Reconstructing Engineering Education AAAS 2010 Annual Meeting

1. CESEM Center for Earth Systems Engineering and Management Reconstructing Engineering EducationAAAS 2010 Annual Meeting Brad Allenby Founding Director, Center for Earth Systems Engineering and Management Lincoln Professor of Ethics and Engineering Professor of Civil, Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering

2. Why We Are Failing: Heidegger “So long as we do not, through thinking, experience what is, we can never belong to what will be.” “The flight into tradition, out of a combination of humility and presumption, can bring about nothing in itself other than self deception and blindness in relation to the historical moment.” Source: M. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translation by W. Lovitt (New York, Harper Torchbooks, 1977), “The Turning,” p. 49; “The Age of the World Picture,” p. 136.

3. What Has Changed? • Information environment is far more dense and rapidly changing than previous generation; multitasking is an evolutionary strategy, not a fad. • Characteristics of short attention span, flitting above information landscape rather than diving in, are adaptive, not artifacts of superficial technologies. • Logic of complex information environment is networked association, not linear. Implication: Students today have different cognitive structures than their teachers; and their teachers by and large powerfully disrespect those cognitive adaptations (when they even perceive them at all). • Accelerating technological evolution and social change obsoletes specifics of education ever more rapidly.

4. What Has Changed? • Social networking creates convenient alternate realities and a different model for networked cognition in complex systems. • Social networked intelligence is comfortable for digital natives; cognition emerges from network conditions, but everything we teach is aimed at individuals. • We need to teach “network intelligence” but every cultural and institutional incentive (tenure, disciplinary structure of engineering and intellectual endeavor, reductionist model of Enlightenment) is to remain wedded to Cartesian model of individual education and cognition. Implication: teaching “teams,” much less individuals, is inadequate and increasingly obsolete, but the framework and understanding to teach “network cognition” does not yet exist, and the need for it is not yet recognized.

5. What Has Changed? • Walk into a classroom; students open their computers; they now have a working memory as large as the Net • We still teach facts when what they need is pattern recognition and integration across multiple disciplines and multiple cultures • Long term memory function is now dispersed across the Net • What will cognition be when each student has a cat brain in their PDA and is fully networked with their peers?

6. What Has Changed? • Accelerating change widens the differences between social groups: • Current generation versus previous generation • Within current generation, between digital natives and digital immigrants Implication: batch processing methodologies characteristic of early Enlightenment education fail Implication: professors rapidly decouple from the population they are supposed to be teaching - this is not a result of incompetence, but of technological change: the problem is not intelligence, but a failure to perceive, much less respect, the cognitive differences between this generation and their teachers

7. What Has Changed? • Students already live in a world of enhancement and human varietals • The digital natives know they are different from their teachers, even if most haven’t articulated that difference • Cognitive enhancers (first generation, e.g., Ritalin and Adderall (focus, enhancement of cognitive tasks), Provigil (modafinil – memory enhancer; wakefulness and alertness enhancer). Stronger, more effective pharma likely because of military pressure to develop. • Debate on whether to accept or reject cognitive enhancers is over. How to teach students with access to enhancements of many kinds is the question.

8. Situation Analysis • Current educational methods are obsolete and increasingly dysfunctional. • Incremental change is inadequate both in scale and in substance. • Current educational institutions are too resistant to change to be able to respond adequately.

9. World has Changed • Complexity • Static complexity: more nodes, more links everywhere • Dynamic complexity: more interactions and shifts over time everywhere • Wicked complexity: human reflexivity, and technological and social evolution, create contingency and unpredictability • Anthropogenic complexity: humans operating at scale of interconnected global systems • Contingency • Human as design space; there are no stable assumptions anymore • Everything from atmosphere to food is increasingly product of human design • Unpredictability • Can’t foresee implications of emerging technologies and related policy decisions

10. Emerging Technologies:The Five Horsemen • Nanotechnology is the end of intensive 2,500 year long project to extend human design to limits of material world • Biotechnology extends human design through biosphere (synthetic biology) and makes the human just another design space • Robotics is rapidly evolving, and is integrating the human with the technological in unpredictable ways (e.g., Iraq had 0 ground robots at invasion time; 150 by end 2004; 2,400 end of 2005; 5,000 end of 2006; 12,000 end of 2008) • Information and communication technology (ICT) – rise of the “digital native” - Facebook is only 5 years old; Second Life only 6 (launched June 23, 2003); Twitter, 2 years old. • Cognitive science: the diffusion of cognition across technologies to enable mission performance (augcog in Iraq); funding for telepathic interconnection (Carnegie Mellon detecting nouns; Japanese detecting visuals; ASU/Duke monkey experiments on direct interconnection of brain with technological environment)

11. Critique of Current Educational Models • Current educational processes are based on manufacturing mental models: • Batch processing • Same process applied to each unit (student) • Time metrics applied to systems where not appropriate (e.g., learning measured by time in university) • Current disciplinary structures are product of reductionist approach and no longer sufficient (not replace entirely, but augment) • Current instructional processes are based on obsolete ideas about students cognitive processes. • Current professors are generally unable to perceive, much less teach to, different cognitive models. • Educational system is very conservative, and even incremental change is hard. Paradigmatic change will be rejected.

12. The Challenge • Develop new teaching models while continuing with and incrementally augmenting existing models • Develop model that meets existing requirements (e.g., ABET) while responding to new environment. • Maintain competency of graduates under existing domain-related standards while preparing them for contingency, unpredictability, and responsibility of new environment.

13. One Route: Personalized Education Skunkworks • Begin with Engineering – a bounded discourse, technology rich, critical to Anthropogenic Earth and its management, and in recognized need of curricular change. • Move from batch processing to individual trajectories through learning space • Maintain existing technical proficiency metrics • Space designed as AI expert system so it provides as much guidance as possible, minimizing demand on professors that would otherwise make personalized education unscalable • All important skills obtained, and testable, when student reaches end of program • Students proceed at own pace • Begin with selected students at freshman level, minor disciplinary distinctions at BS level, disciplinary focus primarily at MS level. All students to stay in program through MS. • Ph.D. level not offered (initially), because of heavy socialization and networking implied by work at that level.

14. Personalized Education • Content of program to integrate social science, liberal arts, and earth systems perspectives. • Goal is to create not just competent engineers, but competent designers and managers of complex adaptive systems – the engineer as leader. • Reconceptualize students as active nodes in complex cognitive systems, in addition to Cartesian individual entities • Students and professors are both learners; each brings different information to learning process • Thus, students help design learning spaces • Choose professors open to student contributions

15. Proposal • Create new institution structured around personalized education • Can be co-located with existing university, or greenfield (each plan has advantages and disadvantages) • Multiple participating universities, businesses and other institutions • The one way flow of authority and information from professor to student replaced by mutual learning (students know far more about their world than the professors ever will) • Each institution contributes a few professors who become core of new institution, and a few who are “visiting” to keep providing fresh vistas. • Commitment to freshest technology – graduating students should be valuable in part because they understand shape of technological frontier • Ethics component to all education – identifying questions, not proposing prepackaged answers

16. “He, only, merits freedom and existence • Who wins them each day anew.” • Goethe, Faust