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New methods not always better

12th June 2015

By: Terry Mackenzie-hoy

  

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I began my tertiary education at the University of Witwatersrand (Wits). I had just turned 17 and I looked forward to university as being, well, as it was depicted: time to enjoy life, meet pretty girls, go to parties and spar intellectually with my fellow students. Naturally, I would have to do some studying but I had no fears about this.

Professor Moolman of the Department of Chemistry set the tone, which shocked me out of my daydreams. He was American and his first words were: “If you jack around in this class, you get the can. Look left, look right, look behind and in front. One of you five will graduate. It’s up to you!”

He then started teaching. Actually he started lecturing. Information poured out of him in a steady stream. The lectures that followed – maths, physics, applied maths and engineering drawing – were equally information-rich. There were no parties. The pretty girls were not interested in first-year students and engineering students had no intellectual-sparring ability.

The mornings were full of lectures and the afternoons full of practicals and tutorials. I would get home at five o’clock, make coffee and then work from six until ten at night. On Friday nights, we would go to the Devonshire hotel and get drunk. On Saturdays, we would recover. On Sunday, I would prepare for Monday.

The dropout rate was massive. I think 65% of our class did not make it beyond midyear. At the time, there were no photocopy machines, no calculators and lecture notes were not handed out (you had to copy it all down). There was no Internet, no email, no fax machines and effectively no computers.

But what I learned at Wits (and later at University of Cape Town ) and what habits I learned at university have helped me for 43 years. I think the biggest lesson was how little I knew and how little I know now.

But there seems to have been a subtle shift in university education in recent years. Now that the ‘drudge factor’ has been eliminated with any amount of electronics to aid learning and education, it seems we are at the point where – as a television game-show contestant confirmed recently – one does not need general knowledge, only Google.

In my office, we issue our staff with moleskin notebooks. These are small black notebooks, which have got pages with squares on them. In the book, the engineers are required to record all their site notes. Details of all the meetings, names of all the people they met. If any engineer does not keep detailed records in his book, the punishment is no access to the coffee machine for two days (by the way, we do have a female engineer, but she would never forget).

I was taught the discipline of note taking at university. Since the course material these days is very often posted on a website, I believe the learning process is now flawed. Students print out the material, it is not clear whether the information passes through their brain?

Again, in my office, I am ruthless (as is the lead engineer) if the information in a report is wrong. It does not matter if it is just a little bit wrong. Wrong is wrong.

When I was at Wits in my second year, we did a series of mechanical engineering practicals. The tutor was a hard act and thought nothing of tearing your report in half if it was even a little bit wrong. I am a bit slack now, but I used to force all the engineers to draw by hand all the designs before committing them to the computer. This way they understood far more clearly what they were drawing. The completed drawing had a better chance of being constructed accurately if it had been hand drawn. Again a legacy of university.

These old ways were there for very good reasons and we need to be very careful that engineering education accepts that, while electronic methods may make things quicker, they do not necessarily make them better. Increasingly, I am finding that the very best engineers I deal with typically grew up in a rural community, without a computer.

Edited by Creamer Media Reporter

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