Got this from Newsscan:<br>
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WORTH THINKING ABOUT: "THE EMEGENCE OF SOMETHING NEW"<br>
The work of Mihai Nadin integrates science, technology, and humanities, and his major publications include "Anticipation: The End is Where We Start From" and "The Civilization of Illiteracy. " A good way to<br>
become familiar with Professor Nadin's work may be to visit his Web site on Computational Design and read an interview he gave to Technos ("Ich Bin Ein Illiterati"):<br>
"Twenty years ago I arrived in the United States and went to teach my first class at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). That school claims to be the Harvard of the arts schools and probably is. In the middle of the class I had a crisis. I said to myself: 'I will never be able to teach in the United States!' In my lecture I was referring to things that were well known in the environment from which I came, the European environment. It was taken for granted that all university students know these things. I was referring to poets and philosophers and writers you don't need a degree to know about -- people like Walt Whitman. But the RISD students kept looking at me and asking: 'Who's that?'<br>
"At the same time, I noticed that those kids were tremendously successful in whatever they attempted. They were functioning in their society at a level I could not imagine. Even at that early stage of their lives, they had imprinted upon them the ability to cope with a tremendous<br>
amount of change. But they could not cope with anything of a permanent nature. That was my crisis. I asked myself: 'What is happening here? Am I failing? Do I bring with me something that simply does not belong here? Am I witnessing the emergence of something new?' "<br>
So it was a different type of student?<br>
"A different type of student, yes, but it was more than that. The big thing was that the environment was different. It was an environment of innovation, an environment that facilitated change in a way that stopped<br>
long ago in Europe. Dealing with change is one of the major problems in Europe, if not the major one."<br>
***<br>
See
www.code.uni-wuppertal.de/welcome.shtml to become acquainted with the work of this very original thinker, Prof. Dr. Mihai Nadin, Computational Design, University of Wuppertal, Germany.<br>
<p>Richard Campbell, Legio XX<br>
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