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A Stroke of Insight for Engineering Education

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When I attended Brian Bomeisler’s course (here) based on his mom’s book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, he showed us Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk Stroke of Insight.  Bolte Taylor is a Harvard-trained and published neuroscientist who had a strong stroke that shut down the language centers on the left side of her brain.  In her video, she goes onto describe both scientifically and emotionally her unique experience in a very moving way.  ThreeJoy works with clients to find the joy, happiness, and peace in educational settings, and her description of the stroke has much in common with mindfulness practices that emphasize quieting the mind and feeling a larger connectedness to others.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU

ThreeJoy believes that these practices and an emphasis on noticing and mindfulness are important to the transformation of engineering education around the world (see earlier post here).  For more on Jill Bolte Taylor and her work go here.

Engineering Education and the Power of Vulnerability

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The more I’ve worked with schools around the globe for the transformation of engineering education, the more I’ve come to understand that all the important variables in that transformation and in the process of change itself are emotional ones.  In the following video, Brene Brown discusses her work on shame and how it led her to a greater understanding of the role of vulnerability in happiness.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCvmsMzlF7o

The lessons of this video (here) resonate with successful change practices at Olin, at Illinois, in Asia, Europe, and South American, and part of the secret sauce to effective education change is to pay more attention to the compassion, connection, courage, and vulnerability as discussed by Dr. Brown.

ThreeJoy at Politecnico Milano

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In the following video, ThreeJoy Associates President, Dave Goldberg, presents The Creativity Imperative and the Technology Professional of the Future.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5b_AFu64YQ

The abstract of the presentation is as follows:

The world (1) is apparently flat, (2) is being given over to a rising creative class, and (3) requires a whole new mind, but a common conclusion drawn from authors such as Friedman, Florida, and Pink is that technology professionals in advanced economies must excel at creating new categories of product and service, as returns to routine engineering/technology labor are declining because of the ease with which these tasks may be outsourced. This talk starts by examining the setting after World War 2 that set the stage for engineering and technology education in modern times. It continues by discussing the techno-economic forces that have shaped the intervening period, and it considers recent work by Price and others to understand the essential characteristics and habits of tech visionaries (TVs), those who permit major companies to create value through the effective bootstrapping of entirely new product lines. These and other factors lead to the conclusion that our times demand a greater emphasis on the education and support of creative engineers and technologists, but existing higher educational programs seem unable to reform themselves for a variety of historical and systemic reasons. The talk concludes by discussing some of these difficulties and a number of the organizational, conceptual, and motivational changes that can enable smooth change to the education of more creative engineers and technologists.

The presentation was recorded at Politecnico Milano earlier in the year 12 April 2011 (announcement here).

Lessons from David working with Goliath

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A key factor in the success of the iFoundry initiative has been working with Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in the Olin-Illinois Partnership (OIP).  In the video below, ThreeJoy President and OIP co-founder Dave Goldberg talks about the ways this experience was especially beneficial.

httpv://youtu.be/FGdAmlVH1T0

More is available about the OIP here and Olin College here.