Conference Session

Blurring the Boundary between Content Knowledge and Professional Knowledge

Collection

2008 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Verna Fitzsimmons, Kent State University - Kent; Stephane Booth, Kent State University - Kent

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education

History and assessment of student learning outcomes in higher education. Page 13.841.1© American Society for Engineering Education, 2008 Professional Education and General Education Join Forces?AbstractThe rapid pace at which technology is changing makes it imperative that students developthe skills that will enable them to be proactive and reflective rather than reactive. Thiswill require them as professionals and responsible citizens to integrate the contentknowledge that they have learned in their professional education with the abilities valuedin general education and by employers. These include critical thinking

Conference Session

Beyond Individual Ethics: Engineering in Context

Collection

2008 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Donna Riley, Smith College

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education

of ethics problems. (f,h,j) • Lead insightful discussions on science, technology, and ethics topics. (f,g,h,j) • Conduct original research into a topic in science, technology, and ethics. (f,h,i,j) • Effectively communicate in oral and written forms the findings of original research on science, technology and ethics. (g) • Explain the complex relationships among science, technology, and ethics in current social contexts, and how these contexts inform and influence social choices about science, technology, and ethics. (f,h,j) • Act creatively and reflectively in the world to address science, technology, and ethics. (f,i) • Assess and direct your own learning, and reflect on that process. (i)These map, as noted above

Conference Session

Learning to Communicate with Engineers and Non-Engineers

Collection

2008 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Laura Wilson, University of CIncinnati; Teresa Cook, University of Cincinnati; Jo Ann Thompson, University of Cincinnati; James Everly, University of Cincinnati

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education

develop an integrated program of mid-level writing instruction in the technical disciplines. A multi-faceted program emerged:collaboration among writing faculty and technical faculty; development of interdisciplinarywriting instruction in mid-level technical courses; the utilization of grading rubrics to enhancethe importance of writing and communication skills in technical courses; the formation of adiscourse community; and the creation of e-portfolios to enhance reflection and illuminateconnections among the students’ technical and Humanities courses.IntroductionThis paper describes how the College of Applied Science writing faculty joined forces withengineering technology faculty to research innovative practices in the teaching of writing in

Conference Session

Venturing Out: Service Learning, Study Abroad, and Criterion H

Collection

2008 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Joe Tranquillo, Bucknell University

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education

different means by which students learnnew concepts. Although visual, auditory and kinesthetic learning are the most commonlylisted learning styles, little attention has been given to kinesthetic learning. This isespecially true in lecture-based courses at the college level where the format favorsverbal and visual learners. Here we make a tentative argument for the value of includingkinesthetic learning activities in lecture-based classes as a vehicle for teaching concepts.To begin, it is important to make clear how our working definition of kinesthetic learningmay be different from previous work. First, the term “active learning” already meanssomething to the education community and may include instructor demonstrations,brainstorming, reflections

Conference Session

Venturing Out: Service Learning, Study Abroad, and Criterion H

Collection

2008 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

David Ollis, North Carolina State University; Anthony Smith, CPE-LYON FRANCE

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education

Page 13.1121.2Bell note that “Student writers often do better work when readings reflect their specialinterests”, and thus justify their assembly of The World of Science: An Anthology forWriters4 We similarly here explore our French experience in combining foreignlanguage, lecture, and engineering laboratory as a bridge between engineering and aforeign culture. The present CPE-Lyon combination of foreign language and laboratoryinstruction would appear to satisfy Ashby’s need to provide “culture through a man’sspecialty,”, to provide an example of Florman’s “bridges” between engineering and thehumanities, and to offer exercises consistent with the Liethhauser-Bell counsel that“student writers often do better when readings reflect their

Conference Session

Beyond Individual Ethics: Engineering in Context

Collection

2008 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Dean Nieusma, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education

Page 13.767.3about what is possible and desirable.6 Hence, technologies have “politics” built in. Whileknown primarily as an STS scholar and political philosopher, he has also published within thedesign studies community, his major publication extending prior work on the politics oftechnology. In one contribution to the design studies community, Winner calls for moresystematic attention to, and more careful reflection on, how our built world fits with our bodypolitic, or in other words how technologies fit with our overarching political ideals and goals.7According to Winner, “There is as yet no well-developed discipline or well-focused tradition ofthought and practice that tries to do this, to specify which patterns of material

Conference Session

Venturing Out: Service Learning, Study Abroad, and Criterion H

Collection

2008 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

John Duffy, University of Massachusetts Lowell; Carol Barry, University Massachusetts Lowell; Linda Barrington, University of Massachusetts-Lowell; David Kazmer, University of Massachusetts-Lowell; William Moeller, University of Massachusetts Lowell; Cheryl West, University of Massachusetts Lowell

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education

meeting real community needs. In engineering thestudents become better professionals and better citizens while the community benefits. There aremany other definitions in the literature, for example, service-learning is the integration ofacademic subject matter with service to the community in credit-bearing courses, with keyelements including reciprocity, reflection, coaching, and community voice in projects (Jacoby,1996)1. Service-learning (S-L) has been shown to be effective in a large number of cognitiveand affective measures, including critical thinking and tolerance for diversity, and leads to betterknowledge of course subject matter, cooperative learning, recruitment of under-representedgroups in engineering, retention of students, and

Conference Session

Learning to Communicate with Engineers and Non-Engineers

Collection

2008 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Paul Ross, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education

practice apply to portfolios as to any other professional communication;the standards for the professional résumé provide some good general guidance for portfoliocontent: both require excellent overall design and organizational planning, and both must avoidcontent that violates the formal and informal rules for personal information under employmentand privacy regulations.Constraints on portfolio content may also reflect well-understood professional limitations thatmost professionals already work with: intellectual property, confidentiality, and issues offinancial interest. Page 13.860.3Accreditation and ethics will continue to provide an

Conference Session

Thinking around the Bachelor of Arts in Engineering

Collection

2008 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Sharon Jones, Lafayette College

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education

Member Page 13.1204.2The IssueTechnology encompasses what we do and what we dream of doing, but technology alone will notsolve tomorrow’s problems. Societal leaders must understand engineering’s methods and valuesto successfully shape government and economic policies, design and interpret laws, teach futuregenerations, produce creative work that reflects the modern world, and use technologythemselves. Below are several selected quotes about this topic from national leaders and nationalreports. “Undergraduate engineering should be reconfigured as an academic discipline, similar to other liberal arts disciplines in the sciences, arts

Conference Session

Learning to Communicate with Engineers and Non-Engineers

Collection

2008 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Leslie Potter, Iowa State University; John Jackman, Iowa State University; K. Jo Min, Iowa State University; Matthew Search, Iowa State University

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education

outcomes can be divided into “engineering” skillsand “professional” skills, with professional skills including not only communication, butteamwork, ethics, professionalism, engineering solutions in a global and societal context,lifelong learning, and a knowledge of contemporary issues.2 ABET prioritized these professionalskills as relatively equal in importance to those of technical competence in its Criteria forAccrediting Programs, and in doing so, made it possible for engineering programs to not onlyrecognize the importance of professional skills, but to teach them to their students. ABET’sdecision to formalize this priority reflects what industry has been emphasizing in its recruitingand advising for many years. Companies such as IBM and

Conference Session

Beyond Individual Ethics: Engineering in Context

Collection

2008 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Byron Newberry, Baylor University; William Lawson, Texas Tech University; Kathy Austin, Texas Tech University; Greta Gorsuch, Texas Tech University; Thomas Darwin, University of Texas at Austin

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education

education forengineers.2,3 This is reflected in current ABET accreditation standards that require “anunderstanding of professional and ethical responsibility” as well as other competencies related tounderstanding engineering’s role and impact in the wider world. This has by no meansguaranteed that ethics education for U.S. engineering undergraduates is of a uniform content,quality, or depth.4 Nonetheless the movement appears to be clearly in the direction of morecoverage, whether in the form of stand-alone ethics courses or ethics modules embedded inexisting courses; at the very least, engineering programs must show that their graduates havebeen exposed to ethics content to a level adequate to satisfy evaluators.The underlying presumption of such

Conference Session

Philosophy of Engineering Education: Epistemology and Ethics

Collection

2008 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Gayle Ermer, Calvin College

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education

alsoserve as case studies for discussion of technological risk in engineering courses or in liberal artscourses that reflect on the role of technology in society. The paper will conclude with somerecommendations for what we need to do as engineers to reduce the risk of engineering disastersand how we can integrate the awareness of these concepts into the experiences of undergraduateengineering students.2. Technology, Engineering and RiskDoing technology is central to what we are as humans. Anthropologists have chosen to describethe first modern humans as “homo habilis,” therefore expressing the centrality of our “tool-using”and tool creating capabilities to our very nature.2 But, everyday observation reminds us thattechnology, like all other human

Conference Session

Learning to Communicate with Engineers and Non-Engineers

Collection

2008 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Mieke Schuurman, Pennsylvania State University; Michael Alley, Pennsylvania State University; Melissa Marshall, Pennsylvania State University; Christopher Johnstone, Pennsylvania State University

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education

in the regular sections; only two minorities participatedin the engineering sections. These numbers are too low to include gender and ethnicity instatistical analyses. One interesting result that arose from the reflection essays in the engineering sections atthe end of the semester was that of the 11 female students in the engineering sections, all 11explicitly admitted the nervousness that they had at the beginning of this course for speaking inpublic. In contrast, fewer than half of the male students explicitly admitted having anynervousness. The issue of nervousness weighed much more on the female students. For instance,10 of the 11 female students brought up the issue of nervousness in the first two paragraphs ofthe 2-page essay

Conference Session

Philosophy of Engineering Education: Epistemology and Ethics

Collection

2008 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Mark Valenzuela, University of Evansville; James Allen, University of Evansville; Brian Swenty, University of Evansville

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education

; evaluate information; think clearly, draw soundconclusions.The identification of attitudes to develop in students is not particularly common in the schools inthe research pool. However, in the development of the whole person, one can imagine thatattitude can fuel the passion for deep and wide intellectual inquiry. The inclusion of attitudes ineducational outcomes is gaining ground in professional education, as evidenced by BOK2. A Page 13.853.17wide array of attitudes was identified by even this small pool of schools: diligence, patience,honesty and integrity, charity, hope, self-reliance, habit of reflection, appreciation of beauty