It was a very busy weekend for us that started last Friday (04/13) evening. That was Tamil New Year . Since we follow a lunar calendar, the exact dates when this happens fluctuates. We have actually stopped celebrating many of these holidays that were the source of real excitement when we were growing up. This time around, an association we belong to in CT had arranged for an evening of celebration. We attended the function and had a great time. We watched a “drama” by a famous group from India. A silly comedy that required a lot of local knowledge about Tamil Nadu where we all belong to. Thanks to the Web and internet, we keep up enough to be able to relate to all the jokes. Saturday was a beautiful day and I golfed with friends from Wesleyan and Sunday we drove all the way to Hanover, NH to visit our son, have a meal, catch up and return!

In between all of this, I was following the happenings on in the world and most notably, a piece in NY Times titled “Where your Money Goes?” where Jane Wellman, who was part of the Delta Project concerned with the cost of Higher Education, was discussing ways to curb the cost of Higher Ed. I was also following the tweets from many that I follow who were at the NITLE Summit. Particularly interesting were the tweets regarding the Digital Humanities. In my humble opinion, in both of these cases, the topic is of utmost importance, but key players are missing. We can have a lot of brainstorming and generate creative solutions and ideas whether it is about reducing the cost of higher education through the use of technologies or Digital Humanities projects, but without the faculty and students participating in these discussions, these are unlikely to go too far. This is why the discussions on Digital Media and Quantitative Analysis Initiative that were part of the Liberal Arts Learning in the Digital Age Symposium were great – participants were faculty and in one case a student.

The recording of the Digital Media in the Fine Arts is available here.  Basic message from here was not much different from what we have been hearing – digital media, like other disciplines, is highly interdisciplinary. Technologies are making huge changes in the way digital media is being taught and is being learned. Therefore, it offers excellent opportunities for us in LTS to partner with the faculty to support teaching, learning and research. Our own recent investments in supporting the activities in Art and Music department were mentioned as the steps in the right direction, but clearly, we need to do much more. Especially with the new ideas that are being imagined as a part of the Wellesley 2025 space planning, our partnership is critical.

One thing that fascinated me was the idea of Anarchism – “Belief in the abolition of all government and the organization of society on a voluntary, cooperative basis without recourse to force or compulsion”  – and how it can be applied to Education. Andy Fedak from Syracuse discussed this in very interesting ways -how the faculty mostly are acting as an information flow agent and are very rarely the source of information itself; the student-faculty duality and how the student should see the faculty as a peer.

The recording of the event on Quantitative Analysis Initiative is available here. This again was a great presentation where Corri Taylor (ECON) did a masterful job of talking while a technical failure was being diagnosed and fixed. This again was a discussion of the importance of the Quantitative skills for all students and how the current Quantitative Reasoning initiative is addressing this in many ways. The proposed QAI is a step up in preparing the students in advanced skills in anything from data manipulation to quantitative research. The presentation by Pasinee Panitnantanakul ’13, a student of Kristin Butcher in the Econ department,  is an excellent example of how the faculty here are training students in skills that once was done by professionals who has been in the workforce for a long time. We are currently launching a project for better data analysis for the College. However, it is mind boggling that common data definitions and data silos are our biggest issues. When Pasinee illustrated all the steps she had to go through to get the data cleaned up before meaningful research could be carried out, I could relate to it first hand. At the same time I appreciated the forward thinking that is happening in the College in imparting such valuable skills on students.

Again, we are already finding ways to partner with the faculty to help the students carry out advanced research. But there is a lot we can do. Some of these were outlined during the presentation and this will help us formulate the future direction for us. I feel that our staff who live through the issues around data can offer real life case studies as well as teach the students some of the database techniques that will come in handy.

We look forward to the remaining symposium events and the wrap up.