When we prepare the youtube draft, I have the feeling that video is really a multidimensional way of communication. Power point slides are only one dimensional-picture. But a video can have text, picture multiply by time, and multiple sources of voice. So it takes a lot more efforts to make a video than do power point slides. Maybe the philosophy behind making videos is that we should never forget that communication is multidimensional.

History

In today’s class, each of us in our Youtube group talked about our own paper, which summarizes the issues of engineering education in a certain time period. After that, we start to merge our findings of different time periods and try to find how engineering education evolve for a longer time period. It is very interesting. It seems that the issues for a long time ago are still under intensive debate today. For example, should engineering education emphasize more on science or practice? These stories happen again and again in the history, and they will probably happen again and again in the future. Later, more questions came out of my mind.

Since these stories happen again and again, can we use them to predict the future? My answer is yes. But can we predict all the stories? My answer is no. There should be something new that will happen in the future and have not yet happened. Is history just repeating? My answer is no. I think although these debates happen again and again, the social context for each of the cycles is different from each other. Something should be improving as a function of time. It may be the society or technology background. It may be other things.

It is also very interesting that although the stimulus of the birth of engineering education in different countries (US and Europe) is different, they all happened. However, it did not happen in China before the World War I. Why?

At last, history is always summarized by historians, so in my opinion it is always biased to some extent. The bias may come from the limitations of vision of the historians or the pressures from the society they lived or other factors.

What are your opionions?

Reflection of Class Observation

I think it is a pity if my reflection is not read by others, so I would like to share it here.

Starts from here...


Team Groups

The students are grouped into teams to accomplish final project and works during the class. A team usually consists of four team members. The members in each group seat face-to-face beside a table during the class. Once Dr. Imbrie gives students some problems to solve, the students in a group work as a team to finish the work. They also need to work after class to finish the final project.

A very interesting thing I observed in the class is that if a group has female students, there are always two. There are about 3 times more male students than female students in the classroom. So if the students are randomly distributed, a female student is very likely to be with three male students in a group. However, the female students in the class are never left alone with other three male students. I was wondering if the students chose to group themselves like this. It is possible that the female students are not confident dealing with the situation that they are the minority in the groups, so they chose to stay with other female students. However, I do not believe that all the female students did this. What will happen if a female student works with three male students in a group? Will the male students welcome her or exclude her? Will they get along very well? ...

So after the class, I asked a TA how the groups formed. The students were grouped by TAs according to their former experience, gender, and race. The rule is that they never leave minorities alone in their groups, so they paired female students together. This is very interesting. The TAs grouped the students like this to protect the female students. However, are they actually protecting these female students? These young female engineers will eventually enter the society without protections to minorities. However, if they do not protect these young female engineers at the beginning, are we going to lose more of them?

The Final Project

The final project of the class is to make a robot. To fulfill the assignment, the students not only need to build the bodies of the robots but also need to do programming to realize functions, such as lifting, walking. They can select the functions they want to realize. The assignment was posted on the second week of this semester and will due at the end of this semester. During this class, the groups were asked to present their posters about their plans and progresses. The students were also asked to comment on other groups’ presentations.

I think this assignment is very challenging for these first-year engineers. Before this class, they do not have the chance to learn basic ideas of mechanical engineering, programming, or electrical engineering. They have to find the answers during the process. They may need to try a lot of ideas, but only a small portion of the ideas will work. They also need to learn how to plan their time, how to make their criteria, how to work as a team, how to delegate the works to the members, how to discuss to make a decision, how to present their work, etc. Actually, this is what real engineers do for their projects. Although compare to complex industrial or academic engineering projects the assignment of the class is just a piece of cake, the students can experience everything an experienced engineer deal with. I think the class really help the students to start early as an engineer.

This design assignment has advantages compared with traditional right-wrong assignment. This kind of assignment can better prepare students to solve everyday problem in engineering (Jonassen, 2007). The students will learn to find standards by themselves and learn to collaborate with other team members. Also, since the students need to engage with and contribute to the teams, they are more likely to get interested in engineering and to stay. Finally, this assignment may help the students find their interest and pick up their future majors. As mentioned before, the students will need to learn some knowledge of mechanical engineering, programming, and electrical engineering. During the process, the students may find their interest in one of the majors, so that they want to continue their study in that major.

Classroom observation

ENGR 195
Dr. Imbrie
Time: Oct 26 03:30 pm-05:20 pm
Location: ARMS B061

The students in the class are top students.

When I read the first several pages of “An anthropologist visits the laboratory”, I was surprised to see that the author can spend 60 pages on describing a laboratory like this. And I thought the author is very stupid describing the laboratory as he knows nothing about laboratory and research. However, when I reached about 10 pages later, I thought he is very good at observing and summarizing the operation of the laboratory. And finally, I found that he did an amazing job in this article, from both insider and outsider’s point of view. He described the physical design, background knowledge, publication, and statement issues in every detail. What he described is known by the members or insiders, but is ignored by them. Also what he described is clear to outsiders and can help them know about how a laboratory works. Now I understand how and why he can spend 60 pages on laboratory observation.

How did engineering majors rise in collage?

Noble mentioned in Chapter 2 that the rise of electrical engineering and chemical engineering, or the “newer branches of engineering”, is accompanied with the rise of “science-based industry” around 1880s. So to some extent, the rise of the two majors in engineering is related to the need of industry at that time. I would like to assume that this rule also can be applied to other traditional engineering majors, such as materials engineering and industrial engineering.

In Layton’s paper, he summarized that engineering societies in America is the compromise of business and professionalism. The rise of American Society of Civil Engineering (ASCE), American Institute of Mining Engineers (AIME), and American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) is related to the representation of the business men and professionals. Also, the relationship between engineering societies and engineering departments in collage is very close. The professors and even students in an engineering department are usually members of a counterpart engineering society. So the rising of the engineering societies could also have an impact on the rising of engineering majors in collage, if the rising of engineering societies is earlier than that of engineering majors.

There should be more factors that impacted the rising of engineering majors. But the question worth discussing here is whether the “boundaries” among engineering major benefit the development of engineering students, and since which year in collage we should define the students as electrical engineers or chemical engineers.

Engineering is based on accuracy and rigorousness

This week’s papers give me the feeling that the authors emphasized more on the uncertainty and ambiguity of engineering, rather than our usual sense of accuracy and rigorousness. However, our group agreed at the end of the discussion that accuracy and rigorousness are actually addressed in the papers and still are the base of engineering.

Jonassen et al. mainly talked about the differences of workplace engineering problems and in-class engineering problems. These differences are present in the structure, goal, standard, solving ways, team members of engineering problems. However, the differences do not present in theory base of design or the details of problem solving. Also, the accuracy and rigorousness can be seen from the argument. Theme 2 involves ill-structured problems including aggregates of well-structured problems.

Koen talked about the characteristics of an engineering problem: change, resources, best, and uncertainty. He also mentioned that uncertainty can be seen in the former three characteristics. However, for example, the curves in the “Sharpness vs. knob setting” and “Fidelity vs. knob setting” are not randomly drawn by an engineer. They are summarized using statistic methods. So, although making a decision in engineering designing is based on a lot of other criterion, evidence and theory base of engineering designing are accurate and rigorous.

Bucciarelli argued that engineers need to select from different theoretical framework to design or solve problems. However, these theoretical frameworks are well-defined. No one wants to drive a car that is designed not based on any theories or experimental data.

Yesterday, I talked with a friend who also has an engineering background but just entered a PhD program of education. I would like to write down his unique understanding of education, which might give me some idea to improve the essay. His philosophy is that educational research involves looking into the details in the learning process from every angle of view, which is very different from engineering research. Engineering research involves the input of knowledge and the output of a new design.

He gives a very funny example to illustrate the difference between education and engineering. When cereal is added into milk, educational research concerns how cereal feels when it is added into milk, how milk feels when it is mixed with cereal, how cereal and milk can be well mixed together, what is the reason for mixing, what result turn to be after the mixing, what if using other brands of cereal, etc. These questions imply the questions discussed in the class: who, why, and how. Educational researchers concern about the every details from every perspective during the process. There are no correct answers for these questions. Engineering research concerns in a total different way. What engineers care about is only what has been created after cereal is added into milk. They believe that if all the parameters are consistent, they can reproduce the results.

Reflection on Perry’s Model

Perry’s model divides intellectual development into nine positions. With the development, the authority plays less and less important roles in students’ thoughts. Culver mentioned that most students appear to leave college in Position 3 or 4, because at this point, students admit a lot of alternative views but do not take a stand or commitment towards any of these ones. Some students also quit at later positions because they do not have the strong will to take the commitments. From Culver’s view, students’ willing to commit is a very important factor that dominates students’ retention. This makes me to think about what is related to willingness to commit or what “commitment” means. From my own experience, I would like to commit because the benefit covers the effort in the long run. I think this also applied to the students. If a student thinks continuing can bring more benefit, he or she probably will stay. But the decision and situation varies for different students. For example, getting a degree may help a student to find a better job. However, a report mentioned that fewer students stay in engineering because they find engineering hard and requiring more effort than other disciplines. So their decisions are much dependent on how they balance a better job and the effort they will spend during degree pursuing.

I like Perry’s model very much. It describes the changes happen in students mind so that we can analyze the key factors behind students’ quit. We can also think about what should we do at certain positions to prevent their quit. My research topic also involves analyzing factors that affect the retention of engineering students. Perry’s model is a good reference for me.

Week 3 Reflections

In the class, we talked about what truth is and how to teach students. When we teach students the theories, since we can never reach truth, we should teach them as well as how to think critically. In this way, teaching in a class is like publishing a paper. An excellent teacher needs to “cite” the theories he or she wants to present. At the same time, attending a class is like reading a paper. Students need to learn how to think critically to approach the truth and how to collect useful information from the class to reach their own goals.

In engineering research, thinking critically is essential. When I read papers on my topic, it is not unusual to find contradictory conclusions from different works. Sometimes it is because the criteria for different works are different; sometimes it is because the control groups are different; sometimes it is because of the specialty of the authors; sometimes it is because of the limitation of knowledge of the authors; and so on. In this situation, a researcher needs to sort out what he or she needs and if the materials are correct to build his or her background. Without thinking critically, one just gets confused and can do nothing innovative.

Philosophy of education in society

When we look through the philosophers from Plato/Socrates to Dewey, their ideas are all basically determined by their society and background. On the one hand, their visions are limited by the situations of the societies. Plato cannot talk about how to facilitate education using internet or multimedia. On the other hand, their ideas must be suitable and helpful to their societies. For example, the responsibility of taking care of the family and the children is not solely women’s task in today’s society. Then the education of women which is advocated to be equal to men’s becomes prevalent. Women can contribute as much as men do. Why do not let them contribute?

At the same time, the philosophy of education can affect the format and principles of education a lot. Dewey’s theories performed very important roles in constructing American education. No one can imagine how American education would be if there was another Dewey who favored another way of education which is also suitable to the society.

If someday our world is like the one in Wall-E: super developed, organized, and programmed. How should the education be?

The New Scholarship Requires a New Epistemology
In this paper, the author presents a new scholarship which is more practical. This scholarship requires a change in the epistemology. To prove this claim, the author brings in the “reflection in” and “reflection on” concepts, which are used in the paper to explain many of the examples, including the MIT’s project, and can be seen very frequently in our everyday life.

The “reflection in” and “reflection on” concepts are very important in the process of learning and teaching. From the teacher’s point of view, what is going to be taught should be based on how much the students have already known. So during the teaching process, the teacher should observe the feed backs of the students and then decided what to teach and how to teach. This process is a reflection process. From the student’s point of view, during the learning process, they should not only learn what they are learning, but also learn how to learn and what to learn. This process is also a reflection process. To promote the efficiency of learning, the teacher and the students all need to be aware of the reflection concepts.

The Hidden Wholeness-Paradox in Teaching and Learning
In this book chapter, Palmer analyzes the concept of paradox of the world and presented the application of paradox in pedagogical design. Paradox presents everywhere around us. Right and wrong cannot be separated; light and dark cannot be separated; good and bad cannot be separated. Phelps’s parents are well aware of this concept. Paradox and wholeness also exist in the classroom. The students were divided into several discussion groups. However, the students all discuss under the same topic. Furthermore, everyone can express their opinions and participate into the topic better because of the division, so that a better wholeness or integrity can be reached.

The author talked about how to handle the six paradoxical tensions in pedagogical design regarding to its range, participators, contents, etc. For the fourth tension, there is an example. The engineering textbooks should include both the “big” theories and the examples or stories happen in students’ everyday life. It can help the students remember the theories. It also tells students that these theories can be used to solve practical problems.

My own “reflections”
During the transition from engineering discipline, there are several things I should keep in mind. First, making notes is very important. In the first class, I did not make notes. Then when I sit in front of the laptop, I found I cannot remember what other people have discussed. I started to realize that notes can not only help me remind the content of the class, but also allow me to look into the class in a different angle of view. After reading more articles or experience more, when I remember the class again, I can understand more of others’ opinions and why they presented these opinions. Similar to making notes in the class, making notes during reading also help me remind the content of the materials. Different from engineering textbooks, the educational reading materials are more like assays. It is impossible for me to read them again, but notes can help me remember the ideas in the articles.

Second, summary is very important. Making summary is also a “reflection” process. This blog is a summary. By writing this blog, I get reflection on my way of reading the materials and my performances at the class.