Dr. Karan Watson's Talk about Change in Engineering Education

I watched this awesome talk by Dr. Karan Watson on YouTube. I am not sure whether other folks have already watched it, since it's been there for a while. Just want to share :)

She talks about "Change". She says we are talking about changing engineering education since a hundred years ago, but the large engineering enterprise simply does not listen to us. The motivation for change today is a creeping crisis that never raise the alarm as mentioned by William Wulf. We engineering education researchers have showed our data again and again and again that our ways are better, but the change simply does not happen, because sometimes culture cannot be changed by data, authentication or facts. What we are doing should not be regarded as science, because “consensus, emotions, and traditions are not changed by proofs”. Culture is a result of daily conversations. We need to be contagious about our ideas.

“If you claim you are going to change engineering education, then recognize that you are going to create a storm.” She mentions an analogy made by Peter Russell: when you face with a storm that is caused by change, you need to be more like a tree. You need to be able to bend when the wind gets strong, you need to have deep root in the discipline, across disciplines, in pedagogy, in engineering, and in change, and you need other trees.

She also talks about balancing the reward system between research and teaching.

I feel it's really an awesome talk.

Interesting Article in ASEE PRISM Magazine

I received the ASEE PRISM magazine today and found an article on a topic which I want to talk for a long time. This article is named "Adding Value to Teaching: What can we offer that students can't get online? " and written by Debbie Chachra. Online version is also available at http://www.prism-magazine.org/nov10/last_word.cfm (ASEE member only).

It says that the way we teach our undergraduate engineering students (chalk-and-talk lectures) looks as though it's still in the Middle Age. However, we are not in the Middle Age, we are in a digital age when Internet is everywhere. "One of the most profound effects of the Internet is the democratization of knowledge." It gives examples of online resources such as Khan Academy Channel on YouTube and MIT's Open CourseWare, and I believe there are millions of others. "Students all over the globe are starting to find the tools they need to learn on their own time, at their own pace--and for free." "We're asking our students for four years of their life and an awful lot of their money. What is they decide that it's no longer cost-effective to get a degree? "

While I think most of students still regard going to college worthwhile, because of the social value of a college diploma, and the precious campus experience (leave parents, go to college, go to a new place, make new friends, and grow up). However, that's not college education truly about. We want to give the students authentic learning experience, harmonious learning environments, to initiate a life-long and self-directed learning process. The diploma and campus experience should only be the added value to the main learning goal, NOT the opposite.

The author of this article thinks the answer to the problem above lies in teaching. Undergraduate engineering educators need to offer mentorship teaching similar as that to graduate students. While I regard this as a good idea, I don't think it's truly feasible: (1) This method maybe feasible in small engineering college, it's probably not possible in large research-oriented universities, where there are large numbers of students, and faculty members put most of their effort in research rather than teaching. (2)Engineering graduate education itself is also problematic and lack of educational research. (3) This problem is a huge issue regarding engineering education in this era, and it involves many stakeholders, only engineering educators couldn't and shouldn't take the whole responsibility.

From my perspective, the answers lie in all stakeholders work together to provide an optimal learning environment for engineering students. "Although we cannot know exactly what they should be taught, we can focue on the environment in which they learn and the forces, ideas, inspirations, and empowering situations to which they are exposed. Despite our best efforts to plan their education, however, to a large extent we simply wind them up, step back, and watch the amazing things they do"(Vest, 2008). It's difficult to decide what to teach, and how to teach, and if it is decided, it's even more difficult to make the educators know and implement the decision. What if putting more effort in offering the students a nice, friendly, diversified inspiring learning environment with a mix of formal and informal settings: classrooms, student lounges, professional working space, online resources, virtual communities. We need to let them know that all resources are open and they are welcome to them. We still need to teach them how to use these resources properly and develop good professional ethics. If they lost in the sea of knowledge, they should always know there are somebody to ask, and get helpful instructions. In this way, students are self-directors of their own education.

Reference:

Chachra, D. (2010, November). Adding Value to Teaching: What can we offer students can't get online? PRISM, 84.

Vest, C. M. (2008). Context and challenge for twenty-first century engineering education. Journal of Engineering education, 97(3), 235–236.

Building boundaries with Tosin and Nikitha

Last week, Tosin, Nikitha, and I, recorded a dialogue about the essay and the boundaries we have been talking along the class.

Here is a "short" edition of what we talked...

Engineering and Engieering Profession

In general, the following post discusses that the definition of engineering can be very broad as to every human's daily life, but the definition of engineering profession must be differentiated to the broad engineering by linking engineering profession with its products and business, so as to help professional engineers find their professional identity.

I didn't know "engineering" can be so broad, until:

• At the beginning monologue of the movie My Sister's Keeper (in this movie, a 13-year-old girl Anna has an older sister Kate who suffers from leukemia. Anna was born to be a perfect donor match to help save Kate's life), Anna said: Most babies are accidents, not me, I was engineered, born to save my sister's life. I appreciate a lot the usage of "engineered" here, better than "conceived" which is widely used in introductory literature of this movie and the novel it based on. Because "conceive" is "to take into one's mind" or "to form a conception of "--maybe--by accident or unconsciously, but it reveals here that "engineer" involves doing something on certain purpose.
• I saw an artificial crystal necklace at the Art Fair. The artist put certain materials into certain machine (something like high-temperature oven), and the materials will grow themselves into artificial crystal with beautiful patterns inside. Somebody said the crystal is engineered. Although the colors and materials used by the artists do set some constraints, the way the pattern grows are mostly random, thus we can see here the word "engineer" includes uncertain and uncontrollable factors.
• Koen(2003) says "To be human is to be an engineer".

Based on these points, I see engineering is a process of doing certain things on certain purposes under certain constraints with uncertainty. It is so broad that almost everybody encounters engineering in their daily lives. Yet to be broad is both an advantage and a disadvantage.

The advantage is that this broad character of engineering can be used into publicity, to persuade people that engineering is relevant to their daily life, and to encourage them to engaged in engineering, because it's easy, and everybody do it everyday. It's not like science and art that only belong to those gifted people who is somehow "geeky", it belongs to everybody.

However, the disadvantage is more obvious. When the category of "engineering" is broad enough to include everybody, everybody loses their identity as engineer (Pawley, 2009). So I see it's necessary to do a boundary-drawing(Gieryn, 1999) work here, to differentiate "engineering" and "to be an engineer (professional engineer)". Engineering can be very broad as Koen describes, but to be a professional engineer is not. A housewife may do the cook everyday, she does the cook on the purpose of making some food to eat using what she has in the fridge or from the grocery store. Although she is experienced, there are still uncertainty in the process as to things influencing the food that might happen at any time. She is engineering food everyday, but she is not an professional engineer, at best a chef. If there is no boundary here between everyday engineering activities and engineering profession, all professions including cook, writer, and artist can be regarded as engineer. Engineers have striven to professionalize themselves ever since the mid-1800s (Layton, 1971; Noble, 1979; Pawley, 2009), and I see lots of boundary works drawing differentiation between science and engineering, but few among engineering, cooking, writing, and art. Maybe because they looks so obviously different, and there seems no need to say they are different. However, I say, they are essentially the same, if by the definition of engineering no matter I give above or Koen gives. So why they looks so different? In my opinion, what differentiate them are the things/products they are making and the way their products link to business field, namely, the product of cooking is for eating, the product of writing is for reading, the product of art is for appreciation, the products of engineering is for usage, and the business ways these products go to consumers are very different. I think this is why business or money is so important when talking about engineering (myriad of literature has clues of the importance of money, and it's beyond the length of this post. I might develop it in my essay), because the definition of engineering profession must include the description of the purpose (the products) and the way it consumes. We couldn't give engineering profession a definition independently (like making things, or doing design), because this will result in a broad dangerous "universal" category where engineers will lose themselves.

P.S.
I came across Dear Dr. Pawley's article "Universalized Narratives: Patterns in How Faculty Members Define "Engineering"" when doing the quick and dirty review of JEE papers. It's very interesting, and the background introductory part really helps me a lot to digest and make connections among Layton, Noble, Koen, Gieryn, and also the Changing the Conversation Report. After reading the narratives of engineering faculty, I become interested in what the narratives about "engineering" of engineers in the industry will be?

YouTube wishlist

So you wanna make a youtube video!  Put in the comments here the things you wish you could do in movie-making software (or something else associated with making your youtube video).  Our current list:

• Translation between Windows Movie Maker and iMovie (or from Windows to Mac)
• Titles and credits and text over images
• How to use software remote
• How to import powerpoint files into movie format
• Merging/gluing video files together
• Special effects, like green screen
• Recording narration

What else?

Tips on peer-reviewing

Today we started peer-reviewing our first drafts of our first essay for this course.  Some guidelines for reviewing your peers' work:

As a reviewer:

• Critique the argument, rather than the person. Ex: "This argument seems to be missing a step, can you please explain this part?" rather than "You skipped ideas in your argument."
• Specific comments related to the objectives are helpful, rather than "it is good." (Full stop.)  Keep in mind our criteria of grounding, clarity, engaging, and organized.
• As a reviewer, ask for clarification on confusing points. (Psst: clarity.)
• Hearing your work reviewed is an emotional experience.  Be gentle.
• Think about providing your feedback in a "sandwich" format (good thing, critical thing, good thing) or as warm and cool feedback (warm=good, cool=critical, avoiding extremes of hot and cold).
• Provide help in seeing the places that need grounding, and in seeing places in the literature that can provide that grounding.
• Focus on ideas, not copyediting.
• Focus on the argument, not whether you agree with the argument (in terms of the values represented). (Psst: organization.)

As a writer:

• Help the reviewer know what you want feedback on.  Ex: "I know this specific section doesn't make much sense yet, but I'd like some feedback on whether the overall argument is clear."
• Don't expect your reviewer to copy-edit.  Get help elsewhere for this -- the writing lab may be a place for such help.
• If the feedback you are getting from your reviewer is not helpful -- courage!  You are welcome to redirect them by emphasizing what would be more helpful.  However, recognize that sometimes they may have valid points even if you were hoping for feedback on something else.
• Ask for reviewing feedback from others, including family members, friends in other programs, graduate colleagues, other colleagues.  Peer reviewing can happen outside this class more frequently than we do it inside the class.

The groups we had on 9/23/10:

• Julia, Diana, Jeremi
• Corey, Nikitha, Tatiana
• Lorie, Beth, Xingyu
• Tosin, Dan, Benjamin
• Mariana, Nichole, Jeff
• Angela, Ruth, Tamecia
• Natalie, Xin, Hadi

A documentary film about Chinese senior high school students and my thoughts about why a certain educational philosophy ceased to be philosophy

The following link is a documentary film which describes the life of Chinese senior high school students. How they spend the whole senior year struggling to prepare for the college entrance exams, the scores of which will be the only standard to determine whether they could enter college. The website Youku.com is a Chinese website similar with Youtube, the documentary film has fairly good English subtitle, if anybody intrested in this film could just click the link and watch the film, and just ignore other Chinese characters if you couldn't read Chinese^_^

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzQ3NDMyNTI=.html

My high school senior year was almost the same. It touches the miserable memory in my heart. This is why many Chinese students get very high math and science scores, why the higher education system in China produces so many engineers each year, one of the reasons that China becomes the world factory, and also why somebody said the "Made in China" would never turn to "Created in China", because students are educated out of the ability of creativity (Ken Robinson). I am not sure whether it's proper to quote George's word here, but I really agree with what he wrote in the A Brief Philosophical Primer post that "I do not know a single member of the Academy who believes in his/her heart that a university education is not a place for growth and development of the individual as a whole; however, the day to day hustle and bustle of the disciplines can turn idealism sour." China has good origin of educational philosophy. Confucius taught his pupils almost the same as Socrates did, using dialogue and taught informally. He also believes that students should be educated according to their capacities and also their own needs and interests. Chinese people regard Confucius as the "Father of Education", some schools even have the sculpture of him to show respect, but no one is really practising or developing his ideas of education. I agree with what George said "the day to day hustle and bustle of the disciplines can turn idealism sour", and there are also the reasons of power and monetary corruptions, just like Dall'Alba says "Power differentials often play a key role in influencing the outcome of challenges to established routines and practices", There was no openness and mutual respect during the two thousand years of feudalism in China, so the philosophy of education of Confucius lacks of good development, and has ceased to be philosophy--it's only a history of education now.

P.S.
To be honest, I wasn't sure whether it's good or not to post this documentary film here, because it seems irrelevant to our readings and also because I might still feel unsafe since different "rumors" about the bolg are going on and I haven't got much comments for my previous posts. Now I "deeply understand" the famous Shakespeare quote "to be, or not to be--that is a question." ^_^ "To post, or not to post--that is a question." As a human being, facing these possibilities, I finally decided to post, to speak what I want to say, because we are discussing education in class, everything about education should be relevant, and as educational researcher, we should explore problems of broad appeal(Borrego, 2007), so I kind of feel it's right to push the boundary of this blog to make it further beyond our class readings and the quantity of 8 posts. If we are constrained by the boundary, we are not practising the ideal type of education we are talking and looking for. Actually, another important reason I posted this documentary film here is that Alice said in the first or second class that educational thoughts from other cultures are also welcome(Thank you, Alice!). So the result that I chose to post according to my own belief as a human being, which is also influenced by what Alice, Robin and our cohorts said about this blog (the education I received from this class), is what I would call, "Dall'Alba effect".

Reference:
1. Confucius
2. Socrates
3. George
4. Dall'Alba
5. Maura Borrego, Conceptual Difficulties Experienced by Trained Engineers Learning Educational Research Methods, JEE, Aprial 2007
6. Ken Robinson

Education should help students develop their own stands on what they want to become according to their own original deep belief

Dall'Alba's article, to a great extend, answers my question about the origin of many of the ontologica and ethical questions existing in educational programs nowadays. Indeed, the most callenging task of learning professional ways of being is the integration of knowing, acting and being. When the education tries to treat knowing, acting and being as separate entities, this most challenging task is left to the students themselves, so students are confused and struggling. Though they have learned much knowledge and many skills at their specific educational programs, but they are still confused and struggling about what kind of people they will become.

I wrote in a previous post that I agree with Dewey's opinion that education should open doors and developing connections for the students. I gave a personal example in that post that my Electrical Engineering education didn't lead me to be an electrical engineer, but it connected me to Purdue ENE, so it's not a failure of my EE education to not make me as an electrical engineer. However, now I realize my EE education actually only gave me some knowledge and skills, it was myself struggling to integrate what I know and what I want to become. It is the integration of knowing and being which has led me to Purdue ENE.

After re-thinking all that we have read and my own experience, I want to put "what is education" like this. This is probably most about higher education or professional education, although I believe it also has relevance for other forms of education. I will further develop it in my essay:
Every students as human beings, as Heidegger says, faces lots of possibilities or possible ways to be, but the possibilities are not limitless, as Dall'Alba points drawing on Heidegger. They have certain belief or direction deep in their heart which lead them to the choice of a certain educational program, but the belief or direction may not be very clear, and they will still face many possibilities in the programs. Although to bring the possibilties are also the eudcation programs' responsibilities, according to the "opening doors and developing connections" theory of Dewey, it is insufficent to help the students to press ahead into one of the possibilities to become what the unclear deep belief wants them to become. Education should help the students in the process of tranformation by help them make a choice according to their own belief.Iain Thomson interpretes Heidegger' work that "we are 'a being who takes a stand on its beig and is defined by that stand'". Education could play a key role in forming and shaping the stand according to the students' own belief, rather than simply make a choice instead of the students themselves.

For example, students enrolled in electrical engineering programs, they probably just have an interest in how TV set works during their childhood. That may sound naive, but not, that's the most powerful source of motivation--the the deep rooted belief. Then how to develop the original form of belief into the stands the students take on their being become a serious problem which actually is the most difficult task of being. Many educational programs today do not address this. Simply because they are engineering programs, they claim--no matter explicitly or not--that:"Our purpose is to make future engineers". Actually, an engineering major student does not necessarily become an engineer. There are many choices. However,by claiming this, the educational programs actually just make a choice instead of the students themselves, also they give the outcome without any process. The process--the transition period--is left to the students themselves. If the deep belief has conflict with this choice, or what they learn in the classroom has conflicts with what they will use when they become what they want to be, students will be confused and struggling. Some of them may not be able to stick to their own stand and couldn't become what they actually want to be. That will be a more serious failure of the education, rather than an engineering program does not make engineers.

An possibility of exploring the aim of education

This initially serves as a comment to Julia's post, but I now think it may provok more thinking if I post it here.

Actually, I very much agree Dewey’s opinion that education should open doors or enable our students to develop connections. Then the problem is open doors to where? be connected to what? The answer differs individually. A burglar may think that his education should open a door for him to become a more skillful burglar; A young child who is interested in mathematics would believe that his education should connect him to a world full of mathematics; and a person who pursues monetary wealth believe that his education should connect him to a more wealthy status.
Although Dewey insisted that to ask “growth towards what?” is inconsistent with the concept of growth, actually, from my perspective and most of you may also agree, Dewey believed that growth should towards an ideal democratic society. So if an experience couldn’t lead a person towards a good citizen of a democratic society, then this experience is not educative.

Thus we see that Dewey’s growth actually has a direction. If we do not agree with Dewey’s direction, then we should face the questions: what is the right direction of education? Just as I mentioned, the answer may differ from person to person. Then this may lead to a concept of education that students should be taught individually, according individual interests and characters. This concept is at best impracticable and biased. The reason why we are leading to this situation is that we neglect that each individual might have more than one aims and expectation of their education. If everyone is connected only to one place, we would not have a community or a society. There are multiple connections. So there may not be an ultimate aim of education, rather there might be multiple aims of education. Thus we could explore the possibility of defining the aim of education from both the angle of individual and the angle of the whole society, and they try to find the connections between the two types of aims.

About Dewey's "Growth" and Epistemology

As I mentioned in my last post, some other questions running in my head when I was writing that post. Also, the topic of my last post seems too big, and somehow empty, so I am trying to talk some smaller things by using specific examples here.

Dewey hold the opinion that becoming more skillful as a burglar does not represent growth, because such activities close off connections and prevent further growth. Then Noddings put another two examples of mathematics and monetary accumulation to argue against Dewey’s opinion. From my perspective, both of their opinions haven’t well developed (maybe it’s because the length of the passages in this book is limited, and I have never read other of their articles in which their argument processes maybe full presented).

In my opinion, the process when the burglar is learning should be regarded as a kind of growth. Then if the burglar went on to do very serious wrong deeds, more and more serious, even developed into a murderer, and got arrested and was given an all life sentence. Only at this time, his growth stopped, because he had lost all the connections to further growth. Exceptional cases exist where prisoner with a life-long sentence could get out of the prison and go on towards new growth like Andy Dufresne in the movie “The Shawshank Redemption”. However, I am not intended to talk about so extreme cases here, so let’s go back to the burglar, if he didn’t do that much serious wrong deed, and someday he somehow realized it’s a bad thing to steal, and stopped such behavior and became a very skillful worker or so. The skills he had learnt when being a burglar may contribute to his new job. This is definitely a growth which opens the door of a new kind of life to him. Even if the skills won’t contribute to his new work, his thought during this transition of his life, and his idea that “being a burglar is wrong” should definitely account for his growth. Dewey may see things from the angle of a democratic society, but I see them from the angle of the individual burglar. We have talked about Dewey’s democratic idealism in our group’s discussion in class, the critiques of Dewey’s theory is actually based on his ideal democratic society.

Dewey's "aim of education is growth" led me to think one question I have been wondering: what is the aim of engineering education? To make students become engineers? What if many of them end up not being engineers (this is obviously true)? Does the engineering education fail? Many of my former classmates in Electrical Engineering are not engineers now. Is this a waste of engineering educational recourses? Should I blame this to the EE education that we have received? Now, Dewey’s idea of growth kind of inspires me that as long as the engineering education gives certain connections to the students which connected them with certain directions that they want to go, the education is at least not a failure, such as my EE education has connected me to Purdue ENE now. I am not an electrical engineer now, but at least I am not failure production of that EE education. It seems earlier to talk about “engineering education” when we are still reading about education, but my mind doesn’t wait until the “what is engineering education?” essay due date. This is another contradictory topic running in my mind, and I shouldn’t say it here. Maybe I could further develop this idea in my “what is engineering education?” essay.

I have a last piece of opinion to say. When I wrote about the burglar case, I said the idea “being a burglar is wrong” could contribute to the burglar’s growth, and this reminded me a defect in Dewey’s epistemology: "p" should be true to be regarded as knowledge, when "p" turns to be wrong, it no longer guides inquiry, so it couldn’t be regarded as knowledge and should be abandoned. There should be more to say, even though "p" is no longer right, “p is wrong” should be knowledge, because it could guide inquiry. For example, we may get a hypothesis that “s is wrong” because it is similar to "p", and then we could utilize other method to verify whether this hypothesis is right or wrong. Actually, the knowledge that “something is wrong” is often more useful than a right proposition, because we tend to be more aware of the experience and lessons we gain from a former wrong idea.

That's all, please excuse my badly-organized logic.

Multiple lenses

We discussed different educational philosophical thoughts of different philosophers in class. All of them were questioning and answering “what is education” through certain lenses. Socrates/Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, and Dewey have their lenses, so do those existentialists, phenomenologists, and postmodernists, etc. Mostly because of the certain lens they took, flaws in their theory become very obvious when we critique through another lens.

Then, question comes to me that what is the lens or lenses that we take today when we talk about, question, or try to define education? We know that we must have certain lens, because we couldn’t “see” the answers to our questions with “naked eyes” (no lens, totally unbiased). If we could find the answers with “naked eyes”, then probably the universal-forever-answers could be located. Unfortunately, that will never happen. This might be a way to explain that why we do the same things and ask the same questions again and again and again, because human beings keep changing lenses during the process of growth, every time we change the lenses, we should “repeat” some actions, but these new actions have totally different means.

Then, my question goes on like this: if we know what is our lens today, and we are sure that it will result in certain defects in our theory, then when we know that the results of our inquiry should have certain disadvantages because of inevitable defect in the premise, do we still have the courage to go on? Is it possible that we could see things through multiple lenses (if “naked eyes” are totally impossible)? How can we do that? I admit and used to strongly agree with that people are deeply influenced by their environment and the times they live, but it is true that there are certain philosophers in history whose thoughts (or more precisely a portion of their thoughts) could transcend the limitation of their time. So now I believe that if we are aware of the limitation that our lenses give us, we take it as a serious problem, and we have a strong desire to break the limitation, then maybe we could make it to yield a better outcome of our inquiry, at least we could on some degree break the spatial limitation, if we couldn’t break the temporal limitation of this digital era.

I personally believe there is something deeply rooted in my mind always leading me to break certain limitation given by my lens, especially spatially. However, I want to see things through multiple lenses for better outcome, but maybe the meaning of inquiry is lying in the process. I probably shouldn’t struggle with how to achieve a more unbiased lens; rather, I should learn to live with the beauty of all the confusing questions according to Palmer’s suggestion.

P. S.
I try to be clear and concentrate on the theme of this post, but I am not sure whether I did it using a language I am not good at. Also, I am often distracted by some of other seems irrelevant questions that keep occurring when I want to concentrate on one theme, what presents to me when I finished the writing is always different from what I thought it should be. I should "comb" my thoughts again and again, and it takes time, but eventually my "thought of hair" still looks crazy. I am writing another post about some other questions occurred to me when I was writing the passages above.