On the Sins of Omission

On Sins of Omission

Anyone that knows me, knows that I have a few too many fingers into too many pies, but I suppose it’s part of my personality to take on a few too many tasks that I probably should. One of the pieces of evidence of that is the amount of emails, blogs, social media streams and magazines that come across my desk daily from a variety of sources in education, technology, science and design to name a few. As a result, sometimes these go directly to my trash or it into piles articles and magazines that I hope I can get back to but often don’t.

from: http://sonofadud.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/030-finger-in-every-pie.jpg

from: http://sonofadud.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/030-finger-in-every-pie.jpg

Why this confession? On Tuesday, I had a couple of hours free to plan, prep and grade and in my mailbox was the latest issue of Wired magazine. Honestly, I don’t even know how I ended up with a subscription, but most months I look at the cover and think to myself “not gonna have time to look at it this month” and put it in a pile to be thrown out two months later. This time, however, I opened up the cover because the title was “The Future of Design: Invisible. Beautiful. Everywhere.” Okay – I was intrigued. Given how much time we spend with our students talking about creating work of meaning and beauty, and our interest in future design I had to at least take a peek inside. What was obvious almost immediately was how beautifully synchronized the work in this magazine is with the kinds of ways we work with our students in our MPX program. Here’s just a few of the articles in the magazine that aligns so beautifully with the work we talk about, or could use as jumping off points to investigate something meaningful in ourselves and our community:
** the fall and rise of gene therapy – in which amongst other things they talk about using topographic maps and visualization technology to understand better viruses
** Argos satellite – a brief article with visuals about a satellite that maps daily movements of marine animals to better understand their behaviors
** how Internet censorship can actually increase the spread of viruses and malware
** going the extra mile – an article about the design of cars from the shell eco-marathon
** one gamers war on sexism – one woman’s work on gender and sexism in video games
** making the web a louder place – the impact of audio files in increasing democratizing voice on the Internet
** nuclear waste management
** Project collaboration using social media
** the chemistry of pool chlorination
** the technology of communication systems in the sky above us
** invisible design – the ways which technologies are becoming embedded ubiquitous and invisible

and that doesn’t even cover all of the short articles on a variety of topics. Do these topics present jumping off points for short or long-term inquiry? Absolutely. Whose job is it to provide opportunities for my students to find areas of interesting, provocative and meaningful research – mine.
Two challenges, then, for me as the lead thinker in my classroom – how to create time and structure so these incredible conversations about present and future can be embedded as a part of our daily work, our passions and thinking, and ways that we position ourselves to take an active role in shaping the future.

So I’ve gone public with my need to not let these powerful opportunities just slide by my desk in the rush of the day-to-day, in the words of Ian Jukes “the tyranny of the urgent”

Hopefully we’ll see examples of that in our work this year…

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