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At this point I’m beginning to think what I’m really doing is giving myself a self-administered remedial engineering education to fix what I now realize are *really* serious gaps in engineering education.
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In defense of traditional education though, learning everything via hands-on making has only gotten cheap enough in the last decade or so. Doing what I’m doing now would have cost 10x morein 1993.
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Open invite to anyone else interested in crafting themselves some alt/remedial engineering education
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Replying to @RonnyBloom
Join the @yak_collective and come to Monday night 10 pm Pacific yak rover meetings, where a group of ~7 of us are building low-cost research-grade rovers. You an probably figure out an interesting learning thing to do for your gap year. You can yakcollective.org
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Hypothesis: engineering education in a given era is organized around the cheapest way to give students a starting point and basic instincts, not make them educated in a liberal sense (as in, education as liberation) or useful in a vocational sense, except by accident.
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In my time (90s) that meant mainly theoretical-functional guided by basic science/math. In the aughts and tens it meant vertically integrated around capstone design/contests, which gradually became cheap enough to be practical. In the 20s, I think it will get horizontal.
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This was around the time, explicit "liberal arts" disciplines in universities were discovering and adopting a very different but overlapping sense of "liberty" derived from things like LatAm liberation theology (pedagogy of the oppressed by Frere was very popular).
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Though he didn't say as much, my advisor strongly implied a corollary -- that people in the formally designated liberal arts corner simply lacked the literacy to see the liberal arts streak in engineering, or how it had evolved beyond vocationalism in the 20th century.
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Replying to
This was a big debate when engineering education started in America. I think ultimately we got a sort of hybrid "social engineering" curriculum via Taylor and behavioral psychology
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Replying to
David F. Noble "America by Design", on the development of the engineer as a managerial social class in America. It's good but a little tedious, I wouldn't recommend it unless you're really interested in the subject although I think it fits really well with this thread
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