Iowa State Lecture Series in Global Issues Opens to Public

A complete lineup for the series, as well as enrollment information for students, can be found online at http://www.ede.iastate.edu/


Engineering Distance Education at Iowa State University has announced that, for the first time in the history of the series, all lectures of invited guests of the university’s course in “Technology, Globalization, and Culture” will be free and open to the public.

While the speakers are part of a tuition-based course taken for credit both on campus and online, organizers say that both ongoing and emerging global issues have created the ideal circumstances for expanding the outreach of the course to include the general public.

“2008 may well mark the beginning of a perfect storm of crises affecting everyone, not just academics and policy makers,” says ISU mechanical engineering professor Jim Bernard who, along with Professor Mark Rectanus of the Department of World Languages and Cultures, established the course and lecture series in 2004.

“Gas at $4, the mortgage meltdown, turmoil in world financial markets, climate change, increasing food prices across the world, the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: you name the crisis,” Bernard continues, “and you don’t have to look far to see how it jumps international borders to affect people around the globe. And the pace of these events is only accelerating.”

Both students and the public will have the opportunity to interact directly with leaders from industry, academia, and government who grapple daily with the local impacts and global intersections of these forces, Bernard says. Past lecturers have included leaders such as former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack, and former Iowa Representative and current director of Harvard’s Institute of Politics Jim Leach, as well as top industrial executives such as Klaus Hoehn of Deere and Company and Greg Churchill of Rockwell Collins.

This year’s lineup has yet to be finalized, but the course has received commitments again from Rockwell’s Churchill, as well as from Mike Mack, Chief Financial Officer of John Deere. The industrial perspective will be complemented by top policy makers and analysts such as Arizona State University President Mike Crow, an expert in science and technology policy who recently oversaw the establishment of the Global Institute for Sustainability at ASU, and Richard Longworth, a senior writer for the Chicago Tribune who specializes in international and economic news.

Besides having the opportunity to attend in person in the Lee Liu Auditorium of Howe Hall on the Iowa State campus, members of the ISU community and general public will also be able to view individual lectures free of charge in real time over the Internet. Facilitated by advanced technology, Bernard remarks, this wide-open approach is itself characteristic of the globalizing juggernaut.

“The emergence of breathtaking bandwidth has made global communication essentially free,” he says, “and that changes everything. Our colleagues, competitors, and markets now span the world, and we need to adapt to succeed.”

That process of adaptation, says Rectanus, demands a deeper understanding of the cultural contexts from which those colleagues and competitors operate.

“Certainly, technology drives globalization to a significant degree,” he observes. “But globalization is a highly complex process that can’t be reduced to the dissemination of advanced computation or other feats of engineering. Without broader understanding, engineers, executives, and policymakers risk serious miscalculation in their efforts to compete in global markets.”

“But it’s not just information for professional managers,” Bernard emphasizes. “Every citizen needs the kinds of knowledge offered by our speakers in order to better understand how the rapidly changing global marketplace impacts their lives. So we invite them to join the conversation.”

A complete lineup for the series, as well as enrollment information for students, can be found online at http://www.ede.iastate.edu/