For several decades philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and education theorists have contested once prevalent accounts of human intelligence as a single, unified or monolithic thing, arguing instead for plural models that accommodate some degree of multiplicity in thinking/learning/knowing modes. The result has been controversy, particularly between advocates (like Howard Gardner) of expanded definitions of intelligence and those who propose instead more restrictive, measurable definitions that push various skill sets outside the bounds of “intelligence” proper.…
 
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It’s easy to poke fun at some of the tics and tropes that have come to define TED over the course of its 32 years of “spreading ideas that matter.” But the fact remains that TED has had an enormous impact and the TED stage is one of the world’s leading communications and innovation platforms, now fully global, interconnected with a multiplicity of television, radio, and web-based channels, and followed by audiences that number in the…
 
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Printing was never monolithic as a technology. Over the course of its history, it has been employed in the service of producing everything from nimble playing cards designed to last for months to hulking tomes destined for millennia of consultation. And within the ever shifting universe of print, books have routinely been perceived as too available or unavailable, too large or small, too cheap or luxurious. This pendulum of concerns, inflected by transformations in the media…
 
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This past spring marked the release of the Inventory Press expanded reprint edition of Maurice Stein and Larry Miller’s Blueprint for Counter Education, one of the defining works of radical pedagogy of the Vietnam War era. First published in 1970, integrated into the Critical Studies curriculum at CalArts (where the authors served as deans and faculty), the original work was accompanied by posters intended to serve as a portable learning environment for a do-it-yourself, process-based model of…
 
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Commissioned by Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, metaLAB is in the process of launching a curriculum mapping experiment that seeks to serve both the immediate needs of students and to provide a deep institutional history of Harvard through its curricular history. The project’s title is CURRICLE and its aim is to model an approach to expressing college and university curricula that can also be followed by other institutions of higher learning. A curricle was…
 
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The Boston showing of metaLAB’s documentary/web documentary COLD STORAGE at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design took place in early February of this year, but we are now preparing for the film’s European premiere in Paris. The presentation will take place at 4:30 pm on Wednesday, September 30, in the Petit Auditorium, at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Quai François Mauriac, within the setting of the conference Vers une littérature mondiale à l’heure du numérique?. The…
 
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Coming up on Friday, Sept. 18 (2-3 pm) at the New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, I will be participating in a conversation with David Senior (from MoMA) about Blueprint for Counter Education, one of the defining radical pedagogical and graphic experiments of the late 1960s. Authored by the noted sociologist Maurice Stein and Larry Miller, Blueprint was a boxed ​set made up of a “shooting script” in the form of a paperback…
 
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In their celebrated 1972 critique of modernist architecture, LEARNING FROM LAS VEGAS, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown summoned architects, designers, planners, and policy makers to learn from what, at the time, seemed like the most improbable of urban models: the Las Vegas Strip. Of course, learning from Las Vegas meant more than simply scrutinizing the Strip or appreciating it as a work of Pop Art. It meant reappraising the top-down ideology of modern(ist) urban…
 
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Last week, I had the honor of being one of the keynote speakers at an event, held at the Triennale di Milano on January 23, which marked the conclusion of an ambitious four-year EU research project on the theme of European Museums in the Age of Migrations. (That’s our age, in case you are wondering.) The project in question is described as follows on the project website: MeLa* European Museums in an age of migrations…
 
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The Library Beyond the Book is finally out with Harvard University Press in the newly launched metaLABprojects series. Here’s the first review that has come in: While iPad-bearing soothsayers banish print books to dustbins, coauthors Schnapp and Battles, both insightful provocateurs from Harvard University, envision dynamic and fluid architectural spaces warehousing paper as well as pixels. In a spirit of refreshing experimentation, they ask: What flexible qualities from the past can accommodate tomorrow’s information consumers…
 
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It’s University Press Week and my colleague at Harvard University Press, Greg Kornbluh, was kind enough to ask me to write something up for the occasion regarding the role of academic presses and the future of scholarly books. The post begins by addressing the question of “what is a scholarly book?” with respect to what scholarly books have been over the course of the past century. It then transitions to another set of questions–questions of…
 
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