Magnitude Nine

One year ago a magnitude 9.0 earthquake occurred off the east coast of the Japanese island of Honshu, displacing the 1300 km long island 2.4 meters east in the process.  The immediate damage to the infrastructure of Japan was intensified when the subsequent tsunami flooded the Japanese coast.  The earthquake and tsunami caused over 15,800 deaths, and left the nation severely challenged to provide even basic necessities to the Japanese people.  A year later the wreckage of towns near the coast remains.  As engineers we must consider the extent to which our systems compounded the disaster; the failure of power and transportation systems, for example, left the nation less able to respond in a time of dire need.  But most notable in this respect is the failure of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station.

I have previously written about the core competencies that an engineer should have for the 21st century.  Within Michigan Engineering we are continuing to refine our understanding of these competencies, but among them is Social & Environmental Responsibility, defined as “an understanding of human, social and environmental impacts, and the ethical tools to make sustainable and responsible decisions.” The crisis created at Fukushima on March 11, 2011 makes the importance of this social and environmental thinking manifestly plain.

We expect it may take 40 years to fully clean up and dismantle the six nuclear reactors at the site. One hundred thousand people remain displaced from the towns closest to the plant, and some still uncertain area around the plant may remain off-limits for normal habitation for decades or more.  Produce from the area, whether contaminated or not, is treated with suspicion all over Japan and the livelihood of many is gone.  This is unacceptable.

Fukushima Dai-ichi (DigitalGlobe www.digitalglobe.com)

This engineering failure will have long-term social implications.  Since the disaster all but 2 of Japan’s 54 nuclear plants have been shutdown for “stress tests;” these plants represent 30% of Japan’s electrical generation capacity.  Without doubt some of these plants will operate again, but a county that had previously been convinced that nuclear power was vital for electric power production is discovering, in a sudden and brutal way, that they can in fact survive without it. Combined with renewed distrust for the utility companies and the government, this will lead to significant rethinking of priorities and strategies for energy generation in Japan.  Japanese society is learning that they can operate without their nuclear plants.   Long a staunch supporter of the Kyoto protocols on reducing carbon emission, Japan could increase reliance on fossil fuels; this could lead to increased tensions as more nations contend for access to dwindling sources of such fuel.  Or Japan may drive new ideas in energy conservation or in renewable energy; but Japan is land poor, and renewables require repurposing of large open spaces to energy production.  Will Japanese cities become even denser to make space for wind and solar energy production in the country?  Will Japan's already strained ability to produce food suffer?

Whatever the outcome, our many failures at Fukushima: our failure to make the engineered systems more robust; our failure to realistically assess the potential earthquake magnitude and tsunami height; our failure to provide a better system to control the process of decay heat production and removal in the plant; our failure to develop better emergency response; all these failures by engineers will have an unintended impact on the structure of Japanese society.

The disaster at Fukushima Dai-ichi reminds us, more than can any lecture or recap of a code of ethics, that as engineers we are responsible to society and to the environment.  Even the very wise cannot see all ends; we must remember that our actions may impact many lives – for good and for ill – in ways that we might not intend or foresee

Online?

Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings.”

Walter Isaacson, in Steve Jobs

Some of my colleagues tell me that my head is in the sand over online learning.  We should be teaching all our students through the internet, and reaching orders of magnitude more students than we currently do, they advise.

These colleagues point to the online tutorials like the Khan Academy and Stanford’s experiment in teaching 35,000 students in a computer science class, and extol the virtues of those modalities.  The best lecturers in the world should give the lectures in all our courses, while our students watch whenever and from wherever they are.

I look, and all I really see are video textbooks. These online lectures are sometimes fine ways of conveying information: interesting, engaging, and occasionally richly visual. But so is a good textbook. The lecture, as a pedagogical device, makes most sense when there is information to share that is difficult to share in a written form, such as when describing a process or a subtle idea requiring human body language or intonation, or when sharing information that is not easily found in written form, either because it is so fresh it has not been written in an accessible form, or when it is so scattered that the bringing together of the various strands is too complex for the novice scholar.  In these cases, the lecturer is a curator or editor of ideas.

Where such lectures can be replaced with videos, go ahead.  But we should critically examine first: could such lectures be better replaced with a written text?  Compared to reading, listening is a very slow process.  Indeed, when the UM Medical School started providing podcasts the medical students listened to them sped up by 3 times, in chipmunk mode, to hear the lecture at more efficient speed.

But the real problem with the online utopian vision of education is that it physically separates the students, from each other, and from the teacher.  While online advocates enthuse on the virtues of online discussion and online community, these fail to replace the face-to-face human process of learning.

Silicon Valley is a physical place, it is not a virtual place.  The Valley has two things: high tech companies, and venture capital firms.  They don’t physically separate or do their business with each other online.  The innovators in this ecosystem want to bump into each other in the coffee shops of Palo Alto.  The investors want to go down the street and talk face-to-face with those in whom they invest.  If the companies that are driving the internet -- Facebook, Google, YouTube, and others -- need face-to-face work, why should we expect that the even more social construct of learning would require any less?

Online learning makes sense only for the lowest levels of education – teaching facts to be used to pass a test.  To teach creative thinking, self-reliance, and values, requires human interaction, face-to-face.  It requires action and practice, and for young people it requires structure.   Those who look to online lectures as the future of education are burying their heads in the sand.   We should not be looking at how to enshrine the lecture as the video textbook – this is a harmless but non-adaptive strategy.  Put em online, I don’t care.  We should instead we working to develop education based on authentic creative effort, with students learning to work in teams and solve real problems in the face of insufficient information and critical choice.

"There is a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat.  That’s crazy.  Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions.  You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas."

Steve Jobs

Intercultural Skill

An engineer in the 21st century needs a host of capabilities.  These capabilities start with deep technical competence, of course.  But this is not enough.  Within the volatility that will characterize the new normal an engineer must also develop creativity, an entrepreneurial mindset, a collaborative approach to work, social and environmental responsibility, communication efficacy, and intercultural skill.   These are not independent capabilities, of course.  Intercultural skill, for example, encompasses the ability to deal with ambiguity, the development of flexibility, respect for others, cultural empathy, and awareness in communication informed by a knowledge of culture; these attributes contribute to many of the other capabilities.  But how does a student develop these intercultural skills?

It is possible to study other cultures, or take courses on intergroup relations such as Sociology 122, or pursue an academic minor focused on a specific part of the world, or a broader minor such as the International Minor for Engineers.  But intercultural skill requires practice; it cannot be learned only by listening in lecture.  So wise students will elect to collide with another culture and perhaps learn intercultural skills by experience; the obvious way to do this is through the rich experience of study abroad.

The efficacy of study abroad has been studied in several ways, and these studies inform how students can best take advantage of the experience.  Williams (Journal of Studies in International Education, 9, pg. 356, 2005) shows that students who study abroad have a greater increase in their intercultural communication skills than those who do not.  But his work also shows that simply studying abroad is not enough: it is the meaningful interaction with other cultures that leads to growth in intercultural communication skills.  The experiential environment of study abroad can work, but only if students really interact with another culture in as many ways as possible.

Yet it is also important to recognize that a student’s intent plays a role in their learning in an experiential environment.  Just experiencing another culture will not make students better at dealing with another culture.  Kitsantas (College Student Journal, 38, pg. 441, 2004) shows that students doing study abroad increase their intercultural skills when they approach their study abroad with the intention of learning intercultural skill. Students must approach the experience with the intention to learn, and must reflect on the experience in order to gain the benefit.

At the University of Michigan our students are ideally placed to greatly increase their intercultural skills.  They can interact with other cultures through many study abroad programs, and they can interact with other cultures right here on our campus.  But they must invest in the effort with some intentionality, reflection, and honest discussion on the experience.  Doing so will help students gain one of the core competencies of a 21st century engineer: intercultural skill.

Competencies

Photo by Linda Peterson

Phil Hanlon is the Provost of the University of Michigan.  His job requires thinking about the future of higher education, and I recently listened to him reflect on the skills our students will need in the future.   He observes that the last 50 years in the United States have not, when seen the broad sweep of human history, been normal.  Most of us have grown up and been educated in a time of unprecedented prosperity and stability.   All the indicators are that the 21st century will be more volatile, activity will be globally interconnected, organizations will be smaller and more flexible, employees will shift jobs often, and they will have to reinvent themselves many times.  How, in four years, do we prepare students for this uncertainty?

In engineering education for the last 50 years, until very recently, we have focused on “engineering science,” fundamental scientific and mathematical tools that can be applied to the analysis of engineered systems.  More recently there has been increased focus on design and open-ended problem solving.  It’s not enough.

To prepare our students for a lifetime of contribution to solving the uncertain problems of the world, our graduates need to possess:

1. Sophisticated learning skills, because what students learn in college will be woefully inadequate to their subsequent 50 years of active contribution to society.
2. Communication skills, to allow them as engineers to communicate with each other, with clients, and with the broader society they serve.
3. Global and cultural understanding to analyze the human needs and human contexts, and ethical implications, of engineered solutions.
4. Creativity and an entrepreneurial mindset to identify opportunities, create ideas, design solutions, and persist through setbacks.
5. Leadership and project management skills, including ethical tools, to support working in and leading diverse teams for the benefit of diverse clients.
6. Sustainability principles to evaluate the environmental consequences of engineering choices.
7. Fundamental knowledge of a discipline, to give focus to their education and early career work, and a foundation on which to build later disciplinary knowledge.

Traditional engineering education focuses mostly on the last, and most specific of these competencies.  But the broader competencies of the first six are the more generalizable ones, that will support a graduate over many decades of productive life.   These broad skills can be inculcated in a college education, but to master many of these skills requires not lectures, but instead reflection on experiences.

Provost Hanlon believes that we need to provide more active learning experiences for our students.  Experiences like study abroad, service learning, student project work: these activities provide the environment in which teachable moments can arise that allow discovery of the generalizable principles of learning, or effective communication, or of cultural understanding.  The challenge for us as teachers will be to ensure that these teachable moments actually lead to learning.

Acknowledgement: the ideas in this post are built from contributions from many colleagues, most notably Stacie Edington and Phil Hanlon.

It All Comes Down in the End

A facebook friend recently posted a pointer to a song by Patti Casey, called It All Comes Down. The song is about the impermanence of human built things.

        It all comes down, in the end,

        all the works of your hand,

        though built of stone and honestly,

        no earthly house shall ever stand,

        and it all comes down, in the end,

        like a handfull of sand,

        and it all comes down in the end.

It’s a beautiful song, although it might seem sad.  But it is not, for later she sings “so seek wisdom and show mercy…  did you help some troubled soul, did you try to lend a hand, for only kindness in the end alone shall stand.”

It’s true that each individual physical work of humanity has a finite lifetime, but the entire enterprise is transmitted from generation to generation and goes on and on.  It may all come down in the end; after all, most mammalian species survive only a few million years.  But I believe our important works will endure in the minds of our children and are continuously renewed by their hands.

For this reason, I work in education.  What we do in educating our children and the young apprentice adults in our universities is the foundation of all that you see around you.

Happy Holidays.

Calculation

On August 29, 1907, the Quebec Bridge collapsed into the St. Lawrence River. This collapse can be traced to a failure to calculate.

Modern engineering practice is highly quantitative, and it is this quantitative practice that distinguishes engineering from the trial and error practice of earlier artistry.  When faced with a problem engineers most start with the tools of creative design: brainstorming, sketching, dreaming, editing,.. it's fun, exciting and produces many sketches on napkins or whiteboards.  But in engineering such ideation must be followed by analysis: are there quantitative specifications that define the need being addressed? Does the proposed system perform within this specification? Without building the system (trial), this question of fitness to purpose can be answered only by mathematical modeling, prototyping, and testing.  All too often failure to analyze leads to a system that fails (error).

Only naive approaches to engineering emphasize design without analysis. It is all too common to see students building a prototype system without any quantitative analysis of the system. This is medieval at best (although even early cathedral builders did some quantitative analysis).  Our ability to model the physical world using mathematics allows us to "test" a design before it is built.  Our ability to do this is not perfect, but it is very good and improving rapidly, especially as computational power increased.  In developing new ideas for radiation shield design my student and I have tested over 100,000 different designs using mathematical techniques.  Of course this is all done algorithmically, and we never personally look at most of these designs: they are generated and rated automatically using our ability to model reality.

The Quebec Bridge collapsed because the design was not sufficiently strong to hold the weight of the bridge; the steel members were not the correct size.  When the steel for the bridge weighed more than expected, there was no recalculation of the stresses in the members.  When the bridge span was lengthened from 488 m to 550 m there was no recalculation. The failure to calculate was a retreat to a naive process of trial and error.  And over 80 men died.

Prestige or Purpose?

Students admitted to the University of Michigan are amazingly accomplished. The University itself is well known, selective, and indeed among the best in the world. Frankly, it’s a prestigious place. But “prestige” has little to do with the spirit of the place. Indeed, often we are criticized for being too Midwestern – friendly, cooperative, soft-spoken.

But the University of Michigan is dedicated to making an impact on the world. This is a large ambition, and it goes back to the first President of the University of Michigan, Henry Tappan. In 1852, looking at six buildings in the middle of a tiny Midwestern town, Henry Tappan imagined a huge, comprehensive university that would attract students from all over the United States, and possibly the world, to study and teach everything.  “It embraces,” he wrote “all possible means for studying every branch of knowledge, and thus perfecting education, and all possible means for making new investigations, and thus advancing knowledge.” He imagined a university that would make a difference through the cultivation of people, placing the university within the State’s aspirations as “Let us make men, as well as houses and railroads.”

We do this still by helping to propel young people towards excellence, and we insist that those young people will go forth with a drive to matter, a drive to make a difference.  Students who come to Michigan are devoted—they must be devoted—to having an impact on the world.  At the university we must dedicate ourselves to molding all the members of our creative community into agents of change.  This is at the heart of the University of Michigan: it’s not about prestige; it’s about purpose.

Note: This entry was inspired by discussions with many students and faculty at the University of Michigan during a number of meetings in November 2011.  The commonality of this theme arising out of so many independent conversations was striking.  The phrase "it's not about prestige; it's about purpose" was used at a meeting of the President's Bicentennial Planning Committee; I believe Scott Page first chained it together.