Breakthroughs
Doug and Michelle: robotics. Eg: computer on Jeopardy. Jetson-type world. Decision-making AI. Basic computer skills plus more
Viviana: re AI that’s already done in telemedicine, nanotechnology; spaceships that go farther in space. In teaching, use a hologram to produce images of what you’re teaching that you can manipulate.
Dan: using computers to design what you used to design by hand, use the computer to transfer the information to have the sample carved mechanically, not by hand. Will students be able to go back from computer-generated to hands-on at-the-bench ability?
Karen and Mark: take the smartrooms further to have ereaders for all students. Teaching will have to change, but there can be more connections—technology can bring students into conversation with the author and other information available. There can also be a return-to-basics. There can be a return to craft, to the local
What did you hope to get out of the seminar?
How to deal with the question of teaching, of students not being engaged
How to model for students the space around City Tech as a canvas for them
To be able to let go of expectations
Teaching and lab as a way for students to learn—and use this as an opportunity for research on teaching
What can be done in their Gen Ed courses that can help students when they get to CS courses
What do students need to succeed in my field, what do they need to get from Gen Ed?
What is general education?
Time commitment per semester—it will vary
Support reading and writing as primary concerns for our students
Keeping our conversation in line with the technology we have—or that we want to have?
We were not able to share the results of our “Breakthroughs” activity in the last workshop, so I am recording them here for our records. Apologies to Boris if I have misrepresented his ideas.
The next big breakthrough in your area will be…
Boris Gelman (Physics): …understanding the nature of dark matter and dark energy. This problem is like a door — it is not clear what will be on the other side, but a breakthrough will no doubt have profound affects on our understanding of the universe (a new paradigm of forces and interactions, new sources of energy, who knows what else?)
Jonas Reitz (Mathematics): … there are many open problems in mathematics, the solution of which would answer deep questions and open up new areas of research. However, I anticipate a qualitative shift in the way we do mathematics when power of computers is integrated with the ideas of mathematical logic and proof theory, to make computers a practical tool in theorem-proving (automated theorem proving, computer-assisted proof, and so on). Want to prove a theorem? Have some ideas of how it might work? Enter these parameters and let a computer test out a million different proof possibilities (this is something like computational thinking, applied to the area of pure mathematics).