Thank you for the supportive comments in response to my post on January 4th about to blog or not to blog [see ‘A tiny contribution to culture?‘]. They dispelled any lingering doubts about continuing to write every week. When I first started writing this blog, I didn’t have an editor. Then, for a while an English literature graduate, who I know well, acted as my editor. He didn’t run off with the butler but his enthusiasm waned and I am very grateful to my current editor, who ensures that my narrative threads are not severed or [too] tangled and my sentences are complete.
Feedback is a tricky thing because often it only comes from a small but vocal minority; so, how much notice should one take of it? We live in a world where the ‘customer’ is always right and a response to feedback is often an expectation. I felt some pressure to respond to last week’s comments and they were positive – it becomes almost an imperative when the comments are negative, even when expressed by a tiny minority of ‘customers’. This might be appropriate if you are running a hotel or an automotive service department but seems inappropriate in other settings, such as education. Engineering students need to develop creative problem-solving skills and research shows that students tend to jump into algebraic manipulation whereas experts experiment to find the best approach. This means that engineering students need to become comfortable with the slow and uncertain process of creating representations and exploring the space of possibilities, which is achieved through extensive practice, according to Martin and Schwartz. Not surprisingly, most students find this difficult but are uncomplaining; however, for some it is not to their liking and they provide, often vocal, feedback along these lines. This is fine and to be expected. However, in the post-truth world of higher education, many administrators and governments appear to value the views of these vocal students more highly than the experts delivering the education – at least so it seems much of the time.
I am not suggesting that we shouldn’t evaluate the quality of educational provision but perhaps it would be more appropriate to ask our students after they have had the opportunity to experience the impact of their education on their post-university life as well as considering the impact of our students on society. Of course, this would be much more difficult for administrators than collating a set of on-line questionnaires each term. However, it would have a longer time constant which would be more conducive to evolutionary rather than revolutionary changes in curricula and pedagogy. Now I sound like a traditionalist when I have been trying so hard to be a post-modernist!
References
Martin L & Schwartz DL, A pragmatic perspective on visual representation and creative thinking, Visual Studies, 29(1):80-93, 2014.
Martin L & Schwartz DL, Prospective adaptation in the use of external representations, Cognition and Instruction, 27(4):370-400, 2009.
Last week I attended a one-day workshop for PhD students sponsored by Airbus. Most of the students produced a poster describing their research; and a dozen brave ones gave a three-minute presentation on their PhD thesis. It’s a challenge to describe three years of research in three minutes to an audience that are not experts in your specialist field. However, the result was an exciting and stimulating morning covering subjects as diverse as multidisciplinary design optimization and cognitive sources of ethical behaviour in business. The latter was presented by Solenne Avet who was the only woman amongst the twelve three-minute thesis presenters. The gender diversity was better for the other, longer talks with two women out of six presenters. Interestingly, the female PhD students were the only ones tackling the interaction between engineering and human behaviour, including system-human communication, collective engineering work and innovation processes, which I have suggested is essential for viable engineering solutions to our global and societal challenges [see my post ‘Re-engineering engineering’ on August 30th, 2017]. This population sample is too small to make a reliable generalization; however, it suggests that a gender-balanced engineering profession would be more likely to succeed in making substantial contributions to our current challenges [see UN Global Issues Overview].
Realize Engineering 
