Best Paper award

Publications — October 27, 2008 @ 7:40 am

I just learned that my paper “The New School, CARE & Ajkem’a Loy’a: A case study in learning in intensive and immersive global programs and in cross-cultural and bilingual collaborative work” presented at GLIDE ‘08 was selected by conference attendees as the best paper of the conference.

Quite a nice boost to start off another busy week of writing, making, and teaching!

This is the abstract (full paper is available upon request):  This paper addresses the challenges and opportunities, and suggests best practices in collaborations across year-levels, programs and divisions of a university; in external partnerships between a university and a large non-profit organization; in teaching and learning in intensive and immersive global programs; and in cross-cultural and bilingual collaborative work.

During the month of June 2008, 14 students, 2 faculty, and 1 project coordinator from The New School (TNS) lived and worked in the small lake-side village of San Lucas Tolimán, Guatemala, to collaborate with a group of Mayan artisan women, Ajkem’a Loy’a (AL.) The students and faculty represent a broad range of undergraduate and graduate academic programs at a university in the United States, and were investigating if and how the Guatemalan women could organize themselves and structure a business to create a sustainable form of generating income via the sale of their artisan goods in local and global markets.

KEYWORDS
Design education, interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary learning, collaborative learning, multicultural, multilingual, humanitarian design, economic development

A conference at which I won’t see anyone

Conferences, Publications — October 21, 2008 @ 7:34 pm

Tomorrow I will be presenting my paper “The New School, CARE & Ajkem’a Loy’a: A case study in learning in intensive and immersive global programs and in cross-cultural and bilingual collaborative work” at the GLIDE ‘08 (Global Interaction in Design Education) conference.  However, I will not travel further than my desk and I will not see any faces other than their bio headshots on a wiki.

I will have actively participated in an academic conference, delivering a 30-minute presentation about my paper that was double peer-reviewed, and all of this, without increasing my carbon footprint.  That is precisely the premise of GLIDE ‘08 – how can we create more sustainable academic exchanges?

This conference won’t have such advanced technologies as others propose but I am certainly looking forward to the experiment.  All participants logged into an Adobe Connect conferenc room and phoned into a conference call, with all watching PowerPoint slides change as the presenter delivers the paper.

The biggest loss – the chance encounters that happen at the coffee and cookie table during the break!

Artistic collaborations

Uncategorized — October 7, 2008 @ 5:27 pm

It’s not every day that artists meet other artists who are interested in so many of the same things, and even have an appreciation for one another’s aesthetic.

I have known Tokyo-based Colombian artist Klaus Fruchtnis for many years, but it is just recently that we discovered our similar interests in using photography as a way to capture urban spaces, in particular public ones. We also seem to always end up in language-based exercises.

We first collaborated on the Thing-a-Day blog run by some great people over at Eyebeam, and most recently decided to continue these ideas in a project we are calling Cross Urban.

I also recently met Brooklyn-based artist Annie Leist, (we were in a group show together at Broadway Gallery) and when I read her artist statement, I had to make sure I was not reading my own.  I’m sure we’ll find a way to work together as well – something I look forward to!