Bill, I clearly have a distorted viewed of engineers (I nearly flunked out
of college in a "pre-engineering" program so that has undoubtedly scarred
me!). But our ideas are pretty close as far as I can tell. My parallel story
is when my farm tractor wouldn't start, I would usually invite my neighbor
over. He couldn't read so he would ignore my attempts to tell him what the
owner's manual said. He'd crank it, smell the exhaust, feel the mixture
coming into the carburetor, apply some duct tape (or some such thing) and
start it up. No senior engineer, he, but he understood the tractor, the
whole of it, whereas I only had the pieces.
Pirsig tells similar stories in _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_.
I also believe that it is easier to understand things that we have built
(cameras, tractors) than things we have not (individuals, communities). We
should try, of course. I just don't see the parallels to duct tape and
q-tips..............djc
-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Barowy [mailto:wbarowy@yahoo.com]
Sent: Monday, January 21, 2002 3:08 PM
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: engineering communities
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