21st Century's Ph.D

Photo credit: katerha/Creative Commons

Academy can't remain unaltered if the world has changed, because Academy is in the world. Those of us that have spent nine years or more writing a doctoral dissertation of hundreds of pages and extremely deep subjects -and still are keen on learning- know it.

It is not that long dissertations were useful in the past. It is that their usefulness remained unnoticed then. New ways of researching have to be accepted. Traditional literary effectiveness has to be a requirement for Ph.D dissertations: if it does not impact the soul of the reader it should not be considered a valuable piece.

The link takes to an excellent discussion at Inside Higher Education on the subject. Follow it

Design Education Research

Open publication - Free publishing - More design

The importance of Design Education Research for design educators is perfectly described by Erik Bohemia at the last paper of this interesting conference:

"it is imperative in these taxing times that design educators continue research their educational practices and the assumptions underpinning these practices. The reason for this is so that they will be able to respond to the changes described above with informed knowledge. This means that they will be able to (re)design curriculum in order to incorporate "desired" changes and/or to "preserve" elements that are deemed important to produce a relevant design education."

New Architectural Thinking: ¿When?

The Institute for the New Economic Thinking is a good example of what we should be doing in architecture.