdisciplinary nature is particularly suited to the large introductory course as that’s the kind of course the could most readily command the participation of faculty from a half-dozen or more disciplines. But the method could also be used in planning a suite of modules to be offered online and which individual students could organize into individualized programs that nonetheless met a coherent set of overall curricular goals.

The scheme is designed to organize materials according to three high-level criteria:
  • interpretive (hermeneutic), social and behavioral scientific, and structural (in the style of linguistics) approaches are all represented,
  • historical (diachronic) and structural/functional (synchronic) approaches are represented,
  • material from other, preferably nonWestern, cultures is presented.
Thus each module would employ either an interpretive, a social scientific, or a structural methodology and would be either historical or structural/functional in character. A student’s suite of modules would have to represent each of the three methodological styles, include both diachronic and functional topics and include materials from a range of different cultures.

This, I know, is all rather abstract. But I flesh it out in the full report by designing two versions of a course, Signs and Symbols, having 12 modules. I call one-version of the course “top-down” because it’s organized in a fairly conventional way as a selection of different topics under the general rubric of sign systems and communications. That is, it proceeds from some conception of how knowledge is structured and generates topics from that, top-down. Obviously there are a zillion ways of designing such a course and no double half of them have already been offered at one time or another. What’s important is the overall distribution of topics, not the specific topics themselves.

The other version of the course is rather different. I selected a specific text, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and generated the 12 modules from that text. The modules are somewhat different from those in the top-down version of the course but they satisfy the same distribution requirements, covering the three methodologies (interpretive, social scientific, structural), both diachronic and functional topics, and a variety of cultures. Were I to redesign that course today I’d be inclined to swap Disney’s Fantasia for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The collection of different topics would change, of course, but the same design criteria would be met.

But one needn’t use a text. Why not use the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair as a case study? Little Egypt performed on the midway; the Japanese sent a delegation, their first to America; the Ferris wheel was invented and available for rides; electric power was put to large-scale use for the first time; Cracker Jacks, Cream of Wheat, Shredded Wheat, and Pabst Beer were introduced to the world; and all in white temporary structures designed in Beaux Arts style.

The possibilities are endless. What stays the same through all of them is the overall set of cognitive goals: methodological diversity, historical and structural/functional thinking, and cultural diversity.

Of those I would particularly emphasize methodological diversity. People need to think about problems in a variety of distinctly different ways. The inability to do so is perhaps the single greatest weakness in specifically humanities education and practice. You really can’t understand human life only through interpretive methodologies. You need to understand how social and behavioral scientists construct models and test them against evidence. And you need to understand the structural and computational models used by linguistics and cognitive science, for those models are our best chance of gaining a deeper understanding of the human mind.

I’m particularly struck how, despite the apparent flourishing of digital humanities, these digital humanists confine computational thinking to their software and seem uninterested in or incapable of thinking about computational models of the mind. But that’s where the deep stuff is. Yes, we need tools that allow us to grapple with big piles of data, but there’s not much point to that if we don’t think more deeply and creatively about how the mind works, both individually and collectively.

At the moment the digital humanities seems headed along a track parallel to that taken by the neurosciences in the last two decades. Those folks have devoted enormous time and effort to developing sophisticated tools for imaging the brain and for analyzing tons of data, but they’re still thinking about mental operations in terms much like those from 50 years ago. For all practical purposes they’re thinking about homunculi passing messages back and forth.

But I digress.

The only way to get past that conceptual log jam is to learn distinctly different methods of thinking and constructing models. That’s what this paper is about, a scheme for organizing those methods into a coherent overall pattern of instruction and learning.

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I consider myself very lucky to be working alongside academics on a college campus, and not for the reasons one might think. True, I am grateful for a fulfilling job in a difficult economy, but I’m lucky because I frequently find myself in rich conversations with critical thinkers about important topics of the day. I […]

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This presentation was something of a general idea we submitted to our Summer Research conference.  It was based on the notion of two very different approaches to e-learning - mine from an Educational Studies approach, Graham's from an Computer Sci...

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A possible solution to one of the thorny questions in historical linguistics – where was the ancestor of many European and Indian languages of the Indo-European language family spoken – has been proposed using techniques normally enlisted in battling disesases.  According to findings recently published, the parent “Proto Indo-European” originated in the Anatolia region of […]

The post Words and Genes appeared first on Communicating Across Cultures.

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Originally posted on Mastering Multimedia:
Having just finished teaching a community college Intro to Documentary DV Production class, I’d thought I would share with you my formula for instructing students on how to shoot a video story in a way…

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An interesting and insightful post by Benjamin Lima. Here's the nut:
A college education has traditionally bundled several different kinds of goods together:
1. The curriculum: mastery of specific knowledge and development of more general reasoning, analytical, and communication skills.
2. The extra-curriculum: a network of friends and contacts, and experience gained from clubs, sports, internships and other activities.
3. The signaling process: validation of general talent or status by completing all of the above at a “better” or highly ranked college.
4. The college experience: everything that is personally interesting, enjoyable or rewarding about living in a certain place with certain people, and having experiences that are personally valuable to the college student, regardless of their value to anyone else or to society at large—everything from late-night conversations about the meaning of life, to road trips, to pranks, sports rivalries, and “school spirit.”
Traditionally, colleges provided all of these goods in a bundle, simply because the best way to provide them was to expensively gather a lot of students, faculty and resources in one place for several years at a time. But now, with the internet, is the logic of bundling starting to break down?

I think it’s immediately apparent that the first type of goods—the curriculum—is by far the most vulnerable to disruption from the internet. Highly self-motivated students (i.e., Abraham Lincoln) have always been able to teach themselves, given the resources, and the internet is simply going to accelerate and expand this opportunity to anyone in the world who has an internet connection. This is where the disruption of higher education is going to parallel that of journalism, publishing and music.

My hunch, however, is that the second, third and fourth types of goods are going to be affected very differently. For these, there is simply no substitute for being in the right place with the right people.
H/t Tyler Cowan.

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Originally posted on Journeys of a Hybrid:
1.  They forget about the story – it’s not your camera that tells the story – it’s the person using the camera. Pretty visuals, slapped into a motion timeline with music, doesn’t necessarily…

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Discussion of the political impact of social media has focused on the power of mass protests to topple governments. For example, see this short video, Technology’s Role In the Arab Spring Protests, of Jared Cohen, Director of Google Ideas, elaborating on … Continue reading →

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All over the world, the way citizens perform in society is strongly guided by the kind of context in which they live. Language, a human invention, is from time immemorial the preferred way by which we create context and meaning. … Continue reading →

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A series of videos examining what Scotland means, on personal level, to one expat Scot, going beyond the hype and the history books…

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I decided to sign up for DigiFoot12 in part because I think the experience will be interesting and, on the other hand, because of something I recently read in Jacob Neddleman’s The Heart of Philosophy : “It remains to be said that the … Continue reading →

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(Dis)United Kingdom invites video comments on what Scotland, and/or the United Kingdom, means on personal level, going beyond the hype and the history books…Authored pieces of no more than 2 minutes please. Email link and comments to mail@hughhamilton.com

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A short blog posting marking the start of a project to examine, to seek out what Scotland means, on personal level, to one expat Scot. It will try to go beyond the hype and the history books…

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Gee, all you need for knowing about other cultures, right on your smart phone.  The CultureGPS app allows you to call up one of over 100 countries/regions and have a score displayed on how that culture ranks in terms of Gert Hofstede’s five cultural dimensions:  power distance, individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term orientation.  The […]

The post Culture? There’s an app for that appeared first on Communicating Across Cultures.

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https://vimeo.com/41237932

A film giving a flavours of NTU recruitment trip to Taiwan in March 2012. Public domain music "In Siam" (Billy Murray) 1915 from iTunes.

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