CARL GOMBRICH - BLOG

In some ways the concept of interdisciplinarity is easy: when doing research or when learning, follow the problem, not ‘the subject’....

I read Toby Young’s piece on ‘The Blob‘ over the weekend. Some of it I agreed with, some of it I didn’t. Here’s a few sections of what...

I tweeted out something about universities as places of formation. Oliver Quinlan said he liked the way it was expressed and asked if I...

An occasional paper given at The Faculty Institute of Graduate Studies (FIGS) within the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at UCL November,...

The life and character – but not the achievements – of my father, Ernst Gombrich. My father, Ernst Gombrich, was born in Vienna on 30...

This year on Arts and Sciences BASc at UCL, several students studied MOOCs and used online sources alongside their undergraduate modules...

I blogged recently on dilettantism. This was intended as a piece of provocation. But it was also, in my view, an optimistic take on the...

Some people don’t like this phrase. It was first popularised by Alvin Toffler – he of Future Shock. Those who think the ’21st century...

This is a question I am increasingly asked. It’s a well fair question to someone leading a big course which includes a lot of innovation....

The work of Fernand Gobet and Herbert Simon seems to indicate that expertise is ‘domain specific’. That is, you can only learn to be an...

The last blog was a venture out on a limb to reclaim some of the ground for ‘dilettantism’ in work and in study. The intuition comes from...

This blog should be read with its companion: Being Serious One of the fun things about being part of the ‘knowledge revolution’  is that...

I attended the Future Learning conference at Stephen Perse School on Wednesday. The school is in a tiny street in the centre of Cambridge...

The Approaches to Knowledge course on Arts and Sciences BASc at UCL has now finished. For this module most of the lectures were ‘flipped’...

I’ve been bigging up interdisciplinarity and generalism as something we must look to provide in UK HE alongside more traditional...

I spoke recently at the London Expertise Group, a group of philosophers, psychologists and educationalists, about generalism in...

This year I am tutoring some maths again. I’ve missed it and it was nice to find my brain in decent shape – after 5 years away from...

Some of the most sceptical remarks about a liberal/interdisciplinary education come from those who are experts in established academic...

Interdisciplinarity is in vogue in education. It’s been in vogue in the US for a while and throughout most of the last 100 years some...