Yes! Excellent point. I hadn’t thought about the “humanities labs” concept from a funding point of view, but it’s an important additional argument for many in the humanities to try to think outside of the box.

Thank you for the John Seeley Brown reference to “learning ecologies.” He mentions research showing that study groups who watch videos of lectures, stopping and starting the video to “construct their own understanding,” learn better than the students who just watch the lecture. This result ties into the well-known (in cognitive psychology and neuropsychology circles) work on “depth of processing” by Craik and Tulving. Their research shows that the more deeply, as opposed to superficially, something is encoded, the better it is remembered. (e.g. focusing on the semantic categories of a word list as opposed to the spelling leads to better retention of words in the list.)

In a similar vein, the diversity of the “learning ecology” described by Brown lead to more richly textured and creative uses of knowledge. I hope that those in the fields that are more isolating will keep these theories and research in mind when they avoid such interactions. I think the comments following my “Inside Higher Ed” piece shows the degree of interest in this concept.