Musings on EER and CER

The workshop program and presentations are available from http://www.it.uu.se/research/group/upcerg_new/events/profesional_competences. Christina Dörge, Universität Oldenburg Discussed the inplications of the terminology used to describe competence and competencies. A discussion arose about the differnece between skills and technical ability/competence and the ability to think about how to use the skill and to reason in a way that is recognised by other professionals as being relevant and valuable. In discussing this there was a discussion also about the goals of education in terms of skilling versus personal development. The role of education was also discussed from an historical and cultural perspective, define terms in the context of the historical and cultural framework that we are trying to interpret. Christina defined several types of competency that are intersting to consider and together combine to generate an action enabling competency. Two interesting ideas are Methodolo...

The event was sadly rather poorly attended, eight people and six speakers, plus Pro-rektor Kerstin Salén. The videos of the speaches are available on the web. Gunnel Cederlöf Presentation on the history of development of knowledge and the challenges of internationalisation in our education. Interesting view of the benefits and challenges of cultural diversity for education in our times. Worth going to the web and listening to. Jakob Johansson Talked about goals and the learning map and pathways that are established in a course. The model presented is drawn from Stanford, USA and appears to be closely connected to and inspired by Biggs work on Constructive Alignment. Ingrid Arnesjö DiaNa, Dialog för Naturvetare: Diolog for Natural Scientists. The model is driven by a competency based approach to learning and developing skills and knowledge. Inspiration from the educational model of Alverno College in the USA. However, the Alverno model also seems to have its roots in ...

Greetings to my musings and ramblings on Engineering and Computing Education Research (EER and CER). This first installment is notes and impressions from the Nordic CDIO conference in Umeå on the 5th and 6th of October 2010. Happy reading, Arnold. Day 1: Interesting presentations at the schools of Architecture and Design at Umeå University. The highly interactive and student focused approaches adopted in Design and Architecture are very interesting as a contrast to the more traditional engineering course structure. Two thirds of the teaching in the design school was done by staff from industry, and the financial and time committment from industry was considerable. To sustain this model the school admitted only 60 students per year, and had a total of approximately 100 staff and 150 students. Student body was very international with 29 nationalities represented. Day 2: Lennart Nilsson, Umeå Talked about the structure of their programmes and the processes they use to gath...