Course Threads

The Project on Disciplinary Innovation is meant to invite new ways of thinking about the architecture of relationships among courses at U.C. Berkeley. The program is built around several premises: that institutions of higher education have remained surprisingly attached to a grid-like departmental structure for teaching even though cutting-edge research has gone in very different directions; that many students at Berkeley find little coherence in their course programs beyond what they take in the major; and that Berkeley faculty are themselves often unaware of the substantial areas of intersection among courses in different departments. Rather than generate new programs, interdisciplinary majors, or requirements, the aim of this project is to establish a flexible model for cross-disciplinary education by bringing to light some of the hidden "threads" that connect courses across existing departments and disciplines. In this project, I explore the area of social networks and adapt it to suit the needs of demonstrating the relationships between courses. Every course that is created in the system will be a node in the network and we leave it up to participating faculty to build the bridges/links to complete the social network graph.