Blog 7- Video Blog- Hapi Themes!

Blog Post 6- Engineering Ethics

Within engineering departments, one of the most feared courses is engineering ethics. Viewed by many as complete wastes of time and in many cases boring these courses do well to hold up a boring core curriculum. I will attempt to discuss some of the issues with current ways of teaching engineering ethics and follow with some possible solutions.

The first thing that comes to mind when thinking of engineering ethics courses is the inherent lack of realism. Pursuing engineering ethics within the realm of theory is pointless. Engineers are not, for the most part, people who deal well with theory without corresponding application (this statement also ignores the fact that it is hard to distill ethics down to theoretical concepts). To that end case studies are a must and a fantastic starting point to any engineering ethics course. As we saw in class, they provide excellent starting points for discussion and pose true to life questions. While analyzing and discussing case studies provide a good basis for the class more thought needs to be put in to what else compliments this.

Internships come to mind, but it is incredibly hard to link this to a class, especially engineering ethics. Situations in which difficult ethical dilemmas are presented cannot be fabricated. I believe that speakers in industry who have had to deal with these types of issues could be useful. These would mostly be managers who have to make decisions on behalf of teams of engineers. Finally writing opinion papers on given case studies would cause students, even those less prone to participate in discussion, to genuinely consider these situations. This could be further enhanced by having students choose case studies that relate to their major or concentration. Finally, I believe that engineering ethics courses should be taught at the end of the student’s course progression. This guarantees that students are exposed to the full range of their topic before considering the ethical issues surrounding it.

While all of these ideas in no way guarantee a successful engineering ethics course, I believe they serve as possible improvements.

Blog Post 5- Model of iFoundry

My model focuses off two main hubs of the iFoundry system, the iFoundry and iEFX “programs” in general. From there I attempted to model how those systems influenced people, how people guided the system, how the system influenced people, what information did the system disseminate, how the people participating in the system interacted with each other, and finally how people fed information back into the system. A design note: I decided to separate iEFX administrators and iFoundry administrators, I figured it would be conceptually easier, for all I know they could be the same people.

The model I drew immediately makes a few things obvious, firstly the iEFX program (and by extension the iFoundry program) has to generate a HUGE amount of guidance as well as information for courses, along with the useful information it passes along to students. The model also brings me to wonder how much guidance the College of Engineering has upon the program, although it seems that a lot of the people who are involved in running iFoundry also guide the College of Engineering. Finally the interactions between iFoundry and its students (outside of IEFX) are probably much more extensive than I have shown on this model.

Blog Post 4- Labeling

Over the summer between my senior year in high school and freshman year in college I had the unique experience of interning at a software consulting firm. Leading up to the experience I was most worried about the breadth and depth of my software knowledge (I would be doing mostly software development projects with the company). I spent the weeks leading up to the experience reviewing the languages I had heard I might be working with and fretting over if what I was doing would be enough.

As it turned out my technical knowledge as it related to languages needed very little practice. Most of the projects I was doing required very little skill with one specific language or another. What would have been most useful going into the internship experience is a more in depth knowledge of the companies software development practices and specific tools they used. While syntax and language theory never came in to play, the ability to understand and label the workings of specific development environments and what rules to follow would have been immensely useful.

The question becomes then how do we better prepare students to label and solve the problems they encounter as they head in to industry. The easiest answer to this is to simply require more experience closer to industry than what is already mandated. However this is more of a throw things at the wall and see what sticks type of approach. I believe that learning to label problems and parts of a system is useful, but what really allows you to do this is the ability to ask the correct questions about a system.

A good amount of the back of the napkin deals with recognizing problems, and determining possible solutions. This sort of methodology is very powerful and simple to combine with labeling, if we can successfully break down each problem or lack of understanding we have within a system, we are infinitely more likely to be able to correctly label each part or at least know what solutions we are looking for. For me personally, labeling seems to be most useful when looking at a system we don’t understand. It, combined with the other missing basics we have learned so far, gives us a running start at understanding systems we are at first unsure of.

Blog Post 3- Communication Free Write

Presentations were one of the points of my high school education. Hence, Goldberg’s writing resonates with me as I have always enjoyed presenting. To be perfectly honest I was never really given that much opportunity to practice making speeches except for perhaps one or two times in elementary schoo. Hence, powerpoints have always been my regular mode of operation. My memories of speeches during elementary school and their relative effectiveness revolve around memorizing an inordinate amount of text so I would not be glaring at note cards for the entire presentation then finding the speech to be a dry boring affair once given.

As the number of presentations I have done has increased I’ve noticed a few things I’m decent at and some I can improve while presenting. While I convey emotion and enthusiasm fairly well throughout all of my presentations, I find that often if I am especially nervous about a particular presentation I am liable to take refuge in the slide. I will only look at the prompts I have on the slide (similar to Goldberg’s idea of using the slide as a note card) but never take the time to look back at the audience. I my propensity to do this is based off of whether I am nervous as well as my grasp of the material I am presenting (obviously material that I am more comfortable with requires less prompting from the slide).

One other thing I find I need to be more conscious of in my presentations is taking the audience into account. I often find myself ignoring the audience I am presenting to completely and simply presenting the subject to the extent of my knowledge. While I did get to hone this skill in the last year of high school with various presentations to elementary aged children, I think I could use more practice with this especially with audiences that have a less defined difference than simply age.

Blog Post 2- The Importance Of Networking

I went to a high school that believed heavily in the importance of each student having their own advisor, along with fostering each student’s relationship with their advisor. It also happened to be a fairly small high school with a graduating class of 75 students. When we were given this networking assignment, my idea of who I wanted to network with came near immediately. I would attempt to find a sort of faculty advisor within the CS department and pitch the idea of a relation similar to what my high school had. While the CS department does suggest consulting faculty for certain types of advisor, as far as I could tell they did not ever formally assign a student a faculty member.

As for the specific faculty member, I decided upon the professor who lectured my CS 125 class. He seemed to be a dynamic and knowledgeable person who would be Extremely useful to have in my network. I proceeded to email him, and once he learned a little bit about myself and the system I was proposing, he was more than happy to forge on with the advising relationship. After a minor scheduling mishap, he and I will be meeting for the first time this Tuesday afternoon. Hopefully all will go well J

My grasp of the importance of the networking has cemented over the course of my high school career. Both in leading a robotics team and my internship over this previous summer, networking has showed itself to be an invaluable tool. During my junior year in robotics competition, our team was playing at nationals and while there met a team located around 100 miles north of us. The team we met was actually a fairly dominant team within the competition, and after pleasant times spent between many members of each of our teams, they offered for us to come up and tour around their workshop. Being a fairly rookie team at the time, this experience was invaluable and provided inspiration to many of our members not to mention the tricks we picked up just from watching them work.

The reading from Kelley makes an important in one of its opening anecdotes as well, that is to network when neither party really needs anything to begin with. This rings especially true after thinking about the above stated robotics anecdote, fostering the network before either party needs something is essential and can lead to unforeseen benefits not directly related to needs.