Welcome
Welcome to Intro to Interdisciplinary Studies. Let’s see if we can figure out what’s going on here. . .
What is this course, anyway?
Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies is a course for Interdisciplinary Studies majors. (Not because we want to be elitist, but because much of what we do is specific to the IDS major and not useful to other majors.) It is also a Technology in the Disciplines (TECO) course, so it will require students to use and think about technology.
There are three modules to this course:
- Creating an Interdisciplinary Studies contract and submitting application materials for the IDS major
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Learning about and working with useful digital technologies:
- ePorts (your own web domain)
- Personal Learning Networks
- Hypothesis (for annotating web pages)
- Learning about Interdisciplinary Studies as a field and what it means to become an interdisciplinarian. This includes learning about how schools are structured and thinking about your own learning โ past, present, future. By the end of this course, we want you to be able to take control of your education.
The underlying philosophy of this course is that of Open Pedagogy, which we will talk about a lot in class during the third module. (But if you want to learn about it now, check out this definition at the Open Pedagogy Notebook.)
Useful Terminology
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- IDS = Interdisciplinary Studies
- CoLab = The Open Teaching & Learning Collaborative, which IDS is a part of.ย The CoLab and IDS share an office space. The Director of the CoLab, Robin DeRosa, used to be the Director of IDS. The CoLab is a place for students, faculty, staff, and community members to talk about education, share ideas, collaborate on projects, and experiment with new ways of teaching and learning. You should visit us there.ย
- ePort = electronic portfolio This is a personal(ized) Web site you’ll build this semester to share the work you’re doing in IDS.ย