Don,
I think there are some misconceptions of engineering. I've been an engineer
in the field, and while its sub-disciplines may be taught as prescriptive, in
my humble experience the professional work rarely is. Here's an example --
while as a new engineer, I was struggling with understanding how a camera was
malfunctioning (it appeared to be a design flaw). I was the n'th person thrown
at this problem, and since i had acquired the moniker of 'super-tech", there
was some thought i could solve the problem. After a few weeks of my
investment, a senior engineer new to the project came along, looked at the
device for ten minutes and then "fixed it" with a q-tip. His comment to me was
"if you can't glue it, screw it".
While, in awe, some of the team then attempted to figure out how the q-tip (or
its equivalent) could be included in the next design, I was charged to figure
out why it worked.
The strategy at the level of "try it and see if it works" aka the quick fix, is
a fairly common engineering strategy, even though it is shunned officially with
such descriptors as "kluge" and "hack". The q-tip solution was necessary for
the development process to go forward, yet we still continued to try to
understand at a deeper level what could be a better design.
The analogy I am pointing to with education is the path of striving to
understand educational designs better. The approach I'm interested in, to
reach that goal, is through coordination with theory, which is more of a
dialectical and highly interactive approach than a prescriptive approach. If
the theory involved in the dialectic parses the world in terms of input
variables that are independently manipulatable and output variable that result,
then the cooresponding designs will be similarly formed. If instead, one
parses education as an activity system, then one does not see input and output
variables, but a web of mediated interrelations. Dynamically, one sees
(systemic) development occuring with creative responses to tensions in the
system.
Of course there are prescriptions in engineering, as there are routine tasks
that prescriptions serve well. But then, there is also room for routine in
activity systems.
gotta go.
=====
Bill Barowy
"Everything is a becoming, without beginning or end"
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Feb 11 2002 - 09:22:33 PST