Hello,
The fiollowing may be of interest to some design educators and researchers?
Design education in engineering fields has been changing radically over the
last two decades into a bridge between the Arts and Humanities, Business
fields and Sciences. For example it is relatively commonplace for curricula
to include hand sketching and drawing of organic objects and multimedia
design skills.
Some universities are moving further along that track. This is a report from
today's ACM Technews and CNN
"The Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering is a five-year-old educational
experiment, chartered with a $460 million endowment by the F.W. Olin
Foundation, that is radically altering how engineers are trained. The
Needham, Mass., school, only 17 miles from MIT, has no academic departments,
no tenure track, no tuition fees, and no fixed curriculum. The school
focuses on a hands-on, project-based, interdisciplinary approach. "We've
redefined what engineering is and what engineering means," said Olin's
founding president Richard K. Miller. "We want to be an irritant that will
cause other to make changes." Miller and a handful of faculty members
designed and tested a new course of study and enrolled the first class of
undergraduates in 2002. Olin's curriculum is focused on courses such as User
Oriented Collaborative Design and Design Nature. Miller says traditional
engineering programs are like music schools that teach music history and
theory, but never allow students to play an instrument. In addition to an
unconventional engineering education, Olin students spend more than a
quarter of their time studying business and entrepreneurship, humanities,
and social sciences. Students can also participate in Olin's senior
consulting program for engineering. This year 12 corporations paid Olin a
combined $700,000 to have groups of five seniors work as consultants on some
of the companies' technological and engineering problems. Olin's approach
appears to be working. Olin's retention rate is 91 percent, about 50 percent
above the average for U.S. engineering schools, and the schools first group
of graduates have taken an impressive array of jobs and graduate school
placements, including two Fullbright scholarships and four National Science
Foundation fellowships.
For more detail of students in pajamas
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/06/01/100050
982/
Terry
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Dr. Terence Love
Love Design and Research
Tel/Fax: +61 (0)8 9305 7629
Mobile: 0434975 848
[log in to unmask]
www.love.com.au
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