The Nelson Institute Blog

Welcome back everyone. It was nice to see the new faces at the Faculty Governance Council on Monday. Thanks to our revised governance criteria we look forward to a broader participation.

For those of you who have been keeping up with the blog, you will see that we have been involved in a lot of activity over the summer. Committees continue to look at possibilities for program redesign, core course design and evaluation criteria. In the latter instance, Nancy Mathews presented a proposal at the Faculty Governance Council which generated a lot of debate. She will be circulating the whole report and I urge you to get comments back to her. We do need a mechanism for making judgments about performance that is interdisciplinary, and the committee in my view had some very rich discussions about a difficult topic. Nonetheless, establishing criteria even for merit evaluation is complex and it was obvious at the meeting, if not surprising, that people had strong views. I will work with Nancy to make sure a revised document gets back to you all in either the October 16 [2:00 p.m.] or the November 27 meeting. My hope is that we will have a set of criteria established (at least for merit review) before Christmas.

I mentioned at the Faculty Governance Council meeting that we are in the process of organizing another Nelson Institute/Madison Community event, this one a conference at Wingspread in January 2007. The conference is titled “Imagine Green Madison – Envisioning a Sustainable Environment and Community,” and the process will be a Future Search – a “whole system approach” designed to help communities and networks to build a future based on present common ground and ideals. The Future Search conference process was developed at the Tavistock Institute in England in the 1960s and has been used all over the world. If you are interested in the process, you can check it out at http://www.futuresearch.net. The conference will last 3 days and will involve participants from the Madison community as well as from the University. At the moment we are working with a design team to refine the theme and sub-themes and create an invitation list. Please let me know if you are interested in getting involved.

Incidentally, speaking to the Faculty Governance, I neglected to give due credit to the large team that redesigned our web page. In addition to Hope Simon, huge kudos are due to: Tom Sinclair, Carol Enseki, Sue Fafard, Justin Fiedler, Lewis Gilbert, Paul Gunther, Eileen Hanneman, Sara Lorence, Mark Marohl, Mary Mercier, as well as four colleagues at University Communications who worked with us on the design– Eileen Fitzgerald, Jenny Klaila, Nancy Rinehart, and Peter Weil. Thanks to all.

That’s all for now.

Frances

www.sharethetruth.us is a website by Eric Pan that lets you obtain tickets to An Inconvenient Truth for free, or to contribute so that others can see it. Al Gore’s movie on our current climate crisis is still playing at Madison’s Westgate Cinema, and is of course connected to our work here at the Nelson Institute. You can read the reactions of Lewis Gilbert (Nelson Institute Associate Director) here.
Eric Pan writes:

Al Gore, I must confess, had never struck me as a stirrer of passion and excitement. . . Gore’s public image, ever since 2000, has been maybe a bit too square to be hip. Watch Al Gore give a slide show? You must be joking.
With these thoughts, I watched the movie.
It was riveting, and intense. The animated graphs were gorgeous, often majestic in their implications. There were moments my heart sank like a stone. Other times, wry wit emerged amid Al Gore’s genuine warmth and engaging concern, and I joined the audience’s elated sighs of gratified relief. After the credits came resounding applause. An Inconvenient Truth is mostly a slide show narrated by Gore. It is also, refreshingly, a wild ride. Here it is from critics:

“Gore’s multimedia presentation is like a rock concert: ever-changing visuals and on-stage mini-shticks that draw the audience into a mountain of scientific data, anecdotes that connect the dots and make the larger picture clear…”
Les Wright, culturevulture.net
“The most compelling disaster movie of the summer.”
Scott Von Doviak, Fort Worth Star-Telegram
It is – by far – the most extraordinary lecture I have ever seen anyone give about anything.
Lawrence Lessig

I agree. I’ve never seen anything like this film: it inspired me to create sharethetruth.

The website has already provided over $6,500 of tickets to moviegoers, and there is at this writing $580.57 available to fund tickets to see the movie. And if all this fails to motivate, check out the Share the Truth blog for a chance to buy the President a Tesla Roadster (0-60 in four seconds, zero emissions) for Christmas.

The Core Competency Committee has made a transition from its former task of imagining how “competency-based” learning might look in the Nelson Institute. While that charge remains as a foundation, the committee now is sharpening its focus on the design of a core course for all Nelson Institute students.

The committee met in late August to further develop the idea of a core course: what concepts and skills would be taught and through what types of exercises, activities, or experiences.

Several documents capture the ideas of the group:

1. A summary of the conversation,

2. A matrix of the course design, and

3. A timeline of the course structure

The Applied Masters Committee was called to investigate a non-thesis option for a masters program in the Nelson Institute. Particularly, this committee is charged with envisioning the “ideal” program: imagining what types of students we want to create, by what structures and experiences we want to facilitate learning, and how to help these students land jobs in professions of their choice.

The committee met in late August to brainstorm such an ideal program. They will meet again in the upcoming weeks to refine their first design and to prepare for a presentation to the governance faculty this fall.

Please see the attached minutes for a summary of the committee’s first meeting.