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........
Thursday, September 23, 2010
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:
- 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?)
- 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?
- 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:
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
Thursday, September 16, 2010
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
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
Fodder for youtube videos
Our YouTube project is motivated by this video.
However, you can make your team's video as involved or simple as you like. Past years have gotten pretty involved; you can do something completely different for them. But in case you want a way to calibrate yourself, here is a list of all our past years' YouTube videos.
http://www.youtube.com/user/alicepawley#grid/user/841ECAED68149FD0
However, you can make your team's video as involved or simple as you like. Past years have gotten pretty involved; you can do something completely different for them. But in case you want a way to calibrate yourself, here is a list of all our past years' YouTube videos.
http://www.youtube.com/user/alicepawley#grid/user/841ECAED68149FD0
Blog interaction guide
Opportunity to:
Engage with colleagues
That the blog space is "different" than our class space
Use blog to help you think (reflect, synthesize, connect to readings, etc.)
Need:
Foundation for trust (recognizing this is a process...this is a start with a little leap of faith)
Safe space to explore ideas and to make mistakes (large and small, even very small)
Being comfortable with less coherent posts (for me to be comfortable, for others to find value)
Ways to connect with other ideas and have a dialogue (need help with "threading" and "tagging")
A place for guiding questions
A place for fragmented ideas
Okay to say "I'm not looking for a comment" and "I am looking for a comment"
How to respectfully disagree / challenge people to explore their ideas (encouragement to think differently)
Is it OK to not blog?
Freedom to "author" own growth
Questions of audience
How to get email notification of comments - in future blog post :)
What are our purposes for blogging in this class?
What are our house rules for blogging? (Board 1)
What are our house rules for blogging? (Board 2)
Engage with colleagues
That the blog space is "different" than our class space
Use blog to help you think (reflect, synthesize, connect to readings, etc.)
Need:
Foundation for trust (recognizing this is a process...this is a start with a little leap of faith)
Safe space to explore ideas and to make mistakes (large and small, even very small)
Being comfortable with less coherent posts (for me to be comfortable, for others to find value)
Ways to connect with other ideas and have a dialogue (need help with "threading" and "tagging")
- Create tags / labels to help people know what you want / need
A place for guiding questions
A place for fragmented ideas
Okay to say "I'm not looking for a comment" and "I am looking for a comment"
How to respectfully disagree / challenge people to explore their ideas (encouragement to think differently)
- engage with the ideas and other ideas - speaking to the "third place"
- first show you understand (e.g, restate what you saw), then engage philosophically
- help clarify the part you disagree with
- put some distance between the post, the responder, the response and the comment
Is it OK to not blog?
Freedom to "author" own growth
Questions of audience
How to get email notification of comments - in future blog post :)
What are our purposes for blogging in this class?
What are our house rules for blogging? (Board 1)
What are our house rules for blogging? (Board 2)
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