Engineers are NOT anti-social!

I really appreciated this week’s articles, in that they provided me with a prelude to the next round of discussions as we begin to answer the question, “What is Engineering?” Tomorrow, I am attending a workshop and as a result of this, will, unfortunately, not be able to enjoy a significant portion of tomorrow’s class discussion. However, in lieu of my absence, I just wanted to officially declare that contrary to popular belief, engineers are NOT anti-social! :-) Now before you put my name on a list for special prayer, let me clear that air and say that I am not actually upset about the assumption embedded in the statement just proclaimed, nor am I saying that this is everyone’s view of engineers. LOL. (This comment is just being used in direct response to some of the feedback I have received when talking to my friends who pursued fields of study other than engineering and to jumpstart another discussion.) Among other things, I found it very interesting that each of the articles for this week's readings contained references to the social dynamic of the engineering field – and not just confining this idea to the fact that we oftentimes work in teams to solve problems.

I think there's a lot of truth in Vygotsky’s philosophy of education – especially the claims that suggest the importance of social interaction during an educational experience (Noddings, 2007, p. 16). Now although I am not speaking about engineers as learners nor am I suggested that the articles for this week did either, to me, there is still a connection worth noting about the importance of social interaction within the engineering profession. Each of the articles alluded to the fact that engineers are not anti-social. See for yourself.

*Figueiredo referred to engineers as “social experts” because within their team, they created solutions that were of social and economic importance, and that customer satisfaction is at the forefront of each design.

*Jonassen, Strobel, and Lee interviewed many engineers and after coding the results and identifying themes among them, at least three suggested a social component:
E. Theme 5. Success is Rarely Measured by Engineering Standards (including the satisfaction of the customer)
G. Theme 7. Problem Solving Knowledge is Distributed Among Team Members
H. Theme 8. Most Problems Require Extensive Collaboration (with engineerings and those in other professions)

*Koen mentioned constraints and resources as important characteristics of engineering problems and in each of these sections, there were references to the involvement & interaction of those within and outside of the engineering field – and their significance in relation to the work that we do.

In closing, I really appreciated the sneak-peek into the next phase of the course via this week’s articles. Now I have at three articles to recommend to my friends who continue to tout that “engineers are ant-social!” LOL.

Reference:
Noddings, N. (2007). Philosophy of Education, 2nd Ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink

I'll try to keep this short as it is a synthesis on education, and not commentary on the new readings for this week.

As I am S-L-O-W-L-Y getting my essay finalized, I am feel like I'm making random connections all over the place, and at a very rapid pace. I want to put them ALL in my essay, which of course is completely ludicrous, because then my essay would be all over the place. So I need an outlet for some of the things jumping around in my head that I haven't quite found a home for yet.


Herbart to Kolb?
Herbart's five-step lesson - preparation, presentation, comparison, abstraction, generalization
Kolb's experiental learning cycle - abstract conceptualization, active experimentation, concrete experience, reflective observation

Notice a common thread of learning occurring as a cycle. This could also be linked to the constructivist camp, as once you have been through one cycle you add another "layer" and repeat the process, and thus "construct" knowledge.

Side note: Svinicki & Dixon [1] expand on Kolb's model to add degrees of active learning where student is actor (i.e. laboratory experiment or journaling) and passive learning where student is receiver (i.e. lecture or viewing film). FYI: This is a really good paper on incorporating active learning in the classroom.

Piaget to Perry?
From the first introduction to Piaget (along with others in constructivist camp such as Kohlberg and especially Vygotsky who focused on "social constructivism") I thought of Perry's [2] stages of intellectual development. While I won't say that Perry builds directly from Piaget, they do align somewhat, with Paiget focusing on early development and Perry on early adulthood. Perry uses specific stages of development to implicate what a student may or may not be "ready" for in an educational environment. For example, if a student in Perry's position 1 of duality (thinks in terms of right and wrong, solves problems by following instructions of Authority) is given an authentic, ill-formed, open-ended problem, the likely result is that the student will "freak out" and not succeed in coming to a solution. If the same problem was given to a student in Perry's position 5 of relativism (which is also referred to as "turning the bend" - where the student sees everything as relative and absolutes are the exception) the student would not feel as intimidated by the divergence of possibilities and would likely be successful in reaching a reasonable solution.

Today in some searching for information, I discovered that I am not the only one to make this connection. Below is an excerpt from Chapter 14 of "Teaching Engineering" by Philip Wankat* and Frank Oreovicz [3]. The authors add that while Piaget and Perry do have some common threads the also have pronounced differences in concentration.


"It would be convenient if Perry’s scheme started where Piaget’s theory stops. Chronologically, the two theories do fit this way, but in other more important ways the theories are not a match. Perry does use Piaget’s ideas of how students learn. That is, a certain amount of disequilibration is necessary for accommodation to occur. However, Perry’s theory is not concerned with problem solving and the applications of logic as are the concrete and formal operational stages of Piaget’s theory. Briefly stated, Perry’s model is concerned first with how students move from a dualistic (right versus wrong) view of the universe to a more relativistic view, and second, how students develop commitments within this relativistic world. There is a strong learning connotation in Perry’s model since students cannot understand or answer questions which are in a developmental sense too far above them."

(*Note Dr. Wankat is a professor in Purdue School of Chemical Engineering and has recently won ASEE 2010 best paper award for ChE Division - you can download full copy of this book from ChE website, see URL link at the end of my post)


Dewey (and a few others) to How People Learn [4]

HPL: Knowledge Centered - The aim of teaching is learning, specifically, what should be taught and why?
Dewey - Students should play active role in setting their own learning objectives
Schon: New scholarship requires new epistemology
Dall'Alba: Ontology should not be neglected in favor of epistemology

HPL: Learner Centered - Includes understanding of student's prior experience and how that experience will affect their learning
Dewey - "The more a teacher is aware of the past experiences of students, of their hopes, desires, chief interests, the better will be understood the forces at work [of the students] that need to be directed and utilized for formation of reflective habits" (Noddings pg 50)
Dall'Alba - Everydayness of becoming - as a teacher/expert you forget and perhaps take for granted what is a crucial and incremental step for a novice.

HPL: Community Centered - Focus on norms and modes of operation
Dewey: Learning is something that must be initiated by the student, teacher is a guide
Palmer: "By 'space' I mean a complex of factors: physical arrangement and feeling of the room, the conceptual framework that I build around the topic my students and I are exploring, the emotional ethos I hope to facilitate, and the ground rules that will guide our inquiry." (pg 73)
Buber: Education is relation - learning via community and dialogue

HPL: Assessment Centered - All successful learning environment must also be assessment-centered - using combinations of formative (designed for feedback and to inform future instruction) and summative (to "index" what has been learned) assessments
Dewey: not enough to stop at awareness, teach must follow up to see what student has learned beyond initial awareness through inquiry.
Palmer: A little more abstract - but his personal anecdotes about his dialogues with his students sound very assessment-centered (formatively) in that he is constantly adjusting his guidance of a particular lecture to the response of his students.


Well so much for short, but I feel better!


In case you are interested, here are references to readings that were not part of H&Ph class:
[1] Svinicki, M. D., & Dixon, N. M. (1987). The Kolb model modified for classroom activities. College Teaching, 35 (Fall 1987), 141-146.
[2] Culver, R. S., & Hackos, J. T. (1982). Perry's Model of Intellectual Development. Engineering Education, 73(Dec), 221-226.
[3] Wankat, P. C., & Oreovicz, F. S. (1993). Teaching Engineering. New York: McGraw-Hill.
URL: https://engineering.purdue.edu/ChE/AboutUs/Publications/TeachingEng/index.html
[4] Bransford, J., Vye, N., & Bateman, H. (2002). Creating High-Quality Learning Environments: Guidelines from Research on How People Learn. In P. A. Graham & N. G. Stacey (Eds.), The Knowledge Economy and Postsecondary Education: Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
URL: http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10239&page=159

Differences between an Engineer and a scientist/mathematician in my eye

The articles about engineering written by Figuoeira, Jonassen, and Koen described engineering from different point of view, but there are some common characteristics in their definition of an engineer: applying science results to solve practical problems, strong problem-solving skills, and using certain criteria for evaluating outcomes. I think they help distinguish an engineer from a scientist/mathematician.

I think the biggest difference between a scientist/mathematician and an engineer is that while a scientist/mathematician concentrates mainly on the research of concept theories, an engineer is adept at applying scientific results to solve practical problems. I had been a mathematics student for six years. Most knowledge I learnt were pure mathematics which included lots of abstract mathematical notations. I was taught to comprehend the meaning of theorems and formulas and gave strict proof of them but never paid much attention to their usage in real-world problems. I used to ask my advisor how I could apply those abstract concepts to solve practical problems. His answer was that a real mathematician never cared about the application of his work. Such applicability should be the concern of an engineer. He cited an example of the great mathematician Leonhard Euler who made important discoveries of Differential Geometry. Euler would never know how vast applications his discoveries would have in the fields of mechanics and engineering problems. In this point, the relationship between scientist/mathematician and engineer is very tight. What a scientist/mathematician discovers is hard to benefit mankind if there is no engineer that can convert it into something of practical use. On the other hand, there will be no theory for engineers to base upon if no scientist/mathematician discovers things.

For engineers, they focus more on how to solve practical problems with scientific results than on figuring out the derivation of theories. Considering the application of mathematical results, often the mathematical models engineers deal with are far more complicated than those taught in mathematics textbook, so it is hard to justify whether certain theories could be used to solve those problems. Using theories in a problem without verifying the satisfaction of all predictions of the theories is very risky in a mathematician’s mind. But for engineers, they care more about the effectiveness of these theories in solving the problem and the rationality of the computed results. Also, due to differences in domain interest, engineers have strong problem-solving skills while scientists/mathematicians are specialized within professional fields and are not good at tackling real-world problems. Moreover, engineers are used to applying certain criteria such as money and time for evaluating outcomes of their work, while scientists/mathematicians hardly evaluate their work by those criteria. For example, scientists had discovered that salt could be separated from water by energy such as electricity. But engineers would consider the high cost of getting distilled water by electricity and doubt its applicability.

Book that might be interesting for our "What is Engineering?" discussion.

I came across this book title just tonight, and while I obviously haven't read the book, I can only assume that it is relevent to our upcoming discussions of "What is engineering?" - and probably more centrally, who decided??

Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870 - 1945, by Ruth Oldenziel.

Apologies if this is familiar material to you........

Guiding questions: what is engineering?

Next week we're starting to move into the space of asking "what is engineering?"  A couple of guiding questions for you to consider as you read Figuoeira, Jonassen & Strobel, and Koen:

1. What does each argue about the "nature" of engineering? (What would be their answer to the question, "what is engineering?" How about their answer to what engineers know and how they know it?)
2. How does each build their arguments?  What evidence do they use to convince their readers?  What was persuasive (or not) about their arguments to you?  Why?
3. What does each suggest (particularly indirectly) about the aims and process of engineering education?

We look forward to reading your thoughts.

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