Week 9, Reflection on readings

Svarovsky & Shaffer (2006) argued that the main purpose of learning environment in engineering design courses is to “allow novice professionals (students) to be engaged in realistic, messy and ill-structured problems under the supervision of more experienced mentors (instructors)”. The aim is to help novices learn how to reflect-in-action, answering question “what if”, which can arise as a result of various constraints. Svarovsky & Shaffer described an ethnographic study of Biomedical Engineering design course. The main goal of this study was to “examine two activities: the weekly design meeting and the student design notebook. The purpose was to closely evaluate the best practices in order to better understand why and how these participant structures are so effective”(p.1).
Fortsythe (2001) discusses the nature of knowledge and the idea of artificial intelligence. Opinions of engineers about “what is and what is not knowledge and expertise” were compared to opinions of social scientists. The author argued that between those two categories of professionals there is a big difference in thinking, analyzing , and problem-solving approaches. For example, on the page 52, Fortsythe states that “knowledge engineers seem to conceive of reasoning as a matter of following formal rules. In contrast, social scientists – especially anthropologists – tend to think of it in the terms of meaning and to note that the logic by which people reason may differ according to social and cultural context”. The author noticed that the cultural context can significantly influence on perception and evaluation of knowledge: “many engineers are white and middle class, Western men; most designed “experts” come from the same background. The knowledge in expert systems inevitably reflects the interests and perspectives of these individuals. It is much less likely to represent the interests and perspectives of individuals from other backgrounds in our increasingly diverse society” (p.58).
Latour & Woolgar (1986) described an observation of the science lab by a newcomer anthropologist. The authors discussed the differences in perception of the same environment by scientists and anthropologist. For example, a newcomer anthropologist was surprised that “a vast body of literature emanates from within laboratory. How is it that the costly apparatus, animals chemicals and activities of the bench space combine to produce a written documents, and why are these documents so highly valued by participants” ?(p.48)
After reading Forsythe (2001) and Latour & Woolgar (1986), I thought that these readings completely fit in the constructivist theory, which states that humans generate knowledge and meaning from their previous experiences. The same concept might be recognized differently by people who have a core focus in their education on scientific fundamental knowledge, comparing to people, which education is more orientated to engineering, or for example, social sciences (like anthropology). In short, professionals from different fields might perceive the same task, concept or phenomenon in different ways.

It is time to go to class,
See all of you then………