This week I spent time at Olin College in Needham, MA with my co-author, Mark Somerville, and collaborating writer, Catherine Whitney as we worked toward a first full draft manuscript for a new book, A Whole New Engineer: A Surprising Emotional Journey. We've been working on the book for almost a year and a half, and crafting the stories together…
MOOCs and Moola There was an article in the New York Times about how massive open online courses are popular and not yet profitable (here). To me this is reminiscent of the rush to place newspaper content online for free, which, later, many newspapers (including the NYT) regretted. The Wall Street Journal was one of a very few who…
It is increasingly commonplace to hear calls for student-centered education, but increasingly I’ve been thinking that the term doesn’t go far enough and have been using the term student-led learning instead.
First, a lot of language concerning education has teacher-centered bias built in. One example is the recommended shift from the sage on the stage, lecturing with 20-old course notes, to the guide on the side who practices active-learning, problem-based learning, experiential learning, or some other X learning in the classroom to the hoped benefit of the students. Indeed this shift is desirable, but the sage-guide shift still considers the instructor as the prime mover in the educational setting; the subject of both phrases, sage and guide, is the teacher. In this sense, education continues to be somthing that is done to or done for the student by the teacher.
As the memory of the London
Olympics fades into the rearview mirror, an interesting piece of psychological research gives us a clue to the origins of a certain kind of dysfunction in a number of universities. Researchers have noticed that among medalists in the Olympics, gold medalists and bronze medalists tend to be happy campers, living happy post-Olympic lives, and that silver medalists tend to be dissatisfied wondering what might have been.
I was watching the 1972 movie Young Winston with Robert Shaw, Anne Bancroft, and Simon Ward, and a number of the most powerful scenes were those when young Winston faced the criticism (and approval) of his father Lord Randolph Churchill, played by Robert Shaw. Watching these scenes reminded me that when working with male clients, one key to progress is sometimes to listen to stories about the client’s relationship to his father. Chapter 3, Live As If Your Father were Dead, in David Deida’s book The Way of the Superior Man succinctly captures why this is so:
By Guest Blogger, Natalie Kuldell
I’m a scientist by training so—no big surprise– I’m excited to discover how the living world works. But new to me is just how powerfully students can learn the technical content when they try to build novel systems. Within the last few years of my teaching career I’ve had the chance to teach the engineering of biology and I’ve seen it bring a context and a joy to the hard work of learning. A student who wants a cell to do something interesting (detect a poison, fix a broken surface, make a medicine) will figure out how the proteins and DNA can work together to build a switch. The biology itself becomes a building material—the nouns and verbs that they can write sentences with, or
the programming language that operates the “wetware.” When I ask the students to design and build, I see the book-learning move into the real world for them. When I put students into teams in order that they might benefit from each other’s ideas and talents, I preview the kind of professional they can someday become.
Over the last few decades, much time and energy has gone toward reform efforts in engineering education. This work has yielded a great deal of insight into the relative effectiveness of different teaching approaches, and has led to calls for the adoption of experimentally validated pedagogies in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). What the work hasn’t addressed as much, though, is one key fundamental question: What are the underlying values in engineering education?
We need to address values because they are critical for enabling real change in engineering education. After all, if you try to make a change in pedagogy or content without addressing the underlying value system, you are likely to fail, as value systems are the social equivalent of immune systems. Additionally, the values we hold greatly affect the experience students have, and, accordingly, who they become.
Following are four core values — or pillars for reform — we need to address when discussing engineering education.
Guest post by Jim Warren, Fabricators and Manufacturers Association, www.fmanet.org To highlight the importance of manufacturing to the nation's economy and draw attention to the many rewarding high-skill jobs available in manufacturing fields, a group of public and private organizations recently announced the launch of Manufacturing Day for October 5, 2012. The effort is sponsored by the Fabricators & Manufacturers…
In strategic thinking circles, the SWOT model is a commonly used framework for strategic planning and stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The model is generative and has been helpful to many strategic planners over many years. Having said this, there’s an alternative that is getting increasing attention called SOAR or strengths, opportunities, aspirations, and results. SOAR grows out of the movement toward appreciative inquiry in which emphasis…
ne of the many blessings in my life has been my ability to travel to and work in Singapore. I love Singapore’s energy, its rapid growth and accomplishments, the boldness of its aspirations, its sheer human diversity per square millimeter. I relish returning to Changi Airport, to stroll among the young people walking in West Coast Park after dark, to its colorful food markets, its busy streets, and the sophistication of its night scene. I enjoy hearing the diverse views of taxi drivers about politics and the economy and business. And underneath, I feel a gentleness of spirit that is as attractive as it is personally calming. These words are perhaps a strange way to start an article on engineering education, but I share these feelings, in part because I want to talk about the role of feelings and emotional variables, more generally, in the transformation of engineering education, but also because I want readers to understand that I know I have only begun to scratch the surface of Singapore, that my understanding of her is of a meager and cursory kind, that I have so much more to learn and experience in order for me to be considered “Singapore-educated” in any meaningful way.