ARTICLES
Latest articles:
Sonvilla-Weiss Stefan (2009), Creative Learning Spaces of the Future
Paper for Designs on eLearning Conference 2009, University of the Arts London
Introduction:
A highly dynamic field of interdisciplinary research clearly stress the need of concrete examples coming from educational practice, i.e. the focus is on the actual implementation of best practice models that would help to define and shape the future formal and informal learning space settings.
In this regard our interdisciplinary project work among design, media, communication and novel pedagogical models has led to valuable outcomes including new interfaces, collaboration and communication tools.
What has become evident in my research is the necessity of seeing together the prevalently dissociated social, technological, cultural, spatial and temporal aspects in the creation process of such environments. Likewise, the fundamental shift from teaching to learning, formal to informal arrangements, collaboration to collective intelligence, consumption to co-production, entails corresponding and flexible architectures that meet the requirements of seamless real and virtual interactions and quests of adaptive students to see themselves as learners and co-creators.
Sonvilla-Weiss, Stefan (2009), Towards a culture of networked practices in a knowledge and learning intensive society. In: University & Industry Knowledge and Innovation. WSEAS (World Scientific and Engineering Academy and Society) PRESS Athens, New York, Miami, Sofia, Madrid, Taipei. Pages 9-35.
Full version (pdf)
Introduction:
The pressure to innovate permeates through all kinds of organizations and institutions. Thereby innovation is often equated with necessary reforms that were often dismissed or simply neglected due to institutional idleness and complacence. Benchmarking and evaluation of individual, administrative and organizational performances have gained fresh momentum by e-policies on interoperable and standardized indicators, which are in permanent flux and in an endless spiral of information data harvesting, control and exploitation. What has long been considered an institutional, governmental or national agenda has now been put forward into a public discussion, yet with sometimes wrong and erroneous premises. Outsourcing and diversification of predominantly service-based supply on demand, for example, were one of the first steps towards liberalization of hitherto closed, because they were publicly financed, bodies. Although the cost-benefit ratio did not always meet the expectations of the policy-makers and their management in place, partly due to the fact that those small enterprises made their profit gains through low-cost and less skilled employees, an unstoppable process of deregulation has come into being until this very day. In terms of university reformation processes, clustering and fusions emerged all around Europe; regardless of the motivations behind them, whether they originated from a supplementary, location-based or financial-driven approach, these steps clearly marked out a new era of putting universities in the context of a competitive higher education marketplace…
Sonvilla-Weiss, Stefan (2008), Art, Science and Education. In: Mel Alexenberg (ed.) Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology and Culture. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9781841501918
Introduction:
There has been an ongoing discussion for several years now on the relationship of art and science in educational and professional contexts. Is this just another attempt to put an old fashion into new clothes? I do not think so, because this time the arguments do not constitute an attempt to make a qualitative distinction between universities or higher institutions of art, design and media. Nor is there a fundamental dispute involved whether the artistic singularity of an artefact or scientific objectivity claims to have more epistemic value. In search of significant sources nourishing the current discourse, paradigmatic changes in the process of renewing and preserving the conditions of cultural self-organization are key to a major shift in how we construct knowledge, technology and cultural memory. It concerns institutional forms as well as the individual. One of the standpoints is to consider a revival of the „Leonardo principle“. A second standpoint might close the chapter of the relationship between art and science for the benefit of scientific-economic prosperity, whereas a third engages with the question of how cultural, intellectual and spiritual fields are prerequisite to evolutions in art, science and technology. My affinity is with the third one, although some of the issues relating to this area are similar to other positions. Many questions derive from the context of audiovisual restructuring of knowledge and communication areas in interrelated and cooperative fields moulding into novel forms of interdisciplinary design, such as BANG design, whose acronym stands for the basic modules of our world (B=Bits, A=Atoms, N=Neurons, G=Genes).1 This field will be extended by neurophysiological research into cognition and perception, not to be confused with the ontological and philosophical terminology of cognition and perception. In conjunction with media- and biotechnological industrialization of codes, concepts and design in the educational context of art and science have been renewed. Can both art and science learn from each other, and, if so, at what and for what? Do both act in the same framework of design and conceptualization, as some of the new generation of media artists suggest in their explorative approach?