Category Archives: Learning & Teaching

Some changes to Realize Engineering

The advertising industry is becoming a pervasive influence on us – telling us how we should eat, dress, travel, vacation, borrow, bank, insure, think and vote. We are constantly bombarded with messages designed to induce us to buy goods or services that we don’t really need and that undermine progress towards a sustainable society [see my post ‘Old is beautiful‘ on May 1st, 2015].

Many services are offered to us for free in order to expose us to advertisements and to collect data about our habits and interests that are put to uses about which we know little. These issues became prominent last week with the allegations about the inappropriate use of data from Facebook by Cambridge Analytica [see for example the The Guardian on March 25th, 2016]. A number of organisations have reacted by closing down their Facebook pages [see for example Reuters on March 23rd, 2018] and a #deletefacebook movement has started [see for example The Guardian on March 25th, 2016, again]. I have joined them and deleted my Facebook page as well as disconnecting this blog from Facebook. Also, in a couple of weeks I plan to stop using Twitter to disseminate this blog; so, if you receive this blog via Twitter then please start to follow it directly.

Finally, the advertisements at the bottom of my blog posts will disappear because I am paying to use WordPress instead of allowing advertising to cover the costs. A side-effect of this change is a new url: realizeengineering.blog/ So please update your bookmarks,if it doesn’t happen automatically!

Compelling presentations

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It used to be that you only had to compete with the view out of the window when you were talking to a group of people. Now, you have to compete with the view of the world available through people’s mobile devices. You know when your audience arrives and sets up their laptops that you have a challenge ahead of you. A few of them might be planning to take notes using their laptop but most will be distracted by the constant flow of information delivered by email and messaging applications. Of course, you can use the same technology to embellish your presentation and to hold their attention; but often the result is ‘death by Powerpoint’ and the audience retreats into their own worlds – doing their own thing.

There’s a nice quote from an interview with Eric Clapton in the San Diego Union Tribune (September 4th, 2005): ‘It’s very hard, so I try and make it as engaging as it can be. But you have to face the fact that, no matter how good it is, you can only hold their attention for a little while.‘ So, you have to plan you talk in small steps and to re-engage your audience at the start of each step. There needs to be a narrative and the same rules apply as when writing [see post entitled ‘Reader, Reader, Reader’ on April 15th, 2015]. Powerpoint is not a requisite nor a substitute but preparation is essential. As a group of undergraduate students told me during a recent visit to another university, they can easily spot the lecturers who prepare conscientiously and are worth listening to.

I am at a scientific conference this week where a wide range of speaking skills will be on display and I have my mobile devices with me to provide alternative stimulation. The real value of the conference is the opportunity to interact with other researchers in a community of knowledge and for that we need shorter talks and more time for discussion. But the mechanics of modern scientific conferences is a separate issue!

Image: view from lecture theatre on London campus where I taught science and technology leadership last year [see post entitled ‘Leadership is like shepherding‘ on May 10th, 2017].

Creating an evolving learning environment

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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about marking examinations and my tendency to focus on the students that I had failed to teach rather than those who excelled in their knowledge of problem-solving with the laws of thermodynamics [see my post ‘Depressed by exams‘ on January 31st, 2018]. One correspondent suggested that I shouldn’t beat myself up because ‘to teach is to show, to learn is to acquire‘; and that I had not failed to show but that some of my students had failed to acquire. However, Adams and Felder have stated that the ‘educational role of faculty is not to impart knowledge; but to design learning environments that support knowledge acquisition‘. My despondency arises from my apparent inability to create a learning environment that supports and encourages knowledge acquisition for all of my students. People arrive in my class with a variety of formative experiences and different ways of learning, which makes it challenging to generate a learning environment that is effective for everyone. It’s an on-going challenge due to the ever-widening cultural gap between students and their professors, which is large enough to have warranted at least one anthropological study (see My Freshman Year by Rebekah Nathan). So, my focus on the weaker exam scripts has a positive outcome because it causes me to think about evolving the learning environment.

Sources:

Adams RS, Felder RM, Reframing professional development: A systems approach to preparing engineering educators to educate tomorrow’s engineers. J. Engineering Education, 97(3):230-240, 2008.

Nathan R, My freshman year: what a professor learned by becoming a student, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 2005

Logarithmic view of the world

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Politicians and the media are fond of dazzling us with big numbers: $62m, £35bn, $1.1 tn. All of these are unimaginable sums of money – uncountable and, for most us, unspendable. They are respectively: the launch cost for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, the anticipated ‘divorce cost’ to the UK for leaving the EU and the predicted US government annual deficit for next year based on the additional spending approved in the budget bill early this month. For most of us, winning $62m in a lottery would be a life-changing event that we might dream about but there’s only about a 1 in 14 million chance of it happening – oops, there’s another unimaginable number.

We seem quite happy handling numbers over a limited interval, from perhaps 1 in 100 [1% or 0.01] to maybe 100,000 but beyond this range our perspective ceases to be linear and probably becomes logarithmic (as in the graphic), or something similar. In other words, we don’t perceive £35bn as being about 500 times larger than $62m, or $1.1tn being about 18 million times larger. Instead, we concertina our mental picture into something more manageable, such as the image shown in the graphic. Does this have the side-effect of lessening the impact of large numbers so that we are less alarmed by costs of £35bn or deficits of $1.1tn? Maybe we would take more notice of a cost of £500 per person in the UK or a deficit of $3600 per person per year in the USA?

At the other end of the scale, something similar happens. Nanotechnology is a popular buzz word at the moment but few people can conceive of something 2.5 nanometres in diameter – that’s the diameter of a strand of DNA. It doesn’t help much to tell you that a human hair is 40,000 times thicker!

Maybe, all of this only applies to those of us who ‘see’ numbers in pictorial patterns, and to the rest of you it is nonsensical. See my post on Engineering Synaesthesia on September 21st, 2016.

Sources:

http://time.com/money/5135565/elon-musk-falcon-heavy-rocket-launch-cost/

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/dec/31/tough-2017-what-does-next-year-hold-theresa-may

Financial Times, Weekend 10 February/11 February 2018.