Mmm - I'm planning to talk about this issue (broadly speaking - designers vs developers vs marketers vs sales/business people and how to reconcile them) at BathCamp in September. I wasn't aware of the Two Cultures lecture, so that's really useful.
I have thought for a while that the narrow education we tend to get in the UK, post-GCSE, probably doesn't help. I keep good old Da Vinci in mind as the archetypal polymath :)
Well, there is a fairly easy resolution that works in many cases: all of them want to make money, so they resolve their differences.
In certain fields which are new or not commercially viable, that motive isn't there, so the linguistic differences are a little more pronounced. So, for instance, in the Semantic Web field, some of the academics and the folks (like myself) who work on open source stuff find it irritating that all the work we have done gets 'rebranded' by marketers and business people to promote something that has nothing to do with what we do - and that it confuses those trying to figure out exactly how it works.
If we are talking Two Cultures in terms of science and humanities, then, yes, I'd agree with you - the education system, both pre- and post-GCSE has to take a lot of flack for it. And I think science education in this country is a joke. Too little theory or explanation, too little "why does this matter?", too much fiddling with Bunsen burners. It's almost as if not being able to do something with a Bunsen burner means it's not science.
2008-06-24EDT11:41:58+00:00
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In certain fields which are new or not commercially viable, that motive isn't there, so the linguistic differences are a little more pronounced. So, for instance, in the Semantic Web field, some of the academics and the folks (like myself) who work on open source stuff find it irritating that all the work we have done gets 'rebranded' by marketers and business people to promote something that has nothing to do with what we do - and that it confuses those trying to figure out exactly how it works.
If we are talking Two Cultures in terms of science and humanities, then, yes, I'd agree with you - the education system, both pre- and post-GCSE has to take a lot of flack for it. And I think science education in this country is a joke. Too little theory or explanation, too little "why does this matter?", too much fiddling with Bunsen burners. It's almost as if not being able to do something with a Bunsen burner means it's not science.
Thanks Tom, useful stuff.
Have you seen the Hype vs Craft blog post, citing Art Kleiner? It seems to sum the situation up quite nicely:
http://bizvprog.blogspot.com/200...rsus- craft.html
2008-06-26EDT14:37:46+00:00
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Have you seen the Hype vs Craft blog post, citing Art Kleiner? It seems to sum the situation up quite nicely:
http://bizvprog.blogspot.com/200...rsus- craft.html
