Creating Schools of Engineering Education Karl A. Smith, University of Minnesota American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference – Workshop June 2004

Suggestions Align with your (Purdue’s) strengths Focus on BIG questions Look for “differences that make a difference” (Bateson, 1972) in engineering Resist methodological hegemony –Let the question dictate the method Remain faithful to engineering –Engineering is NOT applied science –Engineering is NOT problem solving –... Think LEARNING

Engineering Business, government, academic, or individual efforts in which knowledge of mathematics and/or natural science is employed in research, development, design, manufacturing, systems engineering, or technical operations with the objective of creating and/or delivering systems, products, processes, and/or services of a technical nature and content intended for use – National Research Council A scientist discovers that which exists. An engineer creates that which never was -- Theodore von Kármán ( ) Design in a major sense is the essence of engineering; it begins with the identification of a need and ends with a product or system in the hands of a user. It is primarily concerned with synthesis rather than the analysis which is central to engineering science. Design, above all else, distinguishes engineering from science (Hancock, 1986, National Science Foundation Workshop)

Engineering Method The engineering method is the use of heuristics to cause the best change in a poorly understood situation within the available resources – Billy Koen The engineering method is design under constraints – Wm. Wulf

An essential aspect of engineering is the use of heuristics. Although difficult to define, heuristics are relatively easy to identify using the characteristics listed by Koen(1984): (1) Heuristics do not guarantee a solution; (2) Two heuristics may contradict or give different answers to the same question and still be useful; (3) Heuristics permit the solving of unsolvable problems or reduce the search time to a satisfactory solution; (4) The heuristic depends on the immediate context instead of absolute truth as a standard of validity. A heuristic is anything that provides a plausible aid or direction in the solution of a problem but is in the final analysis unjustified, incapable of justification, and fallible. It is used to guide, to discover, and to reveal. Koen, Billy V Definition of the engineering method. Washington, DC: ASEE.

The engineering method is the use of heuristics to cause the best change in a poorly understood situation within the available resources (Koen, 1984, p. 70). Typical engineering heuristics include: 1.Rules of thumb and orders of magnitude; 2.Factors of safety; 3.Heuristics that determine the engineer's attitude toward his or her work; 4.Heuristics that engineers use to keep risk within acceptable bounds; and 5.Rules of thumb that are important in resource allocation.

Where will graduates (M.S. and Ph.D.) of an Engineering Education program be marketable? And what background/experiences should graduates (M.S. and Ph.D.) of such programs have to prepare them for these markets?

Learning Organization A learning organization is an organization skilled at creating, acquiring, interpreting, transferring, and retaining knowledge, and at purposefully modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights – David Garvin Garvin, David Learning in action: A guide to putting the learning organization to work. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization Peter Senge (In Ray & Rinzler, 1993) 1.Building Shared Vision. The idea of building shared vision stresses that you never quite finish it--it's an ongoing process. 2.Personal Mastery. Learning organizations must be fully committed to the development of each individual's personal mastery--each individual's capacity to create their life the way they truly want. 3.Mental Models. Our vision of current reality has everything to do with the third discipline--mental models--because what we really have in our lives is constructions, internal pictures that we continually use of interpret and make sense out of the world. 4.Team Learning. Individual learning, no matter how wonderful it is or how great it makes us feel, if fundamentally irrelevant to organizations, because virtually all important decisions occur in groups. The learning unit of organizations are "teams," groups of people who need one another to act. 5.Systems Thinking. The last discipline, the one that ties them all together, is systems thinking. Senge, Peter The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. New York: Doubleday. Ray, Michael & Rinzler, Alan. (Eds) The new paradigm in business: Emerging strategies for leadership and organizational change. Los Angeles: Tarcher/Perigee.

Expertise implies: a set of cognitive and metacognitive skills an organized body of knowledge that is deep and contextualized an ability to notice patterns of information in a new situation flexibility in retrieving and applying that knowledge to a new problem Bransford, Brown & Cocking How people learn. National Academy Press.

Acquisition of Expertise Cognition: Learn from instruction or observation what knowledge and actions are appropriate Associative: Practice (with feedback) allowing smooth and accurate performance Automaticity: “Compilation” or performance and associative sequences so that they can be done without large amounts of cognitive resources

Paradox of Expertise The very knowledge we wish to teach others (as well as the knowledge we wish to represent in computer programs) often turns out to be the knowledge we are least able to talk about.

John Seely Brown. Growing up digital: The web and a new learning ecology. Change, March/April 2000.

$Learning B In theory and in practice $Cognitive Apprenticeship $Re-education Learning a practice involves becoming a member of a >community of practice= and thereby understanding its work and its talk from the inside (p. 126)

Communities of practice: A group of people who: Share an interest in a topic (Domain), Interact and build relationships (Community) Share and develop knowledge (Practice). Communities of practice: The organizational frontier -- Harvard Business Review, Jan/Feb 2000 Cambridge U Press, 1998

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis. Wenger, Etienne, McDermott, Richard, and Snyder, William Cultivating Communities of Practice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Key Ideas Engineering Design Learning Community