Friend of ThreeJoy and the Big Beacon, author and artist Karen Salmansohn has a usefully funky take on perfectionism in the video in the viewer below: httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGkQP0giXOM Karen did the cool graphics on the Big Beacon Manifesto and the head-heart-hands poster here. Her mission statement in life is quoted below: My mission in one long […]
In the article Engineering Students Can Do X on Huffington Post (here) I talked about the role of trust and other essentially emotional variables in effective education reform, but what is trust? It is a word that we use quite a lot, but it is one that we use in a number of different senses, […]
In discussions of why engineering education is so hard to reform, any number of culprits are often identified: stronger interest in research than teaching, lack of familiarity with or interest in active learning, experiential learning, problem-based learning or other pedagogical techniques, insufficient interest in the cultivation of our young people, and so on. A factor […]
Dan Pink called for a Whole New Mind in his book on creativity of the same name (here). Mark Somerville and I call for a Whole New Engineer and a Whole New Engineering Education in our latest Huffington Post article: We live in a technological time. With nearly 7 billion people on the planet (and […]
Whole new engineers are more than left brains on a stick. Engineers have creative right brains, executive forebrains, emotional brains, and they show up ready in the world embodied in flesh and blood. See Jorge Cham’s brilliant comic below or go to phdcomics by clicking here or on the comic:
Engineering education misleads young engineers about what engineering practice is all about. By concentrating almost all classroom air time on mathematics and the solution of well-formed problem s in physics or engineering science, we give young people the impression that they will spend most of their time doing these things at work in there real […]
In 2009, the Illinois Foundry for Innovation in Engineering Education (www.ifoundry.illinois.edu) admitted 73 freshmen into a special pilot freshmen experience that consisted of the following elements: A one-hour course Introduction to the Missing Basics of Engineering. A zero-credit extracurricular activity called iCommunity (handbook here). The course consisted of two small hands-on projects and small discussion […]
Students in developed countries want to be A.B.E, anything but an engineer. The deck below considers this difficulty. [slideshare id=13393593&doc=abe-anything-but-an-engineer-pptx-120620093031-phpapp02] It considers also the way in which the Big Beacon (here) may be a way to overcome this difficulty.
The Heath brothers book Made to Stick is an invaluable guide to crafting language useful for changing engineering education culture. Watch the short clip by Chip Heath below httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZQwvP2VTNk and read Bill Hammack’s book summary here.
I heard Tony Wagner at an Olin College event in Palo Alto on Sunday and his thoughts about how to educate a generation of innovators as described in his book Creating Innovators. See the book trailer below: httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3c6_Hzgqfmg The book is available in hardcover and kindle versions here.