ThinkWorks News
Sante Fe Institute Profiles Work of ThinkWorks CEO
June 18th, 2008
Albuquerque, NM - A recent article from the Santa Fe Institute profiled the work of SFI research fellow and ThinkWorks founder Derek Cabrera. Cabrera worked with SFI's Alliance for Complexity Science, finding ways to bring science reform to schools in the United States and around the world. The group brought SFI's systems thinking expertise and interdisciplinary approach to the task.
In conjunction with SFI's ProjectGUTS: Growing Up Thinking Scientifically, Cabrera worked to make science more process- than product-oriented. "Science isn't a body of facts," he said. "Science is a process that creates, investigates, and interrogates facts. These students really respond to this."
Cabrera created a curricular model made of modular units that could be adjusted to fit a variety of audiences and purposes. The results are a series of classes on complexity science that benefit middle school students, businesses, and scholars visiting the institute, according to the article. He discussed the importance of systems science in education. "Complexity science is necessary because all of the interesting ideas we have and problems facing us are complex. They cross disciplines. If you're a sociologist, you look at a problem and see a sociological system. If you're a chemist, you look at that problem and see a chemical system. But if you're looking across disciplines, you see the complexity of that problem. The expertise that the sociologist and chemist bring is important, but, if they can't talk, then we're in trouble. These problems will be solved by teams at tables, not loners in labs."
In addition, the article outlines Cabrera's efforts to make evaluation a part of science education. SFI Program Coordinator Ginger Richardson noted that the institute previously relied on anecdotal evidence to gauge the effectiveness of programs. With a team from Cornell University, Cabrera developed a system for evaluation. "How do we evaluate the long-term effect in terms of the students working in an interdisciplinary environment?" Cabrera asked. "It's difficult to know if we've changed the way they think about the world. We wanted to measure how much the program improved students' understanding of complexity. We also wanted a sense of how their meta-cognitive skills - interdisciplinary and scientific thinking - developed."
Issues of the SFI Bulletin are available online. The quarterly magazine highlights the work done in conjunction with the Santa Fe Institute, a private non-profit research and education center. Founded in 1984, SFI encourages "multidisciplinary collaborations in the physical, biological, computational, and social sciences.," according to its website. Guiding their mission - "to uncover the mechanisms that underlie the deep simplicity present in our complex world" - is a belief that the durable problems of the 21st Century can only be addressed with an "understanding of complex adaptive systems."