Interdisciplinarity in the real world

Hello Cornerstone Students! My name is Julissa, and my areas of concentrations are Mass Communications, Letters & Languages and a minor in Psychology. I chose these areas because these three compliment each other in every way. The minor assists me with understanding the way people think and why they make choices. Letters & Languages gives me the understanding of how to get my message across in writing, since mass communications consists of a ton of writing. And lastly, I love relationship building through communication, which is why this area fits me like a glove!

    This week we will complete an exercise that will give each of you the ability to exchange ideas on how we can apply our areas of development.

Activity:  Please read this quote as it helped me a lot in being able to define my degree to everyone that asked, ‘What is your degree good for?”

"When I try to explain Interdisciplinarity to prospective students and their parents I usually use [this] analogy. A building is made up of bricks and mortar. But most of us think of the bricks as being the real building and, in fact, you could pile up bricks without mortar and make something that looks like a building but which wouldn't function as well.  The mortar by itself would also not make a very useful building - although you probably could pile it up in such a way as to make some thing that looked like an igloo or something.
The success of the building is the bricks and the mortar; the bricks are the bones, the structure, of the building - the mortar is the connection between the bricks that holds the building together.  I [compare] the disciplinary programs to the bricks - they're something solid and with which people are familiar - they look like a building.  The disciplines, Art, German, Biology, Music, Mathematics, Economics, etc look like a University - they're the familiar areas of study that people associate with higher education.  The Interdisciplinary programs are more like the mortar - they're the intellectual and academic areas between the disciplines that link them together, that give them solidity and function, and give them a context."

Exercise #1 (please answer the following questions in a 200 word response):
How do you apply your interdisciplinarity in daily situations?

What is interdisciplinarity not? Is it just focus in one direct area?

Who do you know who has an interdisciplinary profession? What do they do, and is their profession what convinced you to go the interdisciplinary direction?

4.How are you integrating your disciplines or are you? If you are not, how could you integrate them more in your coursework or career?

What are some opportunities (personal, professional or educational) that can increase our interdisciplinarity?

Exercise #2:

After you have completed the reading and exercise #1, please comment to the student that posted before you..:: If you are the first to respond please comment to the last student and vice versa.:: 

Topic 3: Critical Thinking

Welcome back cornerstone students. My name is Mark Walker and I will be working with you this week to explore critical thinking skills. This is a skill that we use everyday in every aspect of our lives. A basic definition of critical thinking is the ability to take information and make educated decisions without the influence of your own views. In other words, the capability to engage in introspective and objective thought.

Someone with critical thinking skills will:

• Understand the logical connections between ideas
•  Identify, construct and evaluate arguments
• Detect inconsistencies and common mistakes in reasoning
• Solve problems systematically
• Identify the relevance and importance of ideas
• Reflect on the justification of one's own beliefs and values 

Activity:

In this week’s activity we will apply these proficiencies.

First, visit the virtual philosopher website at http://web.uncg.edu/dcl/courses/ethicsTechnology/video/VP/ethics_vp4/vp4.html and answer the questions that the virtual philosopher poses. After completing this exercise, please use the prompts below as jumping off points to share your perspectives on critical thinking in 4-5 well-developed paragraphs.

• How were you scored and did your answers favor, need, equality or merit? Does this align with your personal beliefs? How? If not, why? If the virtual philosopher considers your score “inconsistent”, do you agree with his statement that you probably, “picked your answers based upon what sounded good at the time without much thought for consistency?” Why or why not? Were you surprised by how you were scored, why or why not?

• Why do you evaluate ethical situations like those presented by the virtual philosopher in the way that you do?

• The virtual philosopher examines the interplay of ethics and critical thinking. As discussed above, skills of a critical thinker include identifying, constructing and evaluating arguments and reflecting on the justification of one’s own beliefs and values. With this in mind, let’s take this a step further and examine another hypothetical situation:

You are a psychologist and a long-time patient reveals that they are a murderer and confesses their crimes to you. They continue by saying they won’t/haven’t killed again. The oath you took declares that a therapist should keep everything a client shares with you confidential unless he/she is an immediate threat to themselves or others. After spending many months treating this client, it is clear to you that they are not a threat. What would you do and why?

• How has your experience as an IDS student enhanced your critical thinking skills? What about IDS studies encourages critical thinking? How do you think this will help you in your future endeavors like graduate school or your professional career?

• Reply to at least one other student’s response. You can discuss their insights on the Virtual Philosopher activity, their response to the hypothetical situation, their ideas about critical thinking or any combination of the three.

Please take the time to really think about your responses and examine them using the critical thinking skills described in the bullet points above before posting. Also, please be sure to keep an open mind about each other’s responses. We all might not have the same opinions, but all responses should be balanced and logical. 

As mentors we are here to try and guide you through these activities, so please ask us any questions you may have, our opinions, our experiences or anything else that may help enhance this activity.

Make sure that you post your responses as comments to this blog post and not as a brand new post. Again, be sure any responses to a particular person’s post are done as a reply to that person’s post and not a brand new comment. This helps keep the conversation going. I encourage you to respond to more than one post if you are so inclined and if someone responds to your comments attempt to engage them in further conversation and/or respond to their thoughts about your post.

I’ll leave you with this one last thought. Daniel Pink points out in his book, A Whole New Mind, that today’s knowledge economy is rapidly changing. This new economy will demand that workers are able to think creatively on their feet and synthesize many disparate pieces of information into new ideas. These skills are enhanced by well-developed critical thinking skills. So it is important to take the opportunities we have to further develop and fine-tune them.

We look forward to reading and responding to your responses this week and learning more about you and your critical thinking skills.

- Mark Walker

References:

Critical thinking bullet points were found here: http://philosophy.hku.hk/think/critical/ct.php

Topic Two - Integrating Your Areas of Study

Hello, my name is Nicole Camire. Welcome to the second week of our discussions. I will be the mentor in charge of this week’s blog.  Last week we learned a little bit about each other and what our interests were by describing ourselves with using the letters of our first name. We also discussed our focus areas and minor. This week we will focus on how your areas of study integrate by incorporating some of the ideas you developed last week in part two of the activity.

Activity Part 1:

We would like you to create a Venn diagram that indicates your areas of study and minor. In the areas inside the Venn diagram where your focus areas and minor intersect, list in a few words 2 ways they integrate. As you can see in the example provided below public relations and advertising integrate in the messaging stage of their work, while PR and marketing integrate more so when developing content. Most important is the center of the circle where all of your areas of study intersect. You can see here that PR, marketing and advertising all integrate through audience engagement. Make sure you list at least two ways all your areas study integrate in this center circle (what commonalities do they share?).

After completing your Venn diagram upload it to your Skydrive in your UCF email account. Make sure to share the file as a link and post that link in your comments to this topic so the mentors and other mentees can view it. Respond to the following question in 2-3 paragraphs in the same post.

1. Explain your Venn diagram noting the specific strengths of how the focus areas and minor build off each other as well as any weaknesses or ways they lack integration. Are your focus areas a natural fit for each other? If not, what are some ways you could make them better integrate? How do your focus areas combine in ways that will help you in your future professional, academic and personal development?

Activity Part 2:

Please read your classmates' posts and respond to at least one other student by providing your own unique insights on their ideas about integration in 1-2 paragraphs.

Make sure that you post your response as a comment to this blog post and not as a brand new post. Again, be sure any responses to a particular person’s post are done as a reply to that person’s post and not a brand new comment. This helps keep the conversation going and more natural. Feel free to respond to more than one post if you have something to share. As always, reach out to the mentors through the comments and we will reply as quickly as possible. We will also be reading and responding to your posts throughout the week. We look forward to learning and sharing more with you about integration.

- Group 8 Mentors

Topic 1 - Getting to Know You

Hello and Welcome Cornerstone Students!

This week we will spend some time getting to know each other. Each of us in the Capstone group will post a little bit about ourselves so you can get to know us a little better, but we also want to get to know you. So below you will find some prompts to get you started in the introduction process.

This week’s blog post will be broken in to two parts. The first will allow you to get your creative juices flowing and let us know a bit about how you see yourself and the second part will be a bit more analytical and dive into your ideas about interdisciplinary studies so we can get an idea about your perspectives on this degree path.

Activity Part 1: The ABCs of me

1. Write your full first and last name.
2. You will use each letter in your first name only to describe yourself.
3. Take the first letter and make it into a descriptive word. Follow this word with one to two sentences about why you chose this word to describe yourself.
4. Continue this with every letter of your first name to paint as complete a picture of yourself and your interests as you can. Here is an example:

John Doe

1. J is for Jovial: I’m a happy go-lucky type of person. I can always find the good in every little moment.
2. O is for Ostentatious: Sometimes my friends and family say I try a bit too hard to make myself the center of attention and I am known for the occasional public display for attention.
3. H is for Harmonious: I like to sing and come from a very musical family.
4. N is for Neat: My room and office are impeccably clean. I feel frazzled if everything isn’t in its proper place.

That’s it, should be fun seeing what you come up with to describe yourself.

Activity Part 2: Talking IDS

Please respond to these prompts in paragraph form.

1. Talk about your focus areas and minor. Why did you choose these areas of study? Why did you choose IDS over other degree options?

2. What are your plans after graduation, more school or a career? How do you think your IDS degree will help you achieve these goals?

3. Do you see any disadvantages to earning an IDS degree? What are they? If not, what do you think the advantages of this degree are in the job market (or upper education)?

4. What are one or two things you hope to gain from this mentoring experience?

We will do our best to individually respond to your posts this semester. Since we all have different experiences and backgrounds we may be able to provide multiple perspectives to your posts. As mentioned above, we will all introduce ourselves to you in this post too. So, feel free to respond to our posts if you want to learn more about us.

Looking forward to sharing this semester with all of you,

Nicole Camire, Julissa Fernandez, Melissa King, Kitcha Sapp, Amanda Tellez, Denise VonGartzen, and Mark Walker (Affectionately known as Group 8)

Mark Walker