Ideas and concepts about how to encourage and facilitate the sharing of ideas, experience and knowledge across disciplines in society in general and in educational institutions in particular? Ideas conceived during MassRefinement v.05

1. CROSS-POLLINATING
IDEAS ACROSS
DISCIPLINES
#MassRefinement 05
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2. The Refinement Club
started with us, Johannes
Rummelhoff and Gro Larsson,
meeting to solve problems and
publish concepts, but evolved into
being a forum for sharing ideas. We
brought in Benedikte Kluge to help
organize what we now call Mass-
Refinements.
Mass-Refinements are about
bringing people together to share
their ideas and thoughts on a certain
subject. We then take the input from
the session and put it in context. This
time we talked about the future of the
book.
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3. How can we encourage and
facilitate the sharing of ideas,
experience and knowledge
across disciplines in society
in general?
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4. INSIGHTS
‣
Cross-connecting
Your mind cross-connects ideas, thoughts,
insights, experiences and biases. Your increasing
knowledge and experience feeds your creativity
and shapes new ideas.
‣
Sharing When you mix people with seemingly unrelated
perspectives/ knowledge/ insights all this melts
together with each other and cross-connects and
forms new and unexpected connections between
neurons in your brain, connections which forms
new ideas.
‣
Start early
The habits you develop during your years of
education tends to stick. And that’s why you
should get accustomed to work interdisciplinary
while still studying.
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5. INSIGHTS
‣
Low-threshold
If it’s easy to share your thoughts and ideas with other people,
it’s more likely that you will do it and you will hopefully do it
more often. That’s why its important to focus on making services
and initiatives that are easy to participate in.
‣
Using existing services
It’s easier to use things that you’re already familiar with and it is
more likely that you care about changes or initiatives happening in
familiar surroundings.
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6. THE JOB SWITCH
Get out of your comfort
zone.
A day a month/ quarter/ year
when you work with something
that you’re not familiar with, and
that’s not your main skill/field.
For example a programmer
working as a graphic designer for
a day.
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7. THE QUIZ
Connecting people with different backgrounds in
a "friendly competition"
Most people like bar quizzes. Why not play it in the comfort of your
couch?
Connect students from different disciplines in teams participating
in the quiz.
As participants register with information about what they are
studying and their different areas of interest, the application
connects X number of students with different backgrounds to get
variety in the teams.
Side activities may be to meet for the awards ceremony,
tournament, IRL pub quiz with the same team that you had in the
app.
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8. THE REAL LIFE GUILD
Build a guild to master your real life quests
A social network where you make a resource bank of people who
fill your blanks and compliments your skills and knowledge.
This can also be a site that helps students connect with other
types of students. The students can state their quest and collect an
interdisciplinary guild to accomplish their academic goals.
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9. IDEA BATTLES
Arrange interesting idea battles where different
people with different knowledge and expertise
battle each other out by building upon each
others ideas. Last man standing. When you can't
think of anything new you're out.
This could also work with randomly generated
teams. The teams get an assignment and battle
each other. This is actually a competition of
collaboration and communication, since the
team that have the better skills in that area
would manage to get the best result.
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10. CONNECTING
STUDENT PUBS
Hooking up tables at student pubs with phones/
web-camera which are directly connected to
another pub with totally different students. This
way you can have random encounters and get to
know people totally different from you. Hopefully
such an encounter could be the start of a
collaboration and cross-pollination of ideas.
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11. #IDEA
Using well-known social networks to share ideas
Share ideas on twitter using the hashtag #idea, but also aggregating
the feed on an external site where you can see how the ideas have
evolved from one single tweet/idea to a massive concept. A follow/
subscribe to the ideas you find interesting feature should also be
included.
It is also possible to use Google+ and Hangouts to collaborate further
on the ideas.
+ Can be implemented NOW
+ easy
+ Low input threshold
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12. INTERNSHIPS
Coordinate internship periods at different schools
Some issues are just practical thresholds. Like if you want to apply for
internship with a person who’s expertise and talent complements
yours, but their school has their internship period at a different time.
If schools could coordinate their internship periods, a graphic design
student could intern in a team with students studying e.g business and
computer engineering. Think how valuable their input would be to a
business, and the students themselves, compared to a team consisting
of one type of expertise?
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13. IDEAS CONCEIVED AT THE
REFINEMENT CLUB’S
#MASSREFINEMENT 05
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14. FACILITATED BY:
‣ Westerdals School of
Communication
‣ Benedikte Kluge
‣ Gro Larsson
‣ Johannes Rummelhoff
Thanks to all the participants!
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15. GET IN TOUCH ON:
www.therefinementclub.com
facebook.com/TheRefinementClub
twitter.com/RefinementClub
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