Video: Don Norman on Engineering Design

Sarah Zehr talks about the importance of non-technical skills

See the short video below:

All iFoundry videos available here

The Illinois Foundry for Innovation in Engineering Education (iFoundry) videos are available in the player below:

All iFoundry presentations available here

The Illinois Foundry for Innovation in Engineering Education (iFoundry) makes free presentations available in video (www.youtube.com/illinoisfoundry) or slide form (www.slideshare.net/ifoundry). The presentation s are available in the viewer below:

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New iFoundry content is up

The Illinois Foundry for Innovation in Engineering Education (iFoundry) has posted new content, including new videos and ppts. For example, Patents in One Easy Lesson is a new video interview of USPTO veteran John Calvert, and Is Science Merely Applied Engineering is a new powerpoint presentation. Go here to see more.

University of Illinois seeks to reinvent engineering education

Today, the University of Illinois announced bold plans to transform engineering education. See here.

iFoundry: Organizational change for transformation of engineering education

Here's another YouTube video test.  iFoundry: Organizational change for transformation of engineering education.

More information about iFoundry is available here.

Engineers as category enhancers

I've been working on creating short YouTube videos for iFoundry, the Illinois Foundry for Innovation in Engineering Education. The first one is about engineers in the 21st century and the need to move toward category creation, not just category enhancement.

How do people share? Email, Facebook & the rest

ShareThis has released some interesting statistics about how people share information online. E-mail is by far and away the most popular mode of sharing accounting for 35% of the traffic followed by Facebook with 10%, Digg with 7%, and MySpace with 6%. A number of bloggers have written about this including VentureBeat, ReadWriteWeb , DigitalInspiration, BusinessBlogAngel.

2nd call: Workshop on Philosophy & Engineering

The second call for papers for the 2008 Workshop on Philosophy and Engineering (WPE-2008) is available here. WPE-2008 will be held 10-12 November 2008 (Mon-Wed) at The Royal Academy of Engineering in London. The workshop, in part, traces its roots to a blogpost on 24 May 2006 on this blog (here) regarding the lack of a philosophy of engineering (see here).

Johnny Bunko: The kids like it

Dan Pink's new book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need is out, and I've given it the ultimate test. I asked my two sons (Max, 19; Zack, 15) to read it and comment on it. First, the book is successful in the sense that they both read it. It isn't very long, and it is in manga form, so it isn't very taxing intellectually, but neither of these comments is meant to suggest that it isn't quite good. Both boys read it and were able to discuss the points raised in terms of their own experience.

Workshop on Philosophy and Engineering CFP

Read this doc on Scribd: wpe-2008-call-for-papers-2008-4-23

Bury the Cold War Curriculum

My essay, Bury the Cold War Curriculum published as the Last Word in the April 2008 ASEE Prism, got picked up on the web and reprinted here at Redorbit. A related set of powerpoint slides, What Engineers Don't Learn and How They Don't Learn It, is available here or in the viewer below:

What Engineers Don't Learn from David E. Goldberg Transforming Higher Education

Favorite B. C. Forbes quotation

"The man who is cocksure that he has arrived is ready for the return journey." B.C._Forbes (1880 - 1954). Other Forbes pearls of wisdom may be found here.

Canonical qualitative models

Certain models in business and engineering become part of the "canon" and are thus part of the background of knowledge one takes for granted. Of course, the act of come up with such models was itself creative at one time, and the study of their structure and content is useful for developing new models of a business or technological situation.

Module 8 of my course, Creative Modeling for Tech Vision discusses some of these models and their construction and use and can be examined on slideshare here or in the viewer below.

Mtv 08 Canonical S07 from David E. Goldberg Transforming Higher Education

The course web site may be surfed here.

Biological anthropology course gets a B+

I just finished another Teaching Company course on DVD: Biological Anthropology: An Evolutionary Perspective (24 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture). The instructor was Barbara J. King, The College of William and Mary. The logical flow of the course was quite good, and the content was up to date. I found her speaking voice a bit grating and her presentation ability below Teaching Company standards. Moreover, Dr. King had the annoying habit of describing in words really interesting graphics and pictures that she didn't show!! This is really odd, because the Teaching Company goes to great lengths to get good visuals. Nonetheless, the course was worth watching, and Dr. King was at her best when talking about primates and primatology, her specialties.

ShareThis on Vator.tv

Tim Schigel, CEO of ShareThis, does the elevator pitch for the ShareThis system on vator.tv here. Tim was at AlwaysOn Media in NYC last week (see related posts here and here).

ShareThis reaches 26 million unique users

A press release today (here) announces the rapid growth of www.sharethis.com. Over 26 million viewers with over a 100 million page views have been reached per month over the last two months, making sharethis one of the fastest growing web applications on the planet. Rafe Needleman discusses the business potential (here) and AppScout discusses how the button can reduce publishing site clutter (here).

Napkintalk

Here is lecture 7 from Creative Modeling for Tech Visionaries called Napkintalk.

Napkintalk from David E. Goldberg Transforming Higher Education

See the course website here.

ShareThis going strong

The sharethis ubiquitous sharing tool*by Nextumi) now has publisher-side and consumer-side buttons (get the buttons here). Since the availability of the publisher-side button in November, installations have increased dramatically and there is growing interest among content purveyors and consumers alike.

More Teaching Company greats

Courses from The Teaching Company have become a habit for me during exercising and driving. Just before Christmas I finished watching Nature of Earth: An Introduction to Geology by WVU's John J. Renton. His lecture on plate tectonics was worth the price of admission. More recently I finished Understanding the Brain (DVD) by Vanderbilt's Jeanette Norden. The coverage of the course was a masterful mix of the anatomical, the functional, and the clinical.

In the car, on CD I listened to European Thought and Culture in the 19th Century and 20th Century by UNCC's Lloyd Kramer and I'm in the middle of 5 courses on Great World Religions.

Over many years, I have been impressed with the uniform quality of these courses. I recommend them without reservation