When Things Start To Think

The full text of When Things Start To Think ISBN:080505880X by Neil Gershenfeld is online.

There's a chapter on "Information and Education" (Stimulating Learning Projects), Faced with students who knew a lot about a little, I decided that I had to teach everything. This took the form of two semester-long courses, one covering the physical world outside of computers, and the other the logical world inside computers. My students loved them; some of my peers at MIT hated them. This was because each week I would cover material that usually takes a full semester. I did this by teaching just those things that are remembered and used long after a class has ended, rather than everything that gets thrown in... Although this brisk pace does a disservice to any one area, unless I teach this way most people won't see most things. It is only by violating the norms of what must be taught in each discipline that I can convey the value of the disciplines. (Digital Literacy, Internet Of Things)

The reality is that there are many different ways to view the organization of the MediaLab, all correct: by projects, by disciplines, by levels of description, by industrial consortia, by people. It functions as an intellectual work group that can easily be reconfigured to tackle new problems. Once visitors understand this (lack of) structure, the next question they ask is how the Media Lab can be copied, and why there aren't more already.

Then there are the students. It's not that they're any smarter than students elsewhere; it's that they're so desperate to make things work. I've never seen any group of people anywhere so willing to go without eating and sleeping to reduce something to practice. It almost doesn't even matter what it is.

The chapter on R And D funding sounds interesting...