Designing Tomorrow: Strategic Design Tactics to Change Your Practice, Organisation, and Planetary Impact

Martin Tomitsch and Steve Baty at ANU. 
Photo by Tom Worthington CC-BY 2014.

Greetings from the Australian National University, where Martin Tomitsch and Steve Baty are talking about their book "Designing Tomorrow: Strategic Design Tactics to Change Your Practice, Organisation, and Planetary Impact". The event is hosted by ACM SIGCHI Chapter for Canberra and the ANU School of Cybernetics. The approach advocated in the book will be very familiar to engineers, computer professionals and other design based disciplines, but may also be of interest to others.

Design thinking for student-centric university courses

Jeffrey M. Penta's doctoral thesis (2019), questions the current university centric design of courses and suggests student centric. The author argues for education for employment, and a holistic approach. Interestingly design thinking was used for the research. He argues  educators approach is influenced by their own experience.

It was refreshing to read a study of education which was not a survey of the opinions of hundreds, or thousands of people, then run through a statistical analysis to make it look sciencey. Instead a few participants were interviewed, in depth.

Penta recommends a "... combination of qualitative
story-telling data and sense-making to change perspectives". However, I suggest directly exposing educators, particularly early career academics,  to new ways of learning, as students. It is very difficult to change an educator's behavior just by telling them to do something differently, or even with a story about how it can be different. It is much more effective if they experience the new approach, as a student. I did not really understand how top-down vocationally aligned course design, e-learning, e-portfolios, blended and online learning, or peer assessment worked, until I had to use them myself as a student.

One problem Penta did not address is a narrow vocational focus in university education. I teach computing and engineering students, for whom there are clear career paths, and high demand. It is very easy to align courses with professional requirements, and the graduates get jobs quickly. What do disciplines do, where there is no specific career, or demand, for their graduates?

The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilization is encouraging Australian universities to expand liberal arts degrees, to defend Western Civilization. But it is not clear how reading old books will get you a job in the digital economy. In contrast, the students I teach are being trained to defend directly the West, by countering cyber attacks, and building anti-missile systems (both skills in high demand). But the world will be the poorer if universities only produce engineers and computer programmers. How do we support the arts?

Reference

Penta, J. M. (2019). Designing Student-Centric Solutions through Collaboration: Exploring the Experiences of Higher Education Administrators Leading Cross-Functional Projects and Initiatives (Doctoral dissertation, Northeastern University). URL http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20316541

Everything is Interrelated

Dr Birgit Penzenstadler,
California State University

One of the rewards for having written published papers is that you get cited. Google Scholar sent me an alert to say I get a mention in a paper by Birgit Penzenstadler, and others (2018), with the intriguing title "Everything is interrelated". This describes an intensive week long  course on Software Engineering for Sustainability (SE4S) at Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT), Finland.

This report is useful as along with the theory as to why and what was planned, the authors showed what was changed in the light of experience during the week. No plan survives contact with the students (apologies to General von Moltke).

The authors are a little dismissive when referring to my green computing course (Worthington, 2012), saying such modules can be  "... plugged into the existing computing course". But what I suggest they could have done is use such on-line modules before their intensive face-to-face sessions. This way the students can be introduced to the basic concepts without using up valuable classroom time.

In the past there has been a problem in getting students to actually complete preparatory material. But this can be solved by making the material assessable with small automated quizzes and peer assessed discussions.

References

Penzenstadler, B., Betz, S., Venters, C. C., Chitchyan, R., Porras, J., Seyff, N., ... & Becker, C. (2018). Everything is interrelated: Teaching Software Engineering for Sustainability. Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering. URL https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/87821/1/Everything%20is%20interrelated_TSpace.pdf

Worthington, T. (2012, July). A Green computing professional education course online: Designing and delivering a course in ICT sustainability using Internet and eBooks. In Computer Science & Education (ICCSE), 2012 7th International Conference on (pp. 263-266). IEEE. URL https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCSE.2012.6295070