Public Class To Decode ‘Flying Information’
Two seemingly different academic disciplines come together for a unique seminar open to the public this summer at Westmont. “Flying Information” will focus on how we learn to read codes, patterns, signs, and symbols and navigate webs of meaning Monday, June 2, through Friday, June 6, from 9 a.m. to noon. Marilyn McEntyre, professor of English, and Wayne Iba, professor of computer science, will teach the course.
“Our hope is that at the end of five days we might approach anything we notice or experience with a deeper sense of what it means to read signs and signals and words and images,” Iba says. “Heightening the awareness of our own processes may serve to make us more curious, more lively and more compassionate inhabitants of a world that is still so vast, so beautiful and so new,” McEntyre says.
“Flying Information” is the first of Westmont’s Whole Life Seminars, team-taught, week-long interdisciplinary courses that consider the arts, sciences and current events through multiple lenses to provide a true liberal arts approach to the subject. The seminars are sponsored by the Gaede Institute for the Liberal Arts. Tuition for each course is $300 per person. Scholarships are available. To register or for more information, visit: http://www.westmont.edu/institute/WholeLife/flying.html.
“Liberal arts education fosters a life-long passion for learning,” says Chris Hoeckley, director of the Gaede Institute. “Whole Life Seminars offer our local community the chance to pursue that passion. Santa Barbara enjoys good adult education opportunities, but Westmont has been eager to offer the community learning experiences with the distinctive liberal arts approach.”
McEntyre and Iba say they realized they’ve been concerned with similar issues from the different perspectives of their academic fields and have enjoyed many hours of conversation exploring these intersections.
“The distinction between the way humans and machines process information gets blurrier every day,” Hoeckley says. “There’s no more critical moment in the life of a society to think carefully about information than during an election season. These issues are interesting in their own right, but they become vital as we chart our society’s future course.”