Tag Archives: education

Knowledge spheres

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Out-of-focus image from optical microscope of 10 micron diameter polystrene spheres in water

10 micron diameter polystyrene spheres in water (see Holes in fluids)

There is a well-known quote from Blaise Pascal: ‘Knowledge is like a sphere, the greater its volume, the larger its contact with the unknown’.  Presumably, Pascal was eloquently observing that the more we know, the more we realise how much we don’t know and the more questions that we have.  Perhaps this is also a test of whether we have acquired knowledge and understanding or only information; because the acquisition of knowledge and understanding will lead to further questions, whereas information tends simply to overwhelm us.  We need to process information into some form of ordered structure in order to gain understanding and render it more useful.  Of course, as in any process that involves increasing order and reducing entropy, this involves an expenditure of available energy or effort.  What makes it interesting and stimulating when mentoring learners on a MOOC is that very many more of them are prepared to make that effort than in a class of undergraduate students.  Some of their questions, including (or perhaps especially) the tangential ones, cause me to think about concepts in a new way and this increases my own knowledge sphere.  Lewis Hyde remarks in his book, The Gift, that ‘ideas might be treated as gifts in science’ and ‘a circulation of gifts nourishes [a] part of our spirit’. I would like to think this is happening in a MOOC, both between the educator and learners and between learners.  In my experience, it is a culture that has been lost from the undergraduate classroom, which is to the detriment of both educator and student.

A liberal engineering education

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115-1547_IMGFredrik Sjoberg points out how the lives of Darwin and Linnaeus have become models for generations of natural scientists.  Youthful travels followed by years of patient, narrowly focussed research and finally the revolutionary ideas and great books.  Very many scientists have followed the first two steps but missed out on the last one, leaving them trapped in ‘the tunnel vision of specialised research’.  As our society and its accompanying technology has become more complex, more and more tunnels or silos of specialised knowledge and research have been created.  This has led specialists to focus on solving issues that they understand best and communicating little or not at all with others in related fields.  At the same time, our society and technologies are becoming more interconnected, making it more appropriate to cross the cultural divides between specialisms.

One of the pleasures of teaching my current MOOC is the diversity of learners in terms of gender, geography and educational background who are willing to cross the cultural divides.  We have people following the MOOC in places as diverse as Iceland, Mexico, Nigeria and Syria.  We have coffee bean growers, retired humanities academics, physical chemists and social historians.  In most of the western world, engineering is taught to male-dominated classes and this has remained a stubborn constant despite strenous efforts to bring about change.  So it is a pleasure to interact with such a diverse cohort of people seeking to liberate their minds from habit and convention.

The original meaning of the term ‘liberal studies’ was studies that liberated students’ minds from habit and convention.  Recently, Vinod Khosla has suggested that we should focus on teaching our students ‘liberal sciences’.     This seems to connect with the ’emotive traits’ that David Brooks has proposed will be required for success in the future, when machines can do most of what humans do now (see my post entitled ‘Smart Machines‘ on February 26th, 2014).  These emotive traits are a voracious lust of understanding, an enthusiasm for work, the ability to grasp the gist and an empathetic sensitivity for what will attract attention.   We don’t teach much of any of these in traditional engineering degrees which is perhaps why we can’t recruit a more diverse student population.  We need to incorporate them into our degree programmes, reduce much of the esoteric brain-twisting analysis and encourage our students to grapple with concepts and their broader implications.  This would become a liberal engineering education.

Sources:

Fredrik Sjoberg, The Fly Trap, Penguin Books, 2015

Asish Ghosh, Dynamic Systems for Everyone: Understanding How Our World Works, Springer, 2015

Vinod Khosla, Is majoring in liberal arts a mistake for students? Medium, February 10th, 2016

David Brooks, What machines can’t do, New York Times, February 3rd, 2014

 

 

Writing backwards

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honey&mumfordschematicMy regular readers will know that I am a fan of the 5E instructional method and in particular combining it with Everyday Engineering Examples when teaching introductory engineering courses to undergraduate students. Elsewhere in this blog, there is a catalogue of lesson plans and examples originally published in a series of booklets produced during a couple of projects funded by the US National Science Foundation. Now, I have gone a step further and embedded this pedagogy in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Energy! Thermodynamics in Everyday Life. If you follow the MOOC, you’ll find some new worked examples that I explain while writing ‘backwards’ on a glass board. My film unit are very proud of the ‘backwards’ writing in these examples, which they tell me is an innovation in education filming-making. Our other major innovation is laboratory exercises that MOOC participants can perform in their kitchens. Two of these are based on everyday experiences for most participants: boiling water and waiting for a hot drink to cool down; the third is less everyday because it involves a plumber’s manometer. In each case, I am attempting to move people around Honey and Mumford’s learning cycle, which is illustrated schematically in the figure, i.e. having an experience, reviewing the experience, concluding from the experience and the planning the next steps. The intention is that students progress around the cycle in the taught component, then again in the experiments.

If you want to have a go at the one of experiments, then the instructions for the first one are available here. Alternatively you could sign up for the MOOC – its not too late!  But if you don’t want to follow the course then you can stil watch some excerpts on the University of Liverpool’s Stream website, including the backwards written examples.

Sources:

Atkin, J.M. and Karplus, R., 1962. Discovery of invention? Science Instructor, 29 (5), 45–47.

Honey P, Mumford A. The Manual of Learning Styles 3rd Ed. Peter Honey Publications Limited, Maidenhead, 1992.

Our place in the web of life

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140-4032_IMGThe seven billion human beings who live on this planet weigh in about 300 million tonnes in total and if you add in our domesticated animals then the scales would hit about 700 million tonnes. Whereas if you weighed all of the animals left in the wild then their total weight would be less than 100 million tonnes, according to Yuval Noah Harari in his book ‘Sapiens: a brief history of mankind’. This explains why many of our landscapes appear empty and barren – they are, at least at the level of large mammals. That’s why you are unlikely to be chased by a tiger or any other predator, see last week’s post entitled ‘Running away from tigers’.

These landscapes are not really barren. We just can’t see what is there. Bacteria are too small for us to see but they have dominated the landscape for most of evolutionary time. They ‘invented’ all of life’s essential biotechnologies including fermentation, photosynthesis, nitrogen fixation, respiration and devices for rapid motion plus probably a few we have haven’t discovered yet. Bacteria exchange up to 15% of their genetic material on a daily basis across all strains so that they could be considered to form a single microscopic web of life.

This web of bacterial life is all around us as well as inside us. If you like to learn more than you probably ever want to know about the bacteria inside us then read Giulia Enders’book ‘Gut: The inside story of our bodies most underrated organ’. We are not alone in being immersed in this web of bacterial life; so is every other living thing which implies we are all intimately connected in a vast ecological network. This microbial web of life in which we are embedded is self-organising – there are no leaders, presidents, generals or CEOs – instead bacteria empower one another. It appears to be one of the secrets of their success.

In an interconnected world, power and control over others in a hierarchy is less appropriate than empowering one another in the network. Many people would find this approach difficult because they identify themselves with their position of power and, hence would tend to resist any attempt to empower the network. To them it begins to sound like anarchy, particularly in the narrow context of human society, but others might suggest it offers a better prospect for addressing the challenges posed by global climate change than world leaders have so far proposed. Well-informed individuals intimately connected in a network are likely to take decisions that support the network, and hence themselves. But, now we are straying into game theory…

Sources:

Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A brief history of mankind. London: Vintage (Penguin, Random House), 2014.

Capri F. & Luisi, P.L., The systems view of life: a unifying vision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Enders, G, Gut: the inside story of our bodies most underrated organ. Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2013.