The boundary work of Los Andes University, Bogotá-Colombia

Los Andes is the University were I used to workback in my country. Is a very new university (it has 62 years) and was "the first non confessional private university in Colombia, independent from all political parties."*

I think is interesting the parallel with Purdue because both have a very strong engineering school. Actually, I have bee

n thinking a lot in this parallel and how can it be connected to the boundary work we have been doing in this class... So I came up with the following micro-research about the themes Los Andes' engineering school published in its own magazine, during the last eleven years.

Here are the numbers...

The upper part of the charts shows the chapters used in the magazine to classify the articles. The lower part of the chart shows the classification I made based on the titles, abstracts, and sometimes based on a skim of the article if the theme wasn’t yet clear. I know that this second classification is biased by my experience and knowledge, but I found some interesting things during this almost twenty years of publication.

First of all is interesting how the names of the chapters change along the years. At the very beginning, when there was only one issue per year, the magazine had two parts: Research, and Research summaries. Both addressed the technical themes; although the second one took into account some boundary and education articles. Then, a third chapter came out: Opinion. In that last classification felt all the few education articles in that time. Some other parts of the magazine came, such as information, memory, or in memoriam; but what I found more interesting is how they changed the name of the first part to Engineering instead of Research. But how other themes such as engineering education can’t be research? Or engineering?

Looking at the most popular themes, the articles into the chapters called Engineering or Research, are almost the same as the ones I classified as technical articles. Adding boundary articles to technical ones, is more alike the engineering/research chapters’ amount of articles. Although in the first years, and in the middle years (magazines 10-13) this similarity decreases.

Another interesting thing I saw is that Engineering Education articles are sometimes classified as Engineer, and some other times as Opinion. I can say that during these years, engineering education is on the boundary of what the School of Engineering at Los Andes consider as part of Engineering discipline. I found it very interesting, because I can see it from the inside.

I also can notice the importance that the School of Engineering gave to engineering education from 2003 and especially during 2004 (magazine 20), which was a couple years after the curriculum changed, and few years before the construction of the new engineering building.

… So this is another “boundary work” about engineering.

* http://www.uniandes.edu.co/About_Uniandes.pdf