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New Ways to Be Excellent
Peter Goodhew CBE FREng HEA STEM conference, 2017
Thanks to Stephanie and Bill yesterday
Watch out for: Resilience (aka grit) Curiosity What are universities for? (aka Why?) Integration Working lifetime
I take the long view
Spoiler and health warning
(but I’m also an old man in a hurry)
If there are elephants in the room, let’s recognise them
Climate change
Nationalism
Populism
Liar movement
Various authors: 500 novels: 2004-2017: New fiction
A bit of background reading
Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote: 1605: : Eccentricity is not evil
Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace: 1869: Cock-up, not conspiracy
George Eliot: Middlemarch: 1872: Life is complex and selfish
Emile Zola: Germinal: 1885: Socialism is needed
Joseph Heller: Catch 22: 1961: War is awful
Donald Bligh: What's the Use of Lectures: 1971: Simple answer
Meadows, Randers and Meadows: Limits to Growth: 1972: We can't go on like this
Since 2004
A bit of background reading
Robert Pirsig: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: 1974: It's all about quality
Mark Haddon: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time: 2003: ASD arrives
Ronald Wright: A Short History of Progress: 2004: Where are we going?
Donella Meadows et al: Limits to Growth: the 30-year Update: 2004: (non) progress since 1972
Jared Diamond: Collapse: 2005: Why societies collapsed
James Lovelock: Revenge of Gaia: 2006: The earth is fighting back
A bit of background reading
Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion: 2006: The case for atheism
David D Friedman: Future Imperfect: 2008: Technology and freedom in an uncertain world
Gabrielle Walker, David King: The Hot Topic: 2008: Survey of global warming
Nigel Lawson: An Appeal to Reason: 2008: The classic denier
Ben Goldacre: Bad Science: 2008: Yes, there is bad (use of) science
Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett: The Spirit Level: 2009: Equality good, inequality bad
Christopher Snowdon: The Spirit Level Delusion: 2011: Attempted refutation of above
A bit of background reading
Tim Jackson: Prosperity Without Growth: 2009: Economics without growth by an Economics Prof
Michael Braungart, William McDonough: Cradle to Cradle: 2009: Total life cycle
Kingsely Dennis & John Urry: After the Car: 2009: Travel with global warming
David MacKay: Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air: 2009: Why be sustainable
John Lanchester: Whoops! : 2010: Why everyone owes and no-one can pay
Clive Hamilton: Requiem for a Species : 2010: Why we resist the truth about climate change
A bit of background reading
Daniel Kahneman: Thinking Fast and Slow : 2011: Why people (don’t) take risks
Richard Heinberg: The End of Growth: 2011: Economics without growth
Paul Gilding: The Great Disruption: 2011: Climate vs economy
John Urry: Climate Change and Society: 2011: Climate change in context
Julie Hill: The Secret Life of Stuff: 2011: Ways to use earth’s resources better
Faqeer Sein: Perils of Self-Righteousness: 2011: The most frightening book I have ever read
A bit of background reading
Robert Peston: How Do We Fix This Mess? : 2012: Exposition of our problems
Robert and Edward Skidelsky: How Much is Enough? Money and the Good Life: 2012: Happiness vs money
Jared Diamond: The World Until Yesterday: 2012: All of history!
Andrew E Dessler: Intro to Modern Climate Change: 2012: Textbook on climate change
Julian Allwood, Jonathan Cullen: Sustainable Materials: with both eyes open: 2012: How to use scarce materials better
Naomi Klein: This Changes Everything: 2014: Climate vs capitalism
A bit of background reading
Dennis Skinner: Sailing Close to the Wind: 2014: Passionate but badly written
Mushtak Al-Atabi: Think Like an Engineer: 2014: A bit pious
David Goldberg & Mark Somerville: A Whole New Engineer: 2014: The Olin experience.
Thomas Piketty: Capital in the 21st Century: 2014: Inequality is bad and growing
Owen Jones: The Establishment: 2014: Left-wing columnist
Bruce Sterling: The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things: 2014: connectedness
Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee: The Second Machine Age: 2014: Digital progress
A bit of background reading
Nicholas Stern: Why Are We Waiting? : 2015: Climate change inaction
Guru Madhavan: Think Like an Engineer: 2015: OK, but not inspired
Steve Silberman: Neurotribes: 2015: History of autism
Richard Murphy: The Joy of Tax: 2015: Labour view of tax as a good
Steve Hilton: More Human: 2015: Cameron’s ex-guru gone native
Zoe Williams: Get It Together: 2015: Guardian columnist
Caroline Lucas: Honourable Friends: 2015: Green MP
Calestous Juma: Innovation and its Enemies: 2016: Vested interest vs change
A bit of background reading
My advice to a busy but concerned reader
Dip in and read about 100 pages
Start with Stern, Jackson, Piketty, Faqeer Sein, Kahnemann
(and Heller and Zola)
(and don’t forget Bligh and Pirsig)
Fiction tells you more about human behaviour than non-fiction!
Sorry: only 9 of these 62 authors are female
“In my whole life I have known no wise people who didn’t read all the time” Charlie Munger
US business man and partner of Warren Buffett
“possess his books, for without them he’s but a sot” Caliban in The Tempest: Act 3 scene 2
“plagiarise, plagiarise, plagiarise, only be sure always to call it please, research” Tom Lehrer
Now, what about excellence?
Why be excellent?
How to be excellent
How to assess excellence
Grit, curiosity and passion
U3A
Millau is both functional and beautiful
Some excellent engineering
Why be excellent?
There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in
embankments and railways and iron bridges and
engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly.
Ugliness is the measure of imperfection. H.G. Wells
Some excellent engineering
Why be excellent?
Some excellent engineering
Why be excellent?
1: Christopher Bullock, 1716, followed by many others!
What does the future hold?
Working lifetime of 50-60 years
More developments than we can imagine
Multiple careers
Immense global challenges
Death and taxes1
Why be excellent?
Why be excellent?
Grit, curiosity and passion
… and purpose
Why be excellent?
Intrinsic or extrinsic motivation?
Global vs local motives
Not just to create jokes for Big Bang Theory, but also …
Clean water vs faster cars?
Nuclear power vs nuclear weapons vs wind turbines?
Personal sense of
achievement, money,
a better life for others
(inc grandchildren)
Me or my family, or
my village, or the UK
or the world?
My knees vs malaria?
How to be excellent
Grit, curiosity and passion
Wisdom Requires
understanding
Needs
knowledge
Need
competence
Takes
practice
Enables the choice of
most appropriate: Skills
Grit, curiosity and passion
Wisdom Requires
understanding
Needs
knowledge
Need
competence
Takes
practice
Enables the choice of
most appropriate: Skills
How to assess excellence
Angela Duckworth (2016) Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
Since I graduated
laser PC mobile phone optical storage internet
heart transplant MRI space travel pulsar catalytic
converter fuel injection CCD digital imaging jet
airliners photocopier geodesic dome bucky ball
VCR integrated circuit LED pixels LCD genetic
modification face recognition spreadsheet foreign
food cheap air travel Euro security scanners
ANPR nuclear power CFRP climate change
How to be excellent
My favourite
microscopy (and
elephant) joke
(Gary Larson, of course)
Britain’s first Engineering-only university
• Accelerated Integrated Masters in Liberal
Engineering Degree: equivalent to MEng plus
internship in 3 years
• Maths and/or Physics not a requirement, but
AAB needed. Students with grit, curiosity and
passion to be recruited
• Based in Hereford www.nmite.org.uk
Where next? AIMLED
at NMiTE
Where next?
AIMLED at NMiTE
• Few lectures; Learning by doing, project based
learning, based on real industry problems
• Block timetabling, seminar, studio and
lab/workshop teaching, classes of 20-30
students
• Six weeks’ vacation; 46 weeks on campus +
high staff student contact time
• No degree classes, just a portfolio
• All staff to be practitioners
• www.nmite.org.uk
Students decide
how to acquire
knowledge
• A revolution in engineering teaching in UK, in
close collaboration with industry
• Focus on employment-ready, entrepreneurial,
problem solving, business literate, wise graduate
citizens
• Total focus on teaching: no research
• 50:50 ratio of male to female students and
faculty
• Recognition that this is just the start of a life-long
process
• www.nmite.org.uk
Where next? AIMLED
Other examples of new approaches
Olin College of Engineering: experiential learning, no lectures
Quest University: integrated Arts & Science, teaching in blocks
Harvey Mudd College: STEM and Liberal Arts
SUTD: Design-based multidisciplinary curriculum
All have >45% female students
Lassonde School of Engineering
My favourite climate change joke
or university!
How is excellence related to success?
For discussion in coffee breaks
Rob
career
How important is success? How might our graduates define it? Or our grandchildren?
Some possible take-home messages
The world has some problems
Let’s focus on why we and our students should study science or engineering
Assess what our graduates can do and can understand, not what they know
Read a lot – away from your subject
Grit, curiosity and passion
Another elephant in the room
The greatest shortcoming of the
human race is our inability to
understand the exponential function.
Albert Bartlett, Professor of Physics at University of Colorado, Boulder
Thanks for listening
Now let’s disagree about some of this
A concept question
You are sitting in a boat in a small pond. You
have a six-pack of beer. You throw it into the
water and it sinks to the bottom.
Does the level of the water
in the pond:
1.Rise?
2.Fall?
3.Stay the same?
Relevance is ephemeral. Fundamentals are eternal.
Some assertions and
suggestions
Ensure that there is a sensible balance between the “relevant”, which is exciting, and the “fundamental”, which will last a lifetime (and several careers).
U3A
Devise a single solid shape which will pass through the
following three holes, (one at a time!) leaving no gaps
U3A
Coffee break task
Published in 1971
“I use lectures to catch up on sleep, or
to update my Facebook page”
The answer is “very little”
What are the alternatives to the lecture?
U3A
Here is my partial list:
Problem-based Learning
Project-based learning
Flipped classroom
Experiential learning
Games or simulations
Podcasts
MOOCs
Tutorials/Seminars
What are the alternatives if you have to lecture?
U3A
Here is my partial list:
Concept Questions
Personal Response Systems
Pair-share / jigsaw classroom
Groups teach each-other
Recitations / ticking
Demonstrations
Mud cards / beauty notes
Another concept question
A ladder is upright against a vertical wall. Both the wall and the floor
are perfectly slippery (no friction between ladder and floor or wall).
You pull the bottom of the ladder away from the wall slightly and it
starts to slip down. At some angle it loses contact with the wall.
What does this angle depend on?
1. The mass of the ladder
2. The length of the ladder
3. g (gravity)
4. None of these
5. All of these
In conclusion
Engineering is an attitude of mind
An engineering education must involve:
A humanitarian approach
Teamwork
A systems approach
Sophisticated communication
Making something
… of what? Remembered knowledge Understanding Know-how Skill/competence Creativity Innovation Generally: LOs Individual or group?
Session 4: Assessment
U3A
… for what purpose? Formative / corrective Summative Competence to practice
Session 4: Assessment
U3A
Knowledge is easily available everywhere; Understanding is both more important and requires nurture.
Some assertions and
suggestions
We should assess only understanding. [Knowledge will have to be deployed to demonstrate understanding, so there is no need to test it separately.]
U3A
A good question!
How will you know you
have made a difference?
Timescales are long Feedback is rare Happy sheets reveal very little Talk to your colleagues, then: Trust your judgement
U3A
