THE FOUR FORCES THAT INFLUENCE THE QUALITY OF

KNOWLEDGE PROVISION SERVICES:Re-Thinking Engineering Education through a Law-Professor’s lenses

Ben Koo, Tsinghua UniversityJohn Cha, Beijing Jiaotong University

Edward Crawley, MIT

Designing a Learning Organization

• Is about …– To support a miniature society

• By providing various functional services such as…– Knowledge Aggregation, Dissemination, and Creation

• Using effective forces to improve service qualities

• Not only about …– Individual performance– Statistical metrics of individual performance

Creator of the Four forces

• Lawrence Lessig:– Law Professor at Stanford

University– Author of the following books:

• And most recently: REMIX

benkoo@tsinghua.edu.cn

What are the four forces

• Architecture/Law <> Pre/Post Constraints• Market/Norm <> Pull/Push forces

4

LawLearning

OrganizationArchitecture

Market

Norm

Modified from Lessig’sCode v2.0

Architecture

• A Pre-Emptive Force:– The stable properties of a system that constraints

the activities of its inhabitants BEFORE they act.

Example: The Great Wall of China

Courtesy: Dr. Nan Tu

Law

• Enforceable consequences AFTER certain rules are broken …

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Swindon) http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/03/worlds-worst-intersections-traffic-jams.html

- Only if it can be enforced.

Market

Source: Wikipedia on Ernie Hudson and Ghostbusters

Norm

• A force that expels or pushes agents to act in conformity.– It can be embarrassing to be different, even just a

little bit.

http://www.faithdoubt.com/be-a-little-different

How do we use these forces?

• If we treat schools as miniature societies …– We may use “the forces” to improve the performance

of engineering schools as service agencies.

• but, what are the goals of our schools?– Providing knowledge? Nurturing engineering culture?

• Then, how do we start testing these ideas?– Start with two consecutive courses at THU IE Dept.

• Data Structures and Algorithms• Database Concepts

Conceiving a Service Product• Goals of our Knowledge Provisioning Service

– Knowledge Aggregation• Aggregate people and resources• Aggregate experience and traditions• Aggregate momentum/interests

– Knowledge Dissemination• Disseminate to fellow students• Disseminate to other dept/schools• Disseminate to the society

– Knowledge Creation• Create knowledge based on incremental aggregation• Create knowledge based on cross-pollination• Create knowledge based on innovation

A Pact with the students• The goal/requirements were developed with

iterative inputs from students• All students are informed in the beginning of the

course, that our collective goal is – not to just get a passing grade on one course, – but to exercise our rights and responsibilities

to benefit-from and contribute-toknowledge provisioning services.

• They are encouraged to integrate any content knowledge from other courses and their life experience.

The first bit of Remix

• Let’s meet the students at the beginning of the semester…– Establishing a vocabulary amongst the students– They are relatively shy and not so well prepared…

• How do we communicate with the students in their “local” language?– The first bit of Remix

» Video excerpts from Prison Break

Goal-oriented architectural plans

• Technical Architectures– Choosing between various dialects of scientific languages

to express the technical content• Organizational Architectures

– One instructor lectures to many students– Many students prepare lectures to help others– Team-based structures to facilitate co-opetition

• Workflow Architectures– How do we choose between different format of

student/instructor interactions to enforce learning?• Weekly lectures, recitations, homework submission standards, …

Some Technical Decisions

• Under Tsinghua IE’s environmental context:– We require students to use at least two languages,

and use as many complementary tools as possible.• Most students will need least 5 languages, many learned

close to 30 different new languages and tools in one semester.

• All students has a series of required homework, create an executable programming language from scratch.

• All homework are managed using networked version control systems (SubVersioN, a.k.a. SVN)

– Computational literacy is the key, the more they learn, the faster and easier it gets.

Technologies enables new possibilities

A quick demonstration of technical possibilities…

Organizational Decisions

• To instill a societal context, all students are considered a member of the “Knowledge City”.

• Teams’ headcount cannot exceed 9, and each team is divided into three functional sub-teams.– Model for Data Management– View for Human-Machine Interactions– Controller for algorithm/process definition

• The organizational policy is modeled after the practice of Extreme Programming®

2007 Teams’ labor division

MODEL

CONTROLLER

VIEW

Workflow Decisions

• Classroom is a venue for “Town Hall” meetings– Students are to actively demonstrate their learning

progress, not just to passively listen to some lecturers.

• Stringent requirements for student-prepared lectures. At least two rehearsals before they go-live. Afterwards, a review lecture must be prepared and presented the following week.

• All teams might be randomly selected to present theirweekly progress.

Content Direction

Outline

Initial Draft

Rehearsal

In-Class Lecture Performance

Performance Review

Tuesday

Thursday

Saturday

Tuesday

Thursday

Thursday

Quality Control Process

19 / 36 19A short video demonstrating a typical workflow in class.

The Pre-Emptive Forces• Technical Architecture:

– The vocabulary, grammar, and the application context of a scientific language, pre-determines the cognitive scope of students’ technical knowledge.

• Organizational Architecture:– Effective interaction mechanisms amongst

students/lecturers could pre-emptivelyeliminate communication bottlenecks

• Workflow Architecture:– Creates learning experiences that can be reproduced

and managed in prescribedprocess patterns

Laws that complements Architectures

• Laws should specify the consequences of policy violation.– The ability to enforce the law, as well as – The strength of punishment

• Example:– Late assignments are:

• Punishable by point deduction– Plagiarism are:

• Manual/Automatically detected?

Points of Law Execution Weekly Lecture Ends

Weekly Lecture Starts

Second Rehearsal

First Rehearsal

SVN Version Control Service

Student Lecture

Student Progress Reports

Quiz

Review Video Production

The Power of Law

• The Power of Reasoning– Are students aware of the consequences?

• Their technical vocabulary helps them to effectively describe what they might have violated.

• Their organizational structure may help them filter the illegal intellectual content/activities

• Their workflow patterns will further reduce the unnecessary mistakes, and identify the differences between aggregation, dissemination, and creation

– The process of claiming a creation requires iterative and community-based reasoning.

Market and Intellectual Currencies

• There are many currencies in the marketplace• Three currencies are discussed here:

– Student Grades• Who gets higher grades?• How to motivate students by grades?

– Student feedback on teaching• Is this a fair exchange?

– Time as a currency• Time spent on improving the learning organization?

Norm and Peer Pressure

• The right to be different• A shared value across knowledge city

– Why is “sharing” good?– Share the vision of contributing “free” knowledge.– The effect of “free” to the infrastructure and

architecture of “Knowledge City”.• How to instill an engineering culture?

– Find/Create one’s own voice…– Stephen Covey’s 8th habit

• “Find your voice and inspire others to find theirs.”

A bit of Remix

• Lessig’s latest book, Remix, talks about the civil rights and case studies on the “Remix” copy-righted intellectual material.

• Let’s watch a 3 min. video of “Remix” at Tsinghua.– The lecture was on “Applications of Data

Structures and Algorithms.”– A typical in-class workflow is illustrated in the

video

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts!

LawLearning

OrganizationArchitecture

Market

Norm

Modified from Lessig’sCode v2.0

Balance and Symmetry

• Designing organizations is about checks and balances! The four forces are balanced in their complementary directions. Before/After, Pull/Push, makes it rather complete to cover all angles of social dynamics.

• The four force framework is symmetrical, becauseapplies to a broad range of scales and types of social dynamics it explains. Its basic principles would apply to a small engineering class, or a large engineering school.– This framework was originally conceived by Lessig, for the

explanation of the entire Internet-infested society.

How can we apply it?

• The four forces can be used as a shared vocabulary to describe the dynamic properties of learning organizations.

• A curriculum design workflow may be deduced from the four forces:– Choose architectures to fit the learning goals– Define rules based on architectural capabilities– Choose fair grading policies to encourage learning

(Market)– Establish a norm that values knowledge sharing

Conclusion

• One or two courses may not be considered a curriculum, – but it could have a tipping effect of students’ overall

learning behavior.– A good starting point to implement CDIO, without too

much political uphill battle.• We might learn a few tricks from a lawyer,

(Lawrence Lessig), who cares about the philosophy and new civil rights primarily established by a great engineer, Richard Stallman.

Acknowledgement

• Thanks go to Wang TianJu, who created many diagrams in this presentation.

• We must also thank the students and other participants in this Tsinghua-CDIO experiment, who truly dedicated their time, and creative energy to push the envelop on many fronts.

• Welcome to join us at the Knowledge City during 2009 Summer Time.