In a complex world of uncertainty, precarity, risk, and trouble, how do we conceive and teach science? I got to read Andrew Pickering’s new book today — Acting with the World [Link]. I have long admired his philosophically-informed studies of scientific practice. With such elegant and compelling clarity he makes the case for a sustainable…
future of learning
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…
Applied Archaeology — Applied Humanities
Studio Michael Shanks Stanford University Newsletter 2024 Stanford Archaeology Center Archaeological mission and vision? Ivory tower as lighthouse? In a recent newsletter for Stanford Archaeology Center [Link] I talked of slow archaeology, of the benefits of long-running projects that afford time for unfolding reflection. Three interrelated projects remain ongoing. A kind of archaeological triptych. —…
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…
Futures Literacy: how to decolonize the future
December 8 – 12 2020. Tamara (Carleton) and I were at the UNESCO Futures Literacy Summit [Link] representing our research group – Foresight at Stanford [Link]. We are standing for design foresight and what we are now calling creative pragmatics (in our forthcoming book – [Link]). Competencies, tools and techniques, mindsets not for predicting the…
imagining the future – SAP’s Ideathon 2020
Today I opened and SAP University Alliances Ideathon – 21 teams around the world spending a weekend addressing critical world challenges – [Link] For future world building, I made the case for using a toolkit that we are calling creative pragmatics, a kind of next-generation design thinking.