Projectories

Sharon Traweek is coming to Tema-T on thursday. She’s giving a talk
on Hybridity. Invitation below.

Title: Hybridity
Lecturer: Sharon Traweek, Associate Professor at UCLA
Time: Thursday 27 th of
January 2005
Place: Lethe, Tema House, Linköping
University

Sharon Traweek is an Associate Professor in the History
Department at UCLA. She has held positions at MIT, UC San Diego and Stanford
University. She has done research in the fields of anthropolgy, cultural studies
of science, international relations, Japan studies, science and technology
studies, science education and women’s studies. Some titles from her
publication list are: Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy
Physicists (1988); Generating High Energy Physics in Japan: Moral
Imperatives of a Future Pluperfect (2004).

STS (R)Evolutions Conference Web Site

[Via: tmttlt.com]

Tomorrow will be the first time I hear the new professor at the department
speak. He’s from Uppsala University, one of
the oldest and best universities
in Sweden. He has written about the history of the natural sciences, astronomy,
cartography, and experimental physics. He is a sociologist of science, and
uses methods from the Edinburgh school. He is also the editor of Lychnos:
Annual of the Swedish History of Science Society.

It’s going to be great fun to hear and meet him.

I find the below quote very interesting – it connects to the discourse
on distance education creating flexibility for the individual, but also adds
something new I haven’t thought about, distance education actually removing
the physical basis for discrimination. In this case age, but one can easily
apply the same thoughts for gender, ethnicity or class. Incidentally this is
also one of the arguments used in relation to correspondence education: it
is the qualifications and competence that are supposed to stand out when dealing
with correspondence education.

But, needless to say, education is not only about learning professional knowledge
or skills, but also about “entering into a body of social conduct” what
Berner calls “savoir faire” – and this is something correspondence
education has a hard time providing, as there are no socializing interactions
in correspondence education classes.

I’ve just watched an amazing
documentary about gifted Swedish children on Swedish channel 4 – a
ten-year-old music genius composing his own postlude, a nine-year-old soccer
professional (almost), and an eleven-year-old chess master. The one making
the biggest impression on me, though, was ten-year-old Emma, the youngest
member of Swedish Mensa, who
always has been ahead of her class and is a real math genius. A recurring
theme during the documentary was how Swedish teachers not are sufficiently
prepared to work with gifted students, and how these students are often
held back in order to not disturb the rest of the class. Emma has found
a solution to this. She is enrolled in a class with which goes on excursions
and so on, but she takes her lessons via distance education. The principal
of her school (I unfortunately didn’t catch the name of neither
her nor the school) talked about the importance of seeing Emma as a person,
not as a child. I think that distance education can definitely be of great
help in this process - it should be much easier for teachers to treat Emma
as a talented and smart individual rather than as a child when communicating
with her via media that do not always remind them about her actual age.
A nice exemplification of the good old, often utopian view that the internet
can help break down our strongest prejudices.

Distance education for the gifted

According to the Institute
of Higher Education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Incorporated Subversion comments:

Couple of obvious gripes are that the fact that this is based solely
on ’academic achievement’ (Alumni of an institution winning Nobel
Prizes and Fields Medals, Staff of an institution winning Nobel Prizes and
Fields Medals, Highly cited researchers in 21 broad subject categories, Articles
published in Nature and Science & Articles in Science Citation Index-expanded
and Social Science Citation Index) and yet this is highlighted, um, *possibly*
in the graphic tucked away in the top left corner… otherwise this is “The
top 100 World Universities” (no mention here, for example, of ‘based-on-what’!)

Second one is that I’d love to see a corresponding study on how happy
teachers & students were with their institutions correlated to to this.

Incorporated Subeversion

Via: Alex Halavais & Incorporated
Subversion

The relatively new center for Science and Technology Studies at Uppsala University has started a STS newsletter.
STS Newsletter from Uppsala University

[Via Nita]