Category: Blog

I recently re-visited a very interesting educational initiative at the Institut Francais du Petrol in Paris.

This was at the invitation of Dr Joao Silveira, a collaborator with the UT Dallas ArtSciLab, which Kathryn Evans and I co-direct. 

On my first visit, over a year ago, Joao introduced me to their school focused on retraining petroleum engineers to become engineers in alternative energy (solar, wind, tidal, biofuels, geothermal, hydrogen, energy storage etc). How can dirty engineers become green and clean? The new Lab e-nov director is Olivier Bernaert.

Lots of MOOCs, micro credentials etc involved . See the work of Marie de la Villèsbrunne.

Hmm so what? Big Deal?  

The IFP has been renamed as the IFP for Energies Nouvelles (IFP for new forms of energy) or more accurately:  Lab e·nov. As part of this transition – the IFP has created the Lab e-nov, a dedicated lab offering “education engineering’ services to IFPEN researchers, as well as IFP school teachers and students.

Here is their current explanatory video, in French: Lab e·nov : le laboratoire des cultures digitales  

Their school is now re-oriented to a re-emerging field of EDUCATIONAL ENGINEERING: 

“Educational engineering is a structured process aimed at designing, adapting, or transforming a learning system in order to optimize the effectiveness of the training.”  

A detailed overview can be found here.

I find this to be a very significant restructuring of how we think of systems to help people find out what they might need to learn/teach. And yes, also how to learn how to teach/learn differently that we currently do.

About the Author:

Roger F. Malina is a space scientist and astronomer, with a specialty in extreme and ultraviolet astronomy, space instrumentation and optics. He served as director of the Observatoire Astronomique de Marseille Provence and was NASA Principal Investigator for the Extreme Ultraviolet Satellite project at the University of California, Berkeley.

He is also a publisher and editor in the new emerging research fields that connect the sciences and engineering to the arts, design and humanities. Since 1982, he has served as Executive Editor of the Leonardo Publications at MIT Press. He founded, and serves on the board of two nonprofits, ISAST in San Francisco and OLATS in Paris, which advocate and document the work of artists involved in contemporary science and technology.

He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Art and Technology and Professor of Physics, at the University of Texas at Dallas and Directeur de Recherche for the CNRS in France. He serves as the Associate Director of ATEC, and founded the ArtSciLab in the ATEC program fall 2013.

We are pleased to announce the Comet Weave initiative at the University of Texas at Dallas.

We seek to reach out for the collective ideas, ingenuity and intelligence of staff members on campus and send suggestions through our systems.

Campus top-down information structures are represented heavily in not only the decision-making aspects of the university but also in the identification of problems.

How long will the concrete on the UTD campus? Not long? Certainly not as long as Roman Concrete? See: Riddle solved: Why was Roman concrete so durable?

Innovation has created much of the world that we know today and as such the role of ingenuity has begun to diminish in many of our institutions. Perhaps we need to incubate ingenious professionals to influence the innovation obsessed.

We all excited by windmill generated electricity, but windmills were invited centuries ago. (See here)

UTD is a rapidly growing university that has not adapted its management methods completely to different scale. We feel that it doesn’t listen enough to the wisdom of the gardeners, staff employees, and visitors who have known the university longer than the current administration. There is a staff council.

Exemplars:

Who knows which offices are never used? – the cleaning staff.

We seek to “weave’ knowledge across and under the whole campus.

‘Interdisciplinary’ is an oft-used buzz word we like to toss around on campus, especially in the Bass School of Arts, Humanities and Technology, where the ArtSciLab specifically seeks to bridge the supposed gaps between artistic, scientific, and technological communities at UT Dallas. BAHT is the benefactor of the ideas and efforts that emerge from an environment containing eclectic knowledge. This same kind of inclusiveness when exchanging ideas is no less valuable when applied to the institutional knowledge that exists between all individuals who work, teach, and learn at UT Dallas.

‘Comet Weave’ aims at further inclusiveness when adopting terms such as ‘interdisciplinary.’ The UT Dallas community is still largely broken up into separately managed communities, lending themselves internalize their problem-solving and identification. This can be observed on multiple levels: students, staff, faculty, and admin each have their own outlets through which they can come together as communities, innovate, and enact change. This can also be seen in the management of different academic schools and departments. This is not to say these communities never work in tandem or identify shared goals – Comet Weave, however, will institute a consistent avenue through which these groups can come together under one banner to the benefit of all of UT Dallas.

As we continue in developing this this collaborative venture, we are confident the ingenuous spirit of the Bass School will contaminate the rest of the university.

If you are interested in helping weave UTD, contact us at: cometsweaveutdallas@outlook.com

Countless social accounts and comments were being blocked because they posted against the
zero-Covid policy in China When I was drawing this painting.

We are borne on the earth. We can enjoy the water, air, and land. People fight for human rights
throughout history. It is time to fight for access to the metaverse right now. Access to the metaverse is
not held in our hands. Access to the metaverse is held in the specific group. The extreme censorship is
killing people and letting people be numb.

The rights and interests of Chinese people in the virtual world are not guaranteed. In China, all
social media accounts require users to provide their identity. each post shows an Internet Protocol
Address. Recently, the government announced a policy that people only see comments on social media
after an inspector review. And each comment must provide identity.

About the Author:

Haoyi Song, Art History TA and first-year PhD student in Visual and Performing Arts said “Painting and drawing is a way to experience the classic way to observe the world before cameras. This is my way to create art.

1. Above the E-Karman boundary to the metaverse, like the oceans and outer space, it must be free for use by all peoples, communities and nations both humans and other forms of life.

2. No-one, no entity, should have the right to acquire any portion of the metaverse. All meta-entities must be by design and law a Phalansterian e-Ville Radieuse.

3. The idea of national sovereignty beyond the E-Karman boundary shall be eliminated. Privacy shall be privileged over democracy.

4. General laws, like U.N. the International Environmental Laws, or the COP Declarations of Nations similar in purpose but different in kind are needed for the e-Metaverse. Be aware of scale; the e-metaverse connects the nano to the macro and ideas and concepts don’t travel well across scale.

About the Author:

Roger F. Malina is a space scientist and astronomer, with a specialty in extreme and ultraviolet astronomy, space instrumentation and optics. He served as director of the Observatoire Astronomique de Marseille Provence and was NASA Principal Investigator for the Extreme Ultraviolet Satellite project at the University of California, Berkeley.

He is also a publisher and editor in the new emerging research fields that connect the sciences and engineering to the arts, design and humanities. Since 1982, he has served as Executive Editor of the Leonardo Publications at MIT Press. He founded, and serves on the board of two nonprofits, ISAST in San Francisco and OLATS in Paris, which advocate and document the work of artists involved in contemporary science and technology.

He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Art and Technology and Professor of Physics, at the University of Texas at Dallas and Directeur de Recherche for the CNRS in France. He serves as the Associate Director of ATEC, and founded the ArtSciLab in the ATEC program fall 2013.

As a working astronomer for decades, I learned different ways of observing the universe, noticing differences, unexpectancies — but as astrologers learned to their peril, never meddle in life on earth.

When Cassini Nazir and I started the ArtSciLab at UTDallas, I had no idea that I had to become a professional meddler, and how much as an astronomer I had to learn. Training as a Designer helped some: thank you Mauricio Meijia and many others.

10 Birthday Party; You are invited to attend April 16 2022, hybrid in Dallas.

We are about to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of our ArtSciLab. We have collaborated with more than 100 people, and bioluminescent bacteria- check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-pmmKRMT9w

Thanks to a group ( detailed at the end of this post) initiated by Jeremiah J Gassensmith we learned how to know when the bacteria were hungry and needed feeding

Now with Kathryn Evans, our co-director, we are meddling in a variety of ways.

About the Author:

Roger F. Malina is a space scientist and astronomer, with a specialty in extreme and ultraviolet astronomy, space instrumentation and optics. He served as director of the Observatoire Astronomique de Marseille Provence and was NASA Principal Investigator for the Extreme Ultraviolet Satellite project at the University of California, Berkeley.

He is also a publisher and editor in the new emerging research fields that connect the sciences and engineering to the arts, design and humanities. Since 1982, he has served as Executive Editor of the Leonardo Publications at MIT Press. He founded, and serves on the board of two nonprofits, ISAST in San Francisco and OLATS in Paris, which advocate and document the work of artists involved in contemporary science and technology.

He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Art and Technology and Professor of Physics, at the University of Texas at Dallas and Directeur de Recherche for the CNRS in France. He serves as the Associate Director of ATEC, and founded the ArtSciLab in the ATEC program fall 2013.