Corn bread recipe from YouTube Extravaganza

Robin and I were asked to share the recipe for the cornbread we brought to Monday's YouTube Extravaganza.  Here it is!

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Skillet Piñon Corn Bread

Ingredients:

• 1/4 c butter, melted
• 2 tbsp canola oil or vegetable oil
• 1/4 c warm water
• 1/2 c buttermilk (we used yogurt)
• 2 eggs
• Dry ingredients
• 1 and 1/4 c cornmeal
• 3/4 c all-purpose flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 c piñon nuts, toasted (pine nuts)
• 1/2 c fresh corn kernels, roasted
• 15 fresh sage leaves, chopped (we used some dried, as we had no fresh)
• 1 small onion, diced

Instructions:

1. Preheat the oven to 400ºF.
2. Whisk together the butter, oil, water, buttermilk, and eggs in a mixing bowl.  Set aside.
3. Combine the dry ingredients and sift into a separate mixing bowl.
4. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and mix until completely incorporated.
5. Stir in the pine nuts, corn kernels, sage, and onion until incorporated.  (We also put in some Mexican cheese at this point.)
6. Coat a 10-inch ovenproof cast iron skillet with softened butter (about 2 tbsp) and heat in the oven for 5 minutes.
7. Remove the hot skillet and pour the batter into it. (We put in 1/2 the batter, then put in some chopped roasted poblano peppers, then put the other half of the batter in.)
8. Bake for 18-20 mins (ours was much longer but Alice's oven is a little cool) or until a paring knife or toothpick comes out clean when inserted in the center.
9. Remove skillet from the oven and let cool slightly.
10. Serve out of the skillet.

Yield: 12-14 servings.

From Flavored Breads: Recipes from Mark Miller's Coyote Café.  By Mark Miller, Andrew MacLauchlan and John Harrison.  Ten Speed Press, Berkeley CA (1996).  Recipe on p. 15.

Linking Theory and Practice - Part 2 of 2

One of the competencies that Ph.D. students in the Engineering Education program at Purdue are required to achieve is to teach engineering. I would like to share in two consecutive posts some of the reflections I once had after working as a teaching assistant for a freshman class of engineering here at Purdue. I believe this is a good effort to link theory (and philosophy) of engineering education, that we talked about in class this semester, to practice.

Community-Centeredness

I consider this dimension as the newest to me and the one that I have spent most of the time working on and the one I most enjoyed. This dimension encourages both students and faculty to learn from one another, and fosters the development identity as a profession in class and out of class.

A statement that I always like to emphasize in my teaching philosophy is to state explicitly in the teaching philosophy document that I would encourage the community-centeredness in developing the systems perspective in my students. Since this was my first time to interact with students at this capacity as a TA, I found myself confused and need to learn with them in so many occasions. I believe that there is no harm of showing that you are confused even though some students do not feel comfortable with that. However, I found that most of the students learn a lot when we are working together on a problem. I am afraid that this feeling would vanish after a while when I start to master the material and the best way to present it, and this is why I should state this in my teaching philosophy that I must show the students that I am learning with them. Personally, and keeping the systems perspective in mind, there are always new angles to look at things when thinking holistically. I would consider this fitting well with community-centered lens in the HPL framework.

During my office hours, it was clear to me that “people learn differently.” Unlike regular office hours for other classes where students approach the TA with their questions, I tried to generate during my office hours an environment that is very similar to the lab environment, in which students sit down on a computer and the TA approaches them when they have questions. It is important to emphasize here that they still had the freedom to work on their own, individually or with their teams, to show up and leave whenever they wanted, and to browse the internet and do any other side activities they wanted. Interestingly, most of the students who showed up did so for the entire period of office hours of two hours, asked questions all the time, were less stressed, and rarely, or never, did they do any other side activities. I think this is because they showed up for a single purpose of completing their tasks; they had the motivation.

Some of the students had team meetings during the office hours and were asking questions as a team. It seemed that their team was well established and they were doing collaborative work very nicely together. Some other students were working individually and they benefited well from the one-to-one interaction. I have to point here that I did not have the key solutions for the homeworks that they were working on, and found myself working with them to solve the problems together. This is a very key point. I think not having the final answers helped a lot in generating more a community-centered learning environment where students and the TA were learning from one another. I felt that students learned a lot from the techniques they were seeing me using to tackle the problems. I found most of them giving me ideas to solve the problems, and they were very good ideas. In the beginning I felt that they lost their trust in me because they felt that I did not have the answer, but that feeling disappeared immediately when they saw me working on the problem with them. It was a mixed feeling of confusion, experimenting with the problems we had, and eventually exploring. I was sure that they learned a lot from these sessions. Compared to other situations where I had the key solutions before the students approached me, I am confident now that this approach of teaching is far more effective. Before this experience, I used to rush to give the students all the details of the problem to get to the solution. But now I think this effective approach is more community-, learner-, and knowledge-centered. A challenge remains on how to generate the same atmosphere of making the students “think” when I already know the answers to their question.

This dimension required me to develop confidence. In fact, some of the students in their feedback to me mentioned that they enjoyed this approach. A question that remains on this dimension is how to maintain this attitude toward teaching without getting bored doing the same thing over and over again. One professor whom I interviewed answered this question by telling me to do new things each time. He himself mentioned to me that he even went to sit down in a class to learn the theory of relativity and then teach it to his students in a new class that he has developed.

I am generally pleased with the feedback that the students provided to me on the course evaluation feedback. I believe the theory we learn about engineering education should be linked to practice.

Linking Theory and Practice - Part 1 of 2

One of the competencies that Ph.D. students in the Engineering Education program at Purdue are required to achieve is to teach engineering. I would like to share in two consecutive posts some of the reflections I once had after working as a teaching assistant for a freshman class of engineering here at Purdue. I believe this is a good effort to linking theory (and philosophy) of engineering education, that we talked about in class this semester, to practice.

As a student, I always enjoyed seeing the relationships between seemingly unrelated topics in the engineering curriculum. I also enjoyed discovering these relationships in the field as a practicing engineer; the relationships between different engineering and non-engineering disciplines. And now as teaching assistant for the freshman engineering class at Purdue, I would like to transfer this important skill to my students.

I am a Teaching Assistant (TA) for a freshmen course in engineering at Purdue. Even though I am considered as a millennial, I feel that my students learn and interact, or prefer to interact while learning, somehow differently from me. But I still feel comfortable with all the situations I have encountered thus far with them. In fact, the framework described in A Generational Approach to Understanding Students by Coomes and DeBard emphasizes that “the variance within groups is always greater than the variance between groups.” I fully agree with this statement in that we might have different perspectives on teaching and learning, or on different ethnic and cultural issues, but we, the students and myself, are still more flexible and willing to adapt to our differences between ourselves than to adapt to the differences with an older generation. This can be partly because we share the same experience of expressing ourselves as being different from the older generations, and because we, as a generation, have to interact with the same larger “cultural force” that is more different from us.

In my two posts on this topic, I will discuss my growth and teaching experience along two of the four How People Learn (HPL) dimensions: the Assessment-Centered, and Community-Centered dimensions. The other two dimensions that are not discussed are the Knowledge-Centered and the Learner-Centered dimensions. I also asked the students to provide feedback for me on my performance as experienced by them in each one of the four dimensions. The feedback is not included in the posts; some of my reflections on it are included though.

Assessment-Centeredness

I had a math professor who used to say, “Let’s make a reality check!” By this he means that he wants to assess our understanding to the concepts that he has just explained in the classroom and during the lecture. He is an old but intelligent professor. To bridge the gap between us and him, he usually gave examples of so many applications that we use in our daily life that utilize the concepts he explains. For example, he gave examples on how the Fourier Transform and the Fast Fourier Transform are everywhere in our digital age, and how these abstract mathematical concepts found their way to applications in fascinating devices like the iPods and the like.

In the beginning, as a student and as an instructor, I always undervalued grades as a way to assess understanding. Also, in the beginning of the semester, I hated when students asked about grades as I wanted them to focus on understanding the materials. In addition to that, the structure of the course I taught did not allow adding more burdens on either the students or the instructors for more grading. I believe that there are many ways to assess understanding.

For example, I once had a professor who assesses understanding in a very interesting and effective way. Contrary to the conventional approach, he showed up in the beginning of the semester and wrote in large letters on the board “No questions!” And between “No” and “questions” in the previous sentence there was the word “dumb”- No dumb questions! That is a call for challenge. Engineers like to be challenged. This is why they are in this profession. They do not like to be in a math class where the professor quizzes them to assess their understanding, or in large classroom where they communicate their Yes-No responses to a question for the sake of assessing their understanding. They like to talk about what they do because they like doing it. This is why instructors should give them the chance to talk, and this is why instructors should challenge them to talk. They should talk beyond the Yes-No response if an instructor wants to assess their understanding of a design concept or idea. Of course, there are no such things as dumb questions.

Also, a crucial part of achieving my personal philosophy of developing a systems perspective of engineering with the students is the use of challenging take-home, open world exams. My observation from grading exams is that students who get an A in an exam are not necessarily the best. That is, they were able to absorb the assigned material very well, and achieved the learning objectives of that exam, but they were not exceedingly excellent in going beyond the expectations, which is the unique characteristic of an A-student. (The nature of these exams, however, is understandable for a huge class like this!) Take-home, open world exams simulate the real world, and require the students to think holistically, given the relaxed exam conditions, and thus achieving the purpose of developing the systems perspective.

In addition to take-home exams, reality check of key concepts should be made. From my personal experience I found that pop quizzes that ask about key concepts are the best in assessing students’ understanding of key concepts. Quizzes should be application-oriented to see if students can really apply an abstract concept to a given situation in an application, which is similar to what an engineer would face in reality. I would consider this fitting well with assessment-centered lens in the HPL framework.

Another experience I had that is related to this dimension was during grading. Grading and giving feedback might be time consuming but it is really important. It was difficult for me to just give the student that her or his answer was wrong, and I felt all the time that it was important to provide feedback on the graded material. This feedback may involve clarifying or explaining the mistake or the fact. I think that despite the fact that this was a time consuming process, my hope in the beginning of the semester was that the students will benefit from that. And they did. Most of them did. In the past, I noticed improvements in the performance of individual students by considering the comments that are in the form of the feedback.

Because I still do not value numerical grades too much, I structured my questions in the HPL evaluation feedback I asked the students to complete for me around feedback that I have provided to them on graded homeworks and exams. That said, however, my understanding of this assessment-centeredness dimension made me believe in the importance of returning graded homeworks quickly to the students, as they seem to need this.

In Context

With so many suggestions to improve the engineering education process which include integrating (often times called networking) the curriculum, more focus on design and less focus on the engineering sciences, and implementing more of the project-based learning activities, with all that, the discussion on educating engineers the history of engineering and technology seems to be of less interest.

We all like stories, and humans are story tellers. The origin from which all the suggestions to improve the engineering education mentioned above is the effort to make engineering in academia match as much as attainable engineering as practiced in the field. For example, the focus on project-based learning activities is an effort to make the classroom-lab setting (although not necessarily the best environment to teach engineering) match projects as implemented in reality. So, it’s all about context. The history of engineering and technology is no different in this sense.

When one thinks about it, a certain engineering concept is basically an abstraction, or an ideal, of a complex situation that some person comprehended at some point. This abstract concept seems to be the middle point between two stages: the first stage is the complex phenomenon that once was observed and then was abstracted, and the final stage is when this abstract concept is taken to another complex situation to be applied to. The demand for a technical curriculum to teach as many abstract concepts as possible leaves no place for teaching the context in which a certain concept was abstracted, or, in other words, the history of the discovery.

What is often neglected as well is the fact that engineering itself is practiced in context. The real world provides more context than the academic exercises, and therefore the need to teach history (and context) seems to be more urgent. Engineering is practiced to achieve the needs of a society; it does not exist for its sake but, rather, in the social and cultural contexts that motivates, and constrains, the practice of the profession.

Professor Walter Vincenti, professor emeritus of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University, is the author of the book What Engineers Know and How They Knew It. The title glimpses to the fact that there is a context for what engineers know, so why not teaching it? Professor Vincenti is reported to describe the academic community’s view of engineering as “an exotic and incomprehensible activity that goes on ‘over there’.” Teaching the history of engineering and technology can better prepare future engineers to practice engineering in its real context: the society which it serves.

Images of an Engineer

I enjoy reading Henry Petroski. In Remaking the World, Petroski relates the story of a friend of a friend who nicknamed him “Steinmetz.” This friend was referring to Charles Steinmetz. The parents of this friend, who himself was inclined toward business and politics and not at all toward science and technology, believed that Steinmetz was “the embodiment of American engineering.”

Karl August Rudolf Steinmetz was born in Breslau, Germany in 1865. He earned a doctorate in mathematics, and immigrated to America in 1889. He joined the General Electric Company, and drew upon his strong mathematical physics background to solve practical problems for which he brought patents for GE. In addition to his employment with GE, Steinmetz joined the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and published papers that showed that he was in the forefront of his field. One of his many contributions to electrical engineering was the hysteresis loss law that is used to calculate power loss in transformers. He was also the one who introduced and developed the use of complex numbers for calculations involving alternating current (AC). (I was personally surprised to know that he was the first person who introduced it, as this is a powerful tool in electrical engineering for people who are familiar with the field.)

Aside from his ingenuity, Steinmetz was an eccentric person; the combination of the two characteristics made it easy to his mention in the newspapers and popular magazines. GE’s public relations department helped also with this publicity and promoted him as the first who generated the power of lightning in the laboratory as “the very personification of modern electrical development.” Petrsoki commented on this popularity that it gave “the cold, abstract, and sometimes feared new technology a human embodiment.”

With this publicity, lots of photos of Steinmetz in different life arenas were distributed. One of the most famous ones is this picture of him with Albert Einstein. I would like to quote Petrsoki’s comment on this picture:



“The father of relativity stands tall, formal, and self-assured beside the short and stooping, hand-in-pocket and smoking, rumpled and scowling figure who looks to be, ambivalently, both leaning toward the famous scientist and pushing him back with an elbow … In it [Steinmetz] seems complemented only by his standing next to a Nobel laureate, as if the engineer needed a scientist to lean upon. The photograph’s semiotics reinforce the stereotype of the engineer vis-à-vis the scientist, of engineering versus science. In this picture the great engineer Steinmetz is reduced to a caricature of himself; by implication, his achievements is diminished relative to that of the giant he stands beside.

“The Einstein-Steinmetz photo is actually as false as are its implications for the relationship between science and engineering. The great scientists and the great engineer never did pose one-on-one, as they are presented in this photo.”

The photo turned to be fabricated from a group photo that was taken in the occasion of a Radio Cooperation of America-sponsored demonstration of transoceanic telegraph transmission at New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1921.



This is, however, the photo that is most popular for Steinmetz who is considered by some “the embodiment of American engineering.”

I believe this story shows how the public perceives engineers and scientists, and, somehow the relationship between engineering and science. Steinmetz was involved later in his life in a distinguished period of service on the Schenectady Board of Education.

Bibliography:
Petroski, Henry (1997). Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Twas the Night before Youtube Poem

Twas the night before Youtube, when all through the Office
Not a student was stirring, not even a mouse.
The papers were saved in the comp'ter with care,
In hopes that St Alice soon would be there.

The students were nestled all snug in their chairs,
While visions of doctorates danced in their heads.
And Tosin in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long desk-side nap.

When out in the hall there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the chair to see what was the matter.
Away to the corner I flew like a goat,
Tore open the doors and threw on my coat.

The light on the tile of the new-mopped floor
Gave the luster of mid-day to objects below.
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a professor with stacked papers and gear.

With a smile so bright, so lively and nice,
I knew in a moment it must be St Alice.
More rapid than eagles her students they came,
And she whistled, and shouted, and called them by name!

"Now Cory! Now, Ruthie! Now Tosin and Hadi!
On, Lorie! On Daniel! On Xingyu and Nichole!
To the end of the hall! to the classroom and blackboard!
Now dash away! Dash away! Dash away all!"

Her eyes-how they twinkled! her dimples how merry!
Her cheeks were like roses, her laughter was inspiring!
Her ideas were exciting, her summaries quick
And the smile on her face made it all click!

She spoke not a word, but went straight to her work,
And filled all the blackboards, then turned with a jerk.
And laying her finger aside of her nose,
And giving a nod, down the hall she goes!

She sprang to her car, to her students gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard her exclaim, ‘ere she drove out of sight,
"Happy Christmas to all, and get your work done tonight!"

My journey of writing the essay “what is engineering education”

When I started to write the essay of “what is engineering education”, I had a hard time to integrate the former two essays into this one, because I thought engineering education was not simply the combination of engineering and education. I learnt a lot about the history and contemporary development of engineering education in the last four week’s readings, which greatly improved my understanding of the discipline. However, the readings addressed so many curriculum design and pedagogical strategies that I found it hard to pick up some “crucial points” and therefore I totally got lost.

In despair, I reread the first two essays talking about education and engineering respectively. It really helped! I quickly figured out I could utilize the structure and main theme of the first essay to write my third essay. Also I could discuss how we taught future engineers based on the characteristics of engineering that I defined in the second essay. Therefore, in this essay, I present my understanding of the aim of engineering education and how to educate engineering students to address the general question of what is engineering education. This structure is similar to that of my first essay. For instance, I discuss how to educate based on my definition of what engineering is (ideas of the second essay) and the aims of engineering education (discussed in the first part of this essay). In the last part of this essay, I propose some challenges in regards to engineering educators, which is inspired by the last week’s reading and is something that I found important to bring forward.

Epistemology vs Ontology

Dall' Alba brings up a problem when the educational program focuses exclusively on epistemology that they miss out on the “being” of the profession (2009). Students educated this way may have the skills and knowledge, but may not know how to apply them in practice. On the other side, knowing ontology without epistemology can also be a downfall. Dall' Alba poses how an architect can graduate “without knowing how to locate a building on a designated site?” Ontology without epistemology, would suggest that although the architect knows how to locate a building, they do not know how to construct an architectural plan. So, it does appear that both types of knowledge are important and that there are downfalls if the student is only seeing one item. This paradox of rigor versus relevance that Schon speaks of is a tension that Palmer believes that we need to be comfortable with to manage and provide a good foundation for students (2000; Schon, 2000).

Dall’Alba, G. (2009). Learning Professional Ways of Being. Learning to be Professionals, 111-132.

Palmer, P., & Neuenschwander, D. (2000). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s life. American Journal of Physics, 68, 93.

Schon, D. (2000). The new scholarship requires a new epistemology. Learning from change: landmarks in teaching and learning in higher education from Change magazine, 1969-1999, 32.

Any thoughts or comments on my assumptions about the future challenges in engineering and engineering education??

What do engineering and engineering education need to be in the 21st century?

            To see into the future requires assumptions about our future society and the future of engineering and engineering education. These are my assumptions:

·         knowledge-human knowledge and technical knowledge will advance at a furious pace, the fastest in recorded human history doubling every ten years; perhaps even at an accelerating pace as we engage hundreds of millions of more humans in advanced education and commerce in Asia and China; (National Academy of Engineering, 2005)

·         knowledge-the scope and depth human knowledge and technical knowledge will be advancing so rapidly that continuous learning is now a requirement of competency in in every scientific or professional discipline; (National Academy of Engineering, 2005)

·         knowledge-problems faced by teams of 21st century engineers will not be bounded by a single technology or geography and will be influenced and constrained by the social tensions that exist within and across cultures, between countries and bounded by the role of engineers as defined within these societies and engineering disciplines; (Vest, 2008)

·         practice-technical competence will remain the number one selector for engineers and engineering educators, (Crawley, 2007)

·         practice-professional engineer work forces will function in a  integrated multicultural, multidisciplinary, and instantly electronically connected virtual team work environment, aka, the 21st century workplace; (Vest, 2008)

·         practice-engineers globally will source or acquire any missing knowledge or skills required to solve problems working in a team environment not as individuals; (Vest, 2008)

·         practice-engineering education and engineering educators will have to continuously acquire, and even create new knowledge, about engineering and about how to educate engineers to serve in the 21st century (Crawley, 2007) also XXX

·         society-The earth's resources will reach ever more crucial limits or constraints on reproduction or replenishment as we have already reached with fish stocks, fresh water, raw materials, and food distribution; (The Economist, 2010)

·         society-The earth's population will grow from 6 billion in 2010 to 8 billion in 2040 and 9 billion in 2070;(The Economist, 2010)

·         engineering education-the tension of technical competence versus the expanding role of engineers in society will remain a huge challenge for the improvement of engineering education; and (Crawley, 2007)

·         engineering education-the tensions and boundaries limiting the role of engineering in society and engineering education research in engineering will not magically disappear. (Crawley, 2007)

Hurrah!!! You Tubes Gobsmackingly fabulous

Just have to say how much I have enjoyed the videos - and now they are in a place where I can play them over and over again and send them to friends!

I know how much all of you put into this project - you all amazed us and showed us new ways of thinking and new groovy YouTube skills.

Hurrah!

An Engineering Rap YouTube video

While checking out our group’s video on YouTube, I came across this video entitled Engineer’s Paradise. If the title reminds you of the rap song "Gangsta’s Paradise", it is likely because this video is based on that song. I found it to be completely hilarious watching this old engineer from IBM rap about engineering. It has over 100,000 views and it seems that other people have created additional versions with captions in Italian, Dutch, etc. I know many of you are still working on your YouTube videos, so I hope that this video can give you a few laughs as you put the final touches on your videos.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0DxmthvkKU

Small study looking at our cohort

Purpose:

To understand the similar experiences of our cohort that lead to potential overlap across their habitus' (or disposition).

Research Question:

What are the shared experiences of our cohort? In what ways (if any) might these shared experiences be indicative of overlap across habitus?

Methodology:

1. Developed survey based on the Inez research paper we read and discussed in two of our classes.

2. Distributed the survey as a paper instrument and collected it anonymously.

3. Analyzed the data and write up results for this blog.

Results & Conclusions:

1. There was strong family support for college education but students had much weaker college advising on average (Q1, Q4).

2. ½ of cohort answered that they worked during their undergraduate years. While this is at best a proximate measure of socioeconomic status, the fact that so many held a job could indicate that this half of the cohort were less likely to be from a high socioeconomic status. (Q7)

3. College statistics on major and department changing suggest that the rate of major or department change in our cohort is normal. (Q 13, Q 17, Q18)

Reaching the level of a PhD degree is not equivalent to entering college or vocational school; more effort must be made and recognizable skills must be demonstrated to be accepted. Some of the experiences of our cohort, particularly poor advising and potentially lower socioeconomic status or at least financial hardship during college years work as barriers to college success. Their appears to also be a considerable amount of social support for educational pursuits, from the family, which could facilitate success. These two experiences seem to be at play for many of the members of our cohort and may effect their habitus and their subsequent entry into PhD studies here. More variables may be behind these circumstances, but from the variables we have identified it appears that the barriers were not as resilient as the facilitators for success.

This research is meaningful because it sheds some light on what type of students this department has attracted. It offers an opportunity for some reflexivity and further studying may afford deeper insight into the shared experiences of students attracted to and accepted into this field (in the academic and Bourdieuian sense).

Limits of Research:

1. Small sample size, non randomized sampling. Both undercut ability to conduct statistical analysis.

Next Steps

1. Consider Qualitative Study in the Spring

2. Considering writing paper for a conference

3. Consider expanding to all ENE grad students

References:

DiMaggio, Paul. (1979). Review: On Pierre Bourdieu. The American Journal of Sociology. 84(6) 1460-1474.

Foor, C.E., Walden S.E. & Trytten D.A. (2007). “I Wish That I Belonged More in this Whole Engineering Group:” Achieving Individual Diversity. Journal of Engineering Education. 103-115

Data: The Responses people could give were:

*Really not like my experiences at all* 1

*Not usually what I experienced* 2

*Sometimes occurred or fits my experience* 3

*Often occurred and a pretty good experience fit* 4

*Very close fit to my experiences* 5

*Not able to answer* 6

Graphs: