Disconnected: at work

It is interesting how disconnected my work at the University feels sometimes. Today I was sitting in a curriculum meeting approving courses for our College. A group of eight of us reviewed curriculum and made recommendations on how to improve each course before it moved forward to the University Curriculum Committee for final approval. After approving several courses the conversation drifted into a discussion about content and overlapping content between departments and colleges. It boils down to "turf" and control of words or content such as "social," "management," "health," "exercise," and "leadership."

As I learn more and more about what confronts students when they enter the innovative / creative economy, I realize how counterproductive these "turf" wars are to their future. We need to be breaking down the silos and find ways to combine majors / content not isolate them. A great example of a program working to combine content to create relevant education is Georgia Tech's Computer Science program. They are leaders in this effort. We all need to be thinking about this type of integration.