OTL Book Club - The Last Lecture

Tuesday, July 28, 2009, 12:00 – 1:30 pm, 144 Purdy/Kresge Library (Simons Room) (Flyer, PDF)

Join us for the OTL Book Club, designed to offer faculty a chance to meet during lunch once a semester to discuss meaningful and interesting books. Our book this semester is, The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch.

According to Pausch, a lot of professors give talks titled “The Last Lecture.” Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them. And while they speak, audiences can’t help but mull the same question: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy?

When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn’t have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave—“Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”—wasn’t about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because “time is all you have...and you may find one day that you have less than you think”). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.

In this book, Randy Pausch has combined the humor, inspiration and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon
and given it an indelible form. It is a book that will be shared for generations to come. Randy Pausch was a professor of Com-
puter Science, Human Computer Interaction and Design at Carnegie Mellon University. From 1988 to 1997, he taught at the
University of Virginia. He was an award-winning teacher and researcher, and worked with Adobe, Google, Electronic Arts (EA)
and Walt Disney Imagineering, and pioneered the non-profit Alice project. (Alice is an innovative 3-D environment that teaches
programming to young people via storytelling and interactive game-playing). He also co-founded The Entertainment Technology
Center at Carnegie Mellon with Don Marinelli. (ETC is the premier professional graduate program for interactive entertainment
as it is applies across a variety of fields).

Randy lost his battle with pancreatic cancer on July 25, 2008.

Join us as we discuss the implications of this book and attempt to better understand the “Generation Me” students in our own
classrooms.

Registrants will receive a free copy of Pausch’s book prior to the discussion and lunch will be
provided for all attendees. Space is limited to 10 participants, so reserve a spot soon and
arrange to pick up your book by emailing us at otl@wayne.edu.