Sunday, September 7, 2014

[Yasmin_discussions] What does steam have to do with it ?

reposted from linked in

Sara Kapadia

Postdoctoral Scholar at UCLA

Great, thanks for sharing... I have a dynamic relationship with
acronyms in that I feel that they never really encapsulate the true
meaning of what they attempt to represent... however I understand
human beings like the shorthand strategies acronyms offer... but as a
visual learner I find myself sometimes frustrated with acronyms and
otehr times drawn to them!

Sara

i must admit that I agree with you- the acronyms STEM and STEAM are
not very helpful-they are mostly institutionally
defined for the use of institutions, funding agencies- when a young
person is making their way in the world their
curiosity and motivation is not really helped by framing these issues
via acronyms

a deeper question is how we think knowledge and ways of knowing are
connected together-
in the traditional 'tree of knowledge' metaphor we think of knowledge
being structured in
branches, and not strongly interconnected

so STEM -science, technology, engineering, math is within a branch
that is in the scientific way of
knowing

but the arts are in a different branch

and often we organise our institutions reflecting this way of thinking

however if we think of knowledge as a networked system the arts and sciences
are different hubs in this network, but there are many live and
important inter connections

we all know that creativity and innovation draw on multiple ways of knowing

and some arts are very close to certain areas of engineering = so clearly
interactive arts and video or computer games draw a great deal on
the computer sciences = so artists in art and technology generally have
many interconnections with mathematics, and computer science

david goldberg has talked a lot about this-see instance
http://spotlight.macfound.org/blog/entry/dml-networked-studio
and this lead to the development of the HASTAC
http://www.hastac.org/
which describes itself as a Humanitise, Arts, Science and
Technology Alliance Collaboratory


so some of the stem to steam discussion is about making these interconnections
more visible to young people

roger malina
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