MassRefinement 05: The Results

Two weeks ago we had a MassRefinement at Westerdals School of Communication. The topic was how to encourage the exchange of ideas, experience and knowledge across disciplines and our goal was to reach and involve students in this. If the mindset of professional life is to change, the change needs to start with people who haven't started their careers yet.

But even though we reached out to several different types of schools, not one of the people who showed up was a student. It made the challenge very clear. The first task is to actually make something that the students would show up to or involve themselves in. It's difficult to encourage idea exchange across disciplines if we can't make students from different disciplines meet in some way. An obvious thing we didn't think of regarding students was the timing. Exams and finals were coming up. So anything that demands extra curricular attention from the students should probably be organized at the beginning of a semester.

This experience colored our discussion, and most of the ideas we present are low-threshold concepts. To change something like this, we believe the level of ambition you start with can't be very high. Check out the keynote for a presentation of the results:

 

View on Slideshare: Cross-pollination of ideas across disciplines

What do you think? Feel free to share your thoughts on the matter.