Creative Pragmatics

Our new book — Creative Pragmatics for Active Learning in STEM Education is published this week. Here’s a personal introduction and the first chapter. edited by Connie Svabo, Michael Shanks, Chungfang Zhou, Tamara Carleton with contributions from (in order of appearance): Andrew Pickering, Jesper Bruun, Søren Nedergaard, Gabriele Characiejiene, Martin Niss, Amalie Thorup Eich-Høy, Maiken…

Update: December 2022 – slow archaeology

“Our brains aren’t designed for multitasking”, my dear friend Cliff Nass, mathematician, cognitive scientist and psychologist, warned me a good long while ago – and he’d written a book about it! “It will slow you down and cloud your reasoning.” OK — I’m still working on the same big three projects as back then. But…

Update – the actuality of the archaeological past

I have contributed little to this site Since 2016. I have been writing (Greece and Rome: a new model of antiquity [Link]), running experiments in fieldwork (Project Borderlands [Link]), exploring applied archaeology (with a host of organizations and corporations), asking questions of the proper role of the academic, the researcher, the scholar. In this contemporary…

Is ‘Design Thinking’ the New Liberal Arts?

Peter Miller’s piece about design thinking and history, more accurately archaeology (because archaeology deals with the past-in-the-present), is in the latest edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Is ‘Design Thinking’ the New Liberal Arts?. Here are some highlights that convey a key message – that human centered design and design thinking, about which I…

Stanford Daily | Top 10: Classes

The Stanford Daily, the venerable student-run newspaper, has included my design class (An archaeology of design – ten things [Link]) among Stanford’s top 10 [Link] – “the courses you have to take before you graduate”. It’s great to get this recognition, and from the students (nearly a third of Stanford undergrads sign up). What is…

Autosuggestion – rough cuts

Mike and I have edited the script of last week’s presentation of Autosuggestion – our new work of Theatre/Archaeology. Autosuggestion – the script There’s still some fact checking to do – mainly on the details of car history (and any suggestions will be very welcome – use the comment form at the end of the…