#BigBeacon Twitter Chat – Nov 18 JE: Transforming Education – Exploration & Discovery

Join Twitter chat regulars as they join CUBE Consulting’s Josh Graham (@CUBEuiuc) for a Twitter discussion of Junior Enterprise: Transforming Education regarding Diversity Education for Engineers. The usual Socratic questions will be posed and all twitter chat participants will be encouraged to engage in a lively chat on this topic.

In their education, engineers are mostly presented with problems that amount to an arbitrary set of numbers to be manipulated. In a professional setting, the work is significantly less cut and dried, as nearly any kind of problem exists as one component in a complex network of components. Students are expected to get through a number of courses before they can graduate, and these courses move so quickly that the best most can do is stay on pace from one week to the next. This leaves most students ill-equipped to tackle problems that span different segments of their knowledge and experience. What do you think? Do you agree or disagree?

One of CUBE Consulting’s Project Managers, Josh Graham (@CUBEuiuc), will be leading the conversation using the #BigBeacon handle.

We hope that you will join us for our Twitter chat as CUBE Consulting asks:

How can engineers learn to explore their field of study actively?

CUBE Consulting hopes to generate a conversation about the place of exploration within engineering education. CUBE Consulting invites you to join in on the conversation and tell us what exploration and discovery mean to you.

As you wait for November 18 at 8 pm EST for our Twitter chat, we hope you’ll consider the following questions:

• In your education, how often are/were practice or exam problems presented as self-contained?
• In the professional world, how often are problems actually self-contained?
• How much of your time dedicated to academics is spent exploring topics with which you are already generally familiar? Why?
• How much time in solving a professional engineering problem is generally dedicated to research, discovery, and learning? Why?
• Why is the freedom to delve deeper into interesting topics so limited in most classroom settings?
• How can students learn to develop the skills to research and discover useful information without losing time for content?

About CUBE Consulting

CUBE Consulting is a student-led consulting organization at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. CUBE Consulting strives to provide engineering and business students with the opportunity to apply classroom theory to real-world consulting projects with local businesses. As the first Junior Enterprise in the United States, CUBE Consulting provides students with international networking and organizational benchmarking.

How to Twitter Chat

If you’ve never Twitter chatted before, don’t worry; it’s very easy! First, get a Twitter account if you don’t already have one, and log in. At 8 PM ET on Wednesday go to twitter.com and type #BigBeacon into the search box on Twitter. Thereafter all the tweets with the hashtag #BigBeacon will show up on your Twitter page. To participate, simply express your opinion by sending a tweet, and be sure to append the hashtag #BigBeacon so other members of the Twitter Chat see you are posting. Alternatively, automate the hashtag search and append feature by using the free service Tchat at http://www.tchat.io.