The cost of our Silos

Roger came to my Industrial Engineering Graduate Seminar class last Friday. He challenged them to consider their career and life choices, and to make theses choices consciously and with consideration of their mandate or goals in life. It was very thought provoking and many students were engaged with questions and with continuing discussions later in the hall.

But, that is not the point of this blog engry. The point is that my students are very smart successful engineers. Very close to 100% of them will get job offers upon graduation where they will start at $70,000 per year. With this backdrop, one student in class asked a question of Roger that knocked my sox off (in a bad way). Roger was saying that some people think the global and societal problems resulting form the anthropogenic era will be solved by technological or free market solutions. She raised her hand and asked "What do you mean by free market?" Roger was shocked, as was I, and asked someone in the class to explain it. Another grad students said, "I don't know, but I think it is open source or free items available on the web." Roger said that is interesting, but not right. Roger then explained briefly free market, and then everyone did remember learning this in econ....or somewhere.

But my question is how could these students in their 5th or 6th year of college not be able to integrate the concepts learned (probably several times)?

That is all I have to say.

oh, the occupational hazards of being an engineer...

alright, i am truly embarrassed. what i discovered today from students is that their college advisors are advising them not to participate in SUSTAIN because

• they don't understand it;
• it's new;
• the application process is cumbersome;
• they are not seeing how courses can be rearranged.

but what i see is that i totally acted like a classic engineer.  i went off in a corner by myself, designed the perfect application process, spent a 4-day holiday weekend teaching myself javascript, programmed and debugged the perfect, interactive set of on-line surveys. well, i didn't initially go off by myself, i went off with another engineer!  (oh, what could be a worse recipe for disaster?)

i engineered the perfectly complex system that met all my functional requirements. it was elegant, it was powerful, it was unusable by the average freshman and staff member. 

i can't believe i did that! i invited feedback but got none. why?  

boy, do i feel dumb. this has been the source of us not having students apply.  the advisors encounter it and say "oh, looks too complicated to me...don't do it."

the lesson learned: Never, never, never, let an engineer work on something alone when the something must be used by humans.

Prodded/Prodding to Write

At our meeting last night with Bill Torbert, Ginger brought up a hugely important point which addressed power and self-censorship among other things. She had earlier offered to help people get going in writing and in writing this I wanted to echo some of her points as well as ask her to post some of the points she made last night.

I find myself in many different situations doing a lot of self-censorship. I often find that in my own department I have become this node of sustainability -- not necessarily in a positive sense but, maybe, in a knee-jerk sense. I bring up issues of sustainability but with this expectation that it will cause a bit of eye-rolling and, often, I caricature myself in the process (as those who know me, I don't usually pass on opportunities to be a little funny). In retrospect, this is me holding back a bit, not wanting to be seen as overly tedious or tendentious. This feeling has also kept me from pushing SUSTAIN with my own department's students as much as I should (which I am beginning to correct). Bill Torbert commented that this recognition of what we do in the face of power and the changes that we make as a result can change that power dynamic. I think Linda commented that it is not that the people in position have inherent power but that we tend to give it to them and that when we recognize it and remove that power that we somehow convinced ourselves to give the people in those positions, we are in fact giving ourselves back the power.

It was a great evening last night, in spite of the exhaustion and headaches that many/all were experiencing. A cleansing laugh, some honest evaluation of where we are at and, best of all, a continuing sense of community.

synergy

synergy |ˈsinərjē| (also synergism |-ˌjizəm|)

noun

the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects 

On Friday, the Mustang Daily (the student daily rag) had a frontpage article on SUSTAIN SLO, thanks to Neal MacDougall's suggestion that we contact the paper and Liz's timely reaction to the reporter's questions. 

It is just amazing to me to see everyone's contributions coming together. Tom, a historian, is going to engage some honors students he knows in documenting the history that we are making...Ginger has just begun a new blog to tell the story in real time from a first person perspective.  Nina, Pete and Roger continue to be the face of the recruitment effort.  It is quite amazing.  We are really functioning as a team now.

notes on the field tests with physics

pete gave the first midterm. the mean was about 63, which he says is historically higher than in the past. but he did an amazing thing right after it was graded... and maybe ...he does this every time, i don't know. He sent a message to the students, telling them the class average and invited them to pick up their exams and redo it over the weekend for 25% of the score of the exam (75% was in-class score).  I was amazed by this because it is so focused on the students' and their need to learn, to demonstrate the learning through earning a higher grade.

one of his observations was that this performance is higher than the historical average!

he has almost entirely shifted to group learning.  he discovered that his lecturing was preventing the very thing that he wanted: stronger classroom relationships, where peers were functioning as thought partners.  Now, they'd rather work with one another than listen and watch him do problems.

but i have to say that pete is an entertaining showman around demonstrations!

what is amazing about the on-line tools is that we can get immediate feedback on the students' behavior around the homework.  For example, we can see when people are investing time.  What this shows is that half the class did not invest in the homework:

 

We can look at trends, to see whether there are increased or decreased investment in the work. So we can use this information to adust the assignments.

We've attempted to make this public to the class and the students have said that they really appreciate the care that is going in to meeting their learning needs.

A student voice

Garrett is a freshman who we met during the summer orientation. He loves SUSTAIN and has been helping us recruit. He and I were asked to contribute some information for an article in the Mustang Daily (our school newspaper). I thought you might want to hear directly form him about his experience.

my name is Garrett Schwanke and I'm a first year mechanical engineer.

1) I come from a high school that put a strong emphasis on group learning which had obvious benefits for me and my classmates. Apart from this program making me feel at home with group work, I want to see more students succeed from teaching and being taught by their peers.

2) In our meetings I've tried to serve as the freshman voice, sharing fears, questions and interests that I hear from my classmates with the Sustain team. Besides that, yesterday I presented to a class of 25 freshmen, informing them about the program and events we are holding (this happened to be coms class and they probably criticized the shit out of my speech). And sometimes I can actually offer an idea that we end up implementing, like formats for learning what classes freshmen want to take with us, or revisions to an email that gets sent to a few hundred mustangs.

3) I've already gained some invaluable connections with professors and team members, and I've learned a load about problem solving at team meetings. But I expect to improve my speaking skills, Improve my leadership, construct something that will have a lasting effect in SLO, network more, and build a resume.

4) I am most excited about the idea that our students can use their skills and expertise for more than just busy work on tests, but rather use them to benefit the community. Our brains are more valuable than we give ourselves credit for..Usually.

Bill Torbert

I am so excited to spend time with Bill Torbert. He is an expert in organizational change and development, but mostly he is one of the nicest men I know. He arrives on Saturday and will be with us until Wednesday.

Here is a flyer about his public venues. We will also be spending time speaking to him individually and as a group.

This visit is a huge blessing.

Advisor meeting

The meeting was ok. At one point one of the advisors said "to tell the truth, my main concern is the students, not your program." I looked her in the eye and said, "me too!" SUSTAIN-SLO is about the students. Where did is ever become anything else?

I did state the background conversations, the same one I have last night, I told them that I was afraid to meet with them, that if they gave me a hard time I might cry. They all said "Oh no! We wont make you cry." That was true, I did not cry.

I think they understand it better and will be helpful with the students. That is all we are asking for really.

Another day

I am not sure I have much to report. Maybe only Linda and I read this anyway - I don't know. It is near midnight. I am very tired, but cannot sleep.

We are continuing to talk to students about the initiative. Several come by the SUSTAIN office every day we are there. Pete, Roger, Nina and several students are meeting with student each Tuesday.

I have to meet with the College of Liberal Arts advisors tomorrow. I am a bit nervous and not sure I can be as ready to state the background conversation as Linda did with the Physics faculty. To tell the truth I feel like I might cry. I might say something like: "why do you imagine we are doing this? do you think we are getting some prestige or profit? Why are you making this so difficult?" See I am not very articulate when I am emotional.

I have been asking myself, what if this doesn't happen? the 100 student cohort part? Because today, at this time of night, I am pretty sure it isn't.

I do promise to write if things go well tomorrow.

Once again, onward!

I keep thinking I need to regularly blog because so much is happening. These are just snippets to capture some of what is happening.  I invite others to edit my blog entry by adding what you all are up to.

This is going to read like a police log.  It is for the sake of posterity.