Tag: Learning

Field notes from chaos
The wind was getting up. The waves were starting to blow in from different directions. The sea scape seemed to be changing at random. The day before, the waves had been rolling in with a nice rhythm.

This is another blog post that comes from the sea. And this one is about chaos. One characteristic of chaotic systems is the rules of the system keep changing. And this seemed to be what was happening around me. The wind was gusting from different directions, the tide was turning, the sun was coming in and out from behind clouds. And all of this was making a chaotic mess of the surface of the water.

Standing there trying to figure out what was going on I started to think about ways of coping with chaos. Think of these as working notes rather than a developed theory.

Get into the field – the sea looked messy from the shore but only in the water could I really feel how changeable it was.

The signal in the noise – there can be a lot of randomness but are there underlying patterns. There did seem to be a beat of waves heading in to the shore, confused by another set rolling in from the side. When you find a pattern in the system it is easier to work with.

Notice when the pattern ends – the rules of chaotic systems change. A pattern in the system is only useful as long as it persists. Look out for the pattern changing.

Think on your feet – you can’t rely on the normal patterns of working (see yesterday’s post on creating cycles in work). Instead you have to make the most of the situation you are in.

Learning is difficult – if learning relies on loops of action and reflection, then learning is much harder when the conditions keep changing.

Chaos is tiring – if you are constantly on alert trying to figure out what is going on then you are not getting time to rest and recuperate.

Writing these notes up I am left wondering:
- How can we support ourselves, other people and organisations when they enter into periods of chaos?
- How might our own actions, behaviours and design decisions cause chaos for others?
- How might we design for increasing chaos as climate breakdown rolls on?
September 17, 2024
Notes from IStructE Academics’ Conference 2018

There was great energy at today’s IStructE Academics’ Conference, the theme of which was Creativity and Conceptual Design.

If you are visiting this site for the first time, it may have been thanks to Chris Wise’s kind recommendation in his keynote presentation – thanks so much Chris.

I presented a session on how to have ideas. Usually when I’m billed with this title, I run a workshop on idea generation, but I thought for once, I would stand up and say what I think about the subject. I’m glad I did because it seemed warmly received. It was also a chance to talk through themes that will be included in the chapter I am writing in a book on scheme design – more details to follow.

(more…)

September 12, 2018
The Beginning of Engineering Knowledge Club

Engineering Knowledge Club Logo by Think Up is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at info@thinkup.org.

Almost nine months since we were awarded funding from UCL’s Teaching Innovation fund, Paul Greening and I kicked off ‘Engineering Knowledge Club‘. The idea is to encourage students to develop for themselves the engineering knowledge they need in order to be successful in the field of engineering they want to go into. We have set up a dedicated blog for Engineering Knowledge Club, which describes our aims for the project, so I won’t repeat them here.

But what I will say here is how excited I am about this project. The timing is particularly appropriate as I have been spending most of November co-writing a guide for the Royal Academy of Engineering on experience-led learning in engineering. Many of the ideas discussed in that report we can put in practice in Engineering Knowledge Club, for example:

Student–led learning – so much of the learning that I see happening in civil engineering courses seems to be motivated by grades, which probably stifles curiosity, intrinsic motivation and independence. I strongly believe that if learners were learning about what they were interested in, then they’d be self-motivated, perhaps work harder, and learn more effectively. Engineering knowledge club is about giving students the chance to define and drive their own learning.

Learning based on real-world stimuli – civil engineering is a subject that surrounds us, and so lends itself well to learning by observation. And yet, so much civil engineering education is based on text books, lecture notes and websites. Engineering knowledge club will encourage students to be inspired by, be curious about and learn from the environment which surrounds them.

Reflective learning – people tend to learn better when they think about how they are learning. Over the last two years I’ve experimented at UCL with Paul Greening and at Queens Belfast with Siobhan Cox on using private student blogs for reflective learning. While this has had some success, what’s been missing is students being able to learn from each others’ blog posts. Engineering Knowledge Club will give me the chance to experiment with using a public class blog. This will hopefully help to build a sense of community among the students, and should serve to demonstrate the concept to anyone interested.

Building a community of learning – I don’t feel that students are encouraged enough to support each other in their learning. I believe that a student cohort in which everyone is looking out for each other would be one that learns more. We hope to build a sense of community in Engineering Knowledge Club and be able to see its impact on learning.

We shall see!

November 26, 2013
Pursuing general knowledge – not such a trivial pursuit

The ability to design arguably sits at the top of Bloom’s taxonomy of learning, requiring as it does decent doses of creativity and evaluation. The foundations therefore of good design must be a broad general knowledge base. This certainly seems true in civil engineering. In order to quickly think up possible solutions to an engineering problem requires knowledge of material properties and behaviour, construction methods, costs, precedents, laws and codes etc. (more…)

January 18, 2013
An end to ‘nailing the start but messing up the finish’

I find that when I am memorising any sort of sequence – song lyrics, dance moves, lines for a presentation – I usually over rehearse the beginning and spend hardly any time on the end. (more…)

October 25, 2012