[iDC] My self-introduction to the iDC list

[Cathy N. Davidson]

Dear iDC colleagues,


As one of the keynoters at the upcoming Mobility Shifts conference, I've been asked to introduce myself to the IDC list by telling you about my paper and about me.  I'm going to be giving a talk called "The Future of Learning."   Here's the abstract:


The Future of Learning
Cathy N. Davidson

In 2003, when Cathy Davidson was Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies, Duke University gave free iPods to every member of the incoming freshman class.  At the time, iTunes had barely started, and the iPod was considered to have only one function:   as a "music-listening device."  2003 was still relatively early in the history of interactive social media, when Wikipedia was still a nascent enterprise and YouTube had not yet admonished the public to "Broadcast Yourself."   Few saw any educational value in the iPods.  On the cover of Newsweek and on the evening news, the experiment was derided as frivolous if not a corruption of the very meaning of education itself.   Yet by the end of the year,  Duke students had found academic uses for the new devices in virtually every discipline, including music students who used them to insert their own performances into famous orchestras and medical students who used them to link to data bases that allowed them to identify heart arrhythmias in patients and contribute their own case studies to those data bases. Duke students held the world's first "podcasting" conference (the term had to be coined), using the iPods to broadcast ideas from and to the conference from all over the world.  The iPod experiment proved to be a classic example of the power of disruption to refocus attention to illuminate unseen possibilities not just in technology but also in learning more generally.   In "The Future of Learning," Davidson discusses several radical experiments in learning:  using open web "innovation challenges" as a form of collaborative testing, student-generated pedagogical design, and peer grading to reverse-engineer the traditional learning hierarchies of contemporary education.   She argues that the norms, practices, divisions, and metrics institutionalized by the modern research university embody and the support the norms of the Industrial Age.  In this talk, she advocates redesigning our schools (K-20) to better take advantage of, support, and prepare students for the new global, interactive demands of the digital age.

And here's a brief biography:
Cathy N. Davidson served as vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke University from 1998 until 2006, where she helped create the Program in Information Science + Information Studies and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience.  In 2002, she co-founded HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory or "haystack"), a virtual organization of innovators and educators worldwide, and currently she co-directs the annual $2 million HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competitions. She holds distinguished chairs in English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke and has published more than twenty books, including Revolution and the Word:  The Rise of the Novel in America;  Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory (with photographer Bill Bamberger); and The Future of Thinking (with David Theo Goldberg). In 2010, President Obama nominated her to a six-year term on the National Council on the Humanities.  Her most recent book is Now You See It:  How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn (Viking).

I look forward to meeting you all.

Best,

Cathy

Cathy N. Davidson
Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English
John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies
Author Website: www.nowyouseeit.net<http://www.nowyouseeit.net/>
HASTAC: www.hastac.org<http://www.hastac.org/>
Twitter: @catinstack
Facebook: www.facebook.com/CathyNDavidson<http://www.facebook.com/CathyNDavidson>

Snail Mail:
Box 90403
114 S. Buchanan Avenue
B196 Smith Warehouse, Bay 5, First Floor
Durham, NC 27708-0403

Phone: (919) 684-8471
Fax: (919) 684-1658



***********************************************
Cathy N. Davidson
Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English
John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies
Author Website: www.nowyouseeit.net
HASTAC: www.hastac.org
Twitter: @catinstack
Facebook: www.facebook.com/CathyNDavidson

Snail Mail: 
Box 90403
114 S. Buchanan Avenue
B196 Smith Warehouse, Bay 5, First Floor
Durham, NC 27708-0403

Phone: (919) 684-8471
Fax: (919) 684-1658