For Wednesday Aug 21
—Send me an email introducing yourself. Where are you from? What are your interests? What people have been important influences on you? Why do you want to be an engineer? What is your favorite book? Where do you hope to be in ten years from now?
—Read the following short pieces:
William James, Habit William James, is considered one of the founders of psychology as an academic discipline and he wrote this piece over 125 years ago. Do you think it still has validity? Can you see evidence of its age? (And perhaps of James’s classism and racism?) Do you have any experience that would lead you to support or refute James? What are some important habits you can cultivate in your time as a student?
William Cronon, “Only Connect…” The Goals of a Liberal Education
Do you think the “goals of a liberal education” are important ones for an engineer? Why? How does one become liberally educated? As you think about the NCSU engineering curriculum, do you think it has as a goal to make you liberally educated?
Franklin Values
The Benjamin Franklin Scholars is a program for students who want to get degrees in engineering and also in humanities or social sciences, but everyone who has experienced the program knows that there is something else to the program. What is that “something else”? In recent years we in the Franklin program, along with alums, have tried to make explicit what the values of the Franklin program are. Here is a compendium put together by Madison Horgan, our former president.
John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, “Learning and Knowledge”
Questions to Consider:
What is the difference between knowledge and information and why is that important? What do the authors think would be the difficulties replicating the program to land a person on the moon? What communities/networks of practice are you a part of? Think of something you have learned and how you learned it. Does your experience support the authors’ argument? In what way? Why do the authors seem to believe that learning is more of a social enterprise than a lone enterprise? What is tacit knowledge? Can you think of an area where you have tacit knowledge? Think of three ways that this reading should have implications for your college career. What implications does it have for you in the workplace? How do you think the authors would feel about online learning? Why?
—send me a 300 word response to these readings and these questions (or any of your own) at ncsusts302h@gmail.com
— Start reading Apollo.