Building governance and energy efficiency: Mapping the interdisciplinary challenge

Improving the energy efficiency of multi-owned properties (MoPs)—commonly known as apartment or condominium buildings—is central to the achievement of European energy targets. However, little work to date has focused on how to facilitate retrofit in this context. Drawing on interdisciplinary Social Sciences and Humanities expertise in academia, policy and practice, this chapter posits that decision-making processes within MoPs might provide a key to the retrofit challenge. Existing theories or models of decision-making, applied in the MoP context, might help to explain how collective retrofit decisions are taken—or overlooked. Insights from case studies and practitioners are also key. Theories of change might then be employed to develop strategies to facilitate positive retrofit decisions. The chapter maps the issues and sets an agenda for further interdisciplinary research in this novel area

Bio-techno-practice. Personal and social responsibility in the academic work

The new challenges posed by biomedicine and biotechnologies ask for a deeper consideration on the relationship among science, knowledge and social responsibility. On one hand, in fact, technologies seem to shape our idea of human progress and scientific understanding of the natural world and of life in particular. On the other hand, a thoughtful consideration on the philosophical foundations of science as human enterprise is required. This also opens important questions about the new emerging paradigms of ‘excellence’ in the academic, social and market fields and on the role that universities play in training the future leaders and professionals of our society. After a short review of the contemporary philosophical reflections on the unity of knowledge, which is the origin and the goal of academic work, we argue that adherence to our current challenges through the bio-techno-practice prism is a fecund driving force of the academic activities. Moving from the experience of an international project, we also discuss the impact that such interdisciplinary activities have on what we call hidden curriculum, i.e. the embodied style of (skills that allow) people in taking care of each other in their physical, social, professional and scientific needs

Nanoinformatics: developing new computing applications for nanomedicine

Nanoinformatics has recently emerged to address the need of computing applications at the nano level. In this regard, the authors have participated in various initiatives to identify its concepts, foundations and challenges. While nanomaterials open up the possibility for developing new devices in many industrial and scientific areas, they also offer breakthrough perspectives for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases. In this paper, we analyze the different aspects of nanoinformatics and suggest five research topics to help catalyze new research and development in the area, particularly focused on nanomedicine. We also encompass the use of informatics to further the biological and clinical applications of basic research in nanoscience and nanotechnology, and the related concept of an extended ?nanotype? to coalesce information related to nanoparticles. We suggest how nanoinformatics could accelerate developments in nanomedicine, similarly to what happened with the Human Genome and other -omics projects, on issues like exchanging modeling and simulation methods and tools, linking toxicity information to clinical and personal databases or developing new approaches for scientific ontologies, among many others

Metacognition and Reflection by Interdisciplinary Experts: Insights from Cognitive Science and Philosophy

Interdisciplinary understanding requires integration of insights from different perspectives, yet it appears questionable whether disciplinary experts are well prepared for this. Indeed, psychological and cognitive scientific studies suggest that expertise can be disadvantageous because experts are often more biased than non-experts, for example, or fixed on certain approaches, and less flexible in novel situations or situations outside their domain of expertise. An explanation is that experts’ conscious and unconscious cognition and behavior depend upon their learning and acquisition of a set of mental representations or knowledge structures. Compared to beginners in a field, experts have assembled a much larger set of representations that are also more complex, facilitating fast and adequate perception in responding to relevant situations. This article argues how metacognition should be employed in order to mitigate such disadvantages of expertise: By metacognitively monitoring and regulating their own cognitive processes and representations, experts can prepare themselves for interdisciplinary understanding. Interdisciplinary collaboration is further facilitated by team metacognition about the team, tasks, process, goals, and representations developed in the team. Drawing attention to the need for metacognition, the article explains how philosophical reflection on the assumptions involved in different disciplinary perspectives must also be considered in a process complementary to metacognition and not completely overlapping with it. (Disciplinary assumptions are here understood as determining and constraining how the complex mental representations of experts are chunked and structured.) The article concludes with a brief reflection on how the process of Reflective Equilibrium should be added to the processes of metacognition and philosophical reflection in order for experts involved in interdisciplinary collaboration to reach a justifiable and coherent form of interdisciplinary integration. An Appendix of “Prompts or Questions for Metacognition” that can elicit metacognitive knowledge, monitoring, or regulation in individuals or teams is included at the end of the article

IDR : a participatory methodology for interdisciplinary design in technology enhanced learning

One of the important themes that emerged from the CAL’07 conference was the failure of technology to bring about the expected disruptive effect to learning and teaching. We identify one of the causes as an inherent weakness in prevalent development methodologies. While the problem of designing technology for learning is irreducibly multi-dimensional, design processes often lack true interdisciplinarity. To address this problem we present IDR, a participatory methodology for interdisciplinary techno-pedagogical design, drawing on the design patterns tradition (Alexander, Silverstein & Ishikawa, 1977) and the design research paradigm (DiSessa & Cobb, 2004). We discuss the iterative development and use of our methodology by a pan-European project team of educational researchers, software developers and teachers. We reflect on our experiences of the participatory nature of pattern design and discuss how, as a distributed team, we developed a set of over 120 design patterns, created using our freely available open source web toolkit. Furthermore, we detail how our methodology is applicable to the wider community through a workshop model, which has been run and iteratively refined at five major international conferences, involving over 200 participants

Research ethics and participatory research in an interdisciplinary technology-enhanced learning project

This account identifies some of the tensions that became apparent in a large interdisciplinary technology-enhanced learning project as its members attempted to maintain their commitment to responsive, participatory research and development in naturalistic research settings while also ‘enacting’ these commitments in formal research review processes. It discusses how these review processes were accompanied by a commitment to continuing discussion and elaboration across an extended research team and to a view of ethical practice as an aspect of phronesis or ‘practical wisdom’ which demands understanding of specific situations and reference to prior experience. In this respect the interdisciplinary nature of the project allows the diverse experience of the project team to be brought into play, with ethical issues a joint point of focus for continuing interdisciplinary discours