Write a response to ONE of today’s guest lectures and post it to your personal blog.
President Klitgaard stated that being a transdisciplinary scholar could enrich his or her research work with more enlightenment and credibility. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) seems an extreme case of such scholar. For more than half a millennium, his Renaissance integration of engineering with human values has inspired technologist, scientists, and artists. In the book “Leonardo’s laptop”, Shneiderman stated “What I like about Leonardo is that he was more than just a Renaissance geek. His playful side flourished in performing on the lyre and stating musical events. He even fabricated theatrical sets, complete with dancing lion puppets. This combination of skills delights us every today and can suggest future toys and entertainment.” (pp. 3).
As a young IS scholar myself, I speak “a digital vernacular”, and have followed “a working trajectory that encompasses multiple careers” (Brown, 2005) myself. I was particularly interested in English and Chinese literature when I was in high school, yet I chose Economics and Foreign Trade major in college. I worked at a foreign company as manager assistant after graduation. Soon after, I came to US to study MBA, and one of my favorite classes turned out to be Management Information Science, so I continued a second master degree in computer science immediately after. Since then, I’ve worked in e-health and higher education industry as software engineer. Bored of writing programs in a lonely cubical, I join PhD in IS program at CGU, looking forward to teaching and researching things that I am interested in. I found myself often benefit from the aforementioned combination of knowledge, skills and experience, such that my research envision has significantly expanded and my analysis ability has also strengthened. For example, in various research projects at the social learning software lab, I applied technology acceptance, user training, and learning theory that I learned from the higher education industry to guide the design product and process of a system. I also applied project management, business strategy skills from MBA classes and business corporations to manage the projects and collaborate with my team members. I also feel comfortable working in cross disciplinary teams that encompass multiple ways of knowing. Amusingly, I often found myself think differently from other colleagues who possess only business or IT background. At the same time, it is easier for me to think in their shoes and assist consolidating different opinions.
Regardless of the aforementioned benefits of being trandisciplinary scholar, many institutions have been slow to recognize and allow for transdisciplinary inquiry (Borderland, 2006) - as Robert Hodge argued in a 1995 issue of the Australian universities review, while more and more postgraduates are pursuing such an approach to their research, they run the risk of being inappropriately supervised and assessed. He makes a passionate argument for students to be bold enough to hold to this approach, and for universities to change their culture to reflect the shift. For Hodge, the transdisciplinary turn is a kind of Kuhnian revolution or, in Foucault’s terms, an ‘epistemic rupture’. It is a question of refusing the way in which disciplines, whilst transmitting useful and important knowledge, also ‘repulse a whole teratology of learning’ - teratology being ‘the study of monsters’.
Hodge exhorts us to be open to the monstrous, to “take seriously those problems, beliefs and experiences that are annulled by a dominant discipline, whether they be intractably personal or contaminated by the disreputable demotic or popular, by passion or anger or delight, by the desire to change the world or to dream a new one.” Being a transdisciplinary scholar then is not to seek refuge in a new mastery but to place oneself, as a site and vector of knowledge, at risk - to seek to become something other than what one is. it might be to seek, as Jane Bennett has argued, productive new hybrids of thought, machine, history and subjectivity.
Here the troubling convergences between mind and body, reason and unreason, man and animal, male and female, self and other are matched by a dissolution of the boundaries which have marked off disciplines from one another and effectively organised powerful systems of learning, pedagogy, research and knowledge. For these reasons, practising transdisciplinary scholarship can itself feel dangerous and troubling, and may produce a certain loneliness. Yet however different, transdisciplinarity is still inspired by the ideals which lie at the root of the liberal tradition, even as it questions its form, limits and history. This is a necessary “postmodern” irony - because while such work criticises and undermines the enlightenment, as a historical experience and a series of claims, it continues to argue within its terms. It asks for free and open debate, democratic spaces of thought, for the university to live up to an ideal it claims to embody. It speaks in the terms of ethics, justice and freedom, even as it rethinks and modifies them.
Agreed with Robert Hodge, I think we should still be aware that it is difficult to become an expertise in another field; sometimes even within one field, each subject can be so deep that it can take years a scholar to master. For example, it may take a database expertise years to master the software development for the DBMS that he has been using. If a scholar doesn’t have enough time or talent in mastering another field or subject, there could be chances that the scholar cannot accurately interpret and/or incorporate other subjects into his own research context, as a result, the study would be misleading to colleagues in same area, and brought critics from the experts from the other field.
Reference:
Bob Hodge (1995), “Monstrous knowledge: Doing PhDs in the new humanities”, Australian Universities’ Review 38 (2)
Borderland eJournal Web Site http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/about/manifesto.html Retrieved September 26th 2006.
John Seely Brown (2005), “New Learning Environment for the 21st Century”, Presentation at the Forum for the Future of Higher Education’s 2005 Aspen Symposium.
Ben Shneiderman (2003) “Leonardo’s Laptop”, MIT Press.