Hosting Honored Guests: A Seminar on Technology and Policy

Mary Anne Staffeldt

Department of Industrial Engineering

New Mexico State University

Box 30001 - MSC 4230

Las Cruces, New Mexico 88011

mastaff@nmsu.edu

(505) 646-4923

ABSTRACT. In this article, we describe a general education course offered by the College of Engineering for students in the Honors Program at New Mexico State University.

1. Introduction. A unique feature of New Mexico State University's general education curriculum is the component "Viewing a Wider World," for which each college offers upper-division courses to students pursing majors in other colleges. These courses provide the opportunity for both the faculty sponsors and the participating students to examine the host discipline from a broader perspective than would be typical of an upper division course designed for specialists. This paper describes an example of a "Viewing a Wider World" course,

HON378G - Technology and Policy, offered as a seminar for honors students. We discuss the goals for the seminar, the content of the first module of the course and the process for presenting the material.

2. Content Objectives. The "Viewing a Wider World" concept motivated our decision to design a course around three major issues:

·    how society sets goals for science and technology,

·    how society allocates resources to these goals, and

·    why conflicts emerge during these processes.

When society sets goals and allocates resources for technology, engineers return to society not only products and processes, but also new wealth. This wealth then enables society to set new goals and to allocate new resources. However, the new products and processes that technology creates may also contribute to society's most serious problems. Successes and failures in exchanges between engineering and society depend not only on the capability of the engineers, but even more on the wisdom of society’s choices and the adequacy of resources. Today, redirecting technology is as important as improving it.

The synergy between the seminar format of honors courses and the general education concept of "Viewing a Wider World" provides a unique opportunity to model the exchange between engineering and society. The instructor represents engineering, while the students represent society as a whole. Since the course is open to students from any undergraduate college except the College of Engineering, society has representatives from agriculture, the arts and the sciences, business, education, health and social services. To the extent that a good host creates situations in which guests can share ideas while gracious guests accommodate one another with civility, the College of Engineering literally hosts honored guests. In this context, we can restate the objective: to enable all of the participants to contribute more effectively to the exchange between society and technology.

3. Topics. The seminar deals with three topics: defense spending by the United States, quality in commercial products and social services, and education in mathematics and science. The choice of these topics is consistent with the author's experience with military operations research, with her curriculum development projects¹ for courses on reliability and quality control, and with her association² with the New Mexico Systemic Initiative for Mathematics and Science Education. For each topic, we examine several processes for setting goals and several methods of allocating resources. Each topic illustrates professional practices in system engineering, allows international comparison of public policies and raises ethical questions. Each topic offers a contrast between a long time span for formulating policy goals and a short time span for implementing a specific policy. We see both successes and failures in the leadership exercised by individuals, professions and political groups.

To indicate the range of the course material, we list the sources for the unit on defense spending by the United States:

4. Process. General education fosters not only speaking and writing, but also listening and thinking.³ The seminar format allows the participants to exercise all of these. For the unit on defense spending, teams of two students lead the discussion of each of the sources. The two student-leaders use half of the class session to present their source material; during the second half of the session, they moderate a discussion in which all of the members of the class have the opportunity to react to the source material. In planning "their" class, the student-leaders are required to formulate specific objectives for their presentation, to achieve their objectives, to design an effective introduction, to control the timing of their presentation and to offer a framework for the "open" discussion. All of the participants evaluate how well the presenters achieved their objectives, the appropriateness of the objectives, the quality of the introduction, the quality of the content, as well as the ability of the student-leaders to moderate and close their sessions. Later in the semester, we invite members of the university community to evaluate the group presentations on quality in commercial products or social services.

The unit on defense spending closes with a writing assignment in which each student studies a military conflict of the last ten years. The papers prepared in response to the assignment explain the causes of the conflicts, identify the technologies that support the arms used in the conflicts and the sources of funding for these arms, report on the current status of the conflicts and summarize the outlook for a permanent peace. The papers conclude with the students' evaluations of how well the prospects for a permanent peace conform to Kant's ideal of eternal peace. Evaluation criteria for the papers include quality and scope of the content, organization and grammar, as well as quality and scope of the library research.

5. At the Start of the Semester. To break the ice among the students and to allow the first presenters time to prepare their sessions, we use the opening week of the semester for introductory activities. The first activity is modeled on a feature article in which The Wall Street Journal⁴ (WSJ) rates the skills in language and mathematics needed for a wide range of careers. The table below shows the WSJ definitions for the top three skill levels.

The participants introduce themselves, locate their academic majors on the WSJ scale for skill levels and describe their own experiences with language and mathematics. We score a variety of careers based on our perceptions of the verbal and quantitative skills required for success and then compare the results with the WSJ scoring of similar careers. Finally, we use the WSJ criteria to explain the range of the source materials for the unit on defense spending.

Since the primary objective of the course is to develop effective participation in the process by which society sets goals for technology, it is appropriate to discuss formulation of values, pluralism in values and civil discussion of conflicting values. The second introductory activity, modeled on Perry's Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years⁵, provides a frame of reference for this discussion. Perry describes a spectrum that begins with a black/white perspective on right and wrong responses to complex issues and ends with an ideal state in which people choose from conflicting values, act in accordance with their chosen values and accept the consequences of their choices. Our activity includes an explanation of Perry's scheme and examples of course-related issues to which this scheme might apply; for example, the issue of affirmative action programs for facilitating access to careers in technical fields elicits intense responses from the participants. Discussion topics include the contribution of general education to ethical development, examples of decisions that reflect values, aspects of lifestyle that reflect values, and the interests of a prospective employer in a candidate's values. This activity motivates a writing assignment for which participants describe their development as professionals and individuals in terms of three important goals. The papers state the students' goals, explain the choice of the goals and offer examples of experiences that demonstrate progress toward these goals. For honors students, the assignment supports preparation of applications for graduate school or leadership activities appropriate to the students' intended professions.

6. Acknowledgements. The author gratefully acknowledges the PNM Foundation of the Public Service Company of New Mexico for its support of curriculum development for this course. She also appreciates the sustained support of the Honors Program at New Mexico State University. She is glad to acknowledge T. Hoeksema's advice during the revision of the syllabus after the course was first offered and his support during the process of certifying the seminar as a general education course. She also thanks W. Eamon for his continued support of the course and for his patience with scheduling around the birth of Beth Anne Staffeldt during the fall semester of 1996. Tom Powers of NMSU's Advanced Manufacturing Center, Lois Reed of the Naval Air Warfare Center, and local members of the honor society Alpha Pi Mu have earned thanks for their sustained service as reviewers of students' presentations.

7. References

1. Maher, M.A., Bach, Bartok and Reliability. Presentation to the Educational Research Methods Division at the 1992 Annual Conference of the American Society of Engineering Education.

2. Brown, S., Pelking, M., Rojas, P. and Staffeldt, M.A. Design Technology and Engineering for American's Children (D/TEACh): A Curriculum for a SIMSE Summer Institute. Presented to the New Mexico Systemic Initiative for Mathematics and Science Education and to the New Mexico Commission on Higher Education, 1995.

3. New Mexico State University Faculty Handbook.

4. Workplace Revolution. The Wall Street Journal, Special Feature on Education, February 9, 1990.

5. Perry, Wm. G. Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968.