The Expert:
The Expert:
PHYLLIS GRABER JENSEN
What is the value of bringing interdisciplinary thought to the Bates DCS program?
PHYLLIS GRABER JENSEN
What are the implications for the college’s Information and Library Services operation when we add DCS to the curriculum?
Katie Vale, vice president for Information and Library Services and librarian
Rebecca Herzig, Christian A. Johnson Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, chair of the Division of Interdisciplinary Studies, and an expert in the history of science, technology, and gender
One of the things that’s particularly novel is that this is not just a straight computer science program. While students can certainly learn to code, the Bates DCS program will give students experience with a variety of technological tools and the curricular work will have ties to many different subjects and topics. What ILS excels at, especially on the library side, is helping people make connections, find information, and learn to use technologies to ask questions and solve problems. Our librarians and academic technologists assist faculty in thinking about new types of assignments that will increase students’ understanding of the world. For example, they can locate actual government data sets that can be analyzed to understand a range of political, social, and economic issues in a particular country or group of nations. Or they might help with GIS mapping technologies to identify population changes or environmental resource constraints. Students can report their findings via research papers, multimedia assignments, or even 3D-printed items. Digital and information literacy skills are necessary for life in the 21st century, and we in ILS look forward to supporting the DCS program.
In my view, an interdisciplinary perspective is really about perceiving and understanding relationships, and that’s a long-standing theme at Bates, something Bates students do unusually well. And what does a networked world demand but the ability to see and frame and transform relationships in new ways? I like to imagine that our graduates will help build a different kind of digital infrastructure and, in so doing, build a different kind of world: more inclusive, more sustainable, more democratic. And they’ll be able to do that not only because they have the requisite technical skills in coding and analysis and so on, but also, more importantly, because those skills emerge within the context of a broader liberal arts education. An interdisciplinary education can encourage students to explore the social underpinnings of technical skills, and the limitations of those skills, as well as their most potent applications.
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Fall 2016