- Wednesday, 13 September 2017
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm - Building 11, Level 00, Room 401
Title: Obedience, Courage, and the Australian Professional of the Future: Rethinking Education in a Relentlessly Innovative Age
As we have moved from an industrial age to a knowledge age, to a more creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial age, a quiet revolution is taking hold in the education of engineers, computing and other professionals around the world. Where once mastering a relatively fixed body of knowledge in a relatively stable world was enough, now students must be educated to face rapid change, learn to learn and relearn, and create new products and services that never existed. This talk starts by examining educational changes at Olin College and the University of Illinois as described in the book, A Whole New Engineer: The Coming Revolution in Engineering Education. A surprising conclusion of these experiences is that modern education is less about reforming content, and curriculum and more about unleashing students to the possibilities in their lives through a different balance between the polarities of obedience and courage. The talk briefly reviews the framework of polarities and so-called “and” thinking as a useful way to avoid unhelpful “either-or thinking.” The presentation concludes with a discussion of how companies in the US are embracing these new “courageous-disciplined engineers” as having more of the right stuff for the 21st century.
Further enquiries: Eugenia.Figueroa@uts.edu.au
Feature image credit: Ricardo Gomez Angel