When

Tue, Feb. 28, 2012
12 pm - 1:30 pm
(GMT-06:00) America/Chicago

When Duke University gave free iPods to its freshman class in 2003, critics called it a waste of money. Yet when students found academic uses for the brand new music devices in virtually every discipline, the iPod experiment proved to be a classic example of the power of disruption -- a way of refocusing attention to illuminate unseen possibilities. Cathy N. Davidson, Duke"s vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at the time of the iPod experiment, sees this kind of innovation as the heart of a new collaborative, interactive learning that is ideal for students facing a changing, global future. Using cutting-edge research on the brain and learning, Davidson shows how the phenomenon of "attention blindness " -- in which people fail to perceive objects they are not specifically paying attention to -- shapes our lives, and how it has led to one of the greatest problems of our historical moment: Although we email, blog, tweet and text as if by instinct, too many of us toil in schools and workplaces designed for the last century, not the one in which we live. A "technopragmatist," Davidson helps us to think in historical, theoretical, institutional and practical ways about how to thrive in the connected, global world we currently inhabit.

When

Tue, Feb. 28, 2012
12 pm - 1:30 pm
(GMT-06:00) America/Chicago