Manufacturology

Learning about teaching

Since last fall I’ve attended a course in uni­ver­sity teach­ing which is manda­tory for me if I want to stand any chance to be pro­moted to senior lec­turer. Despite the fact that I’m more or less forced to take the course, I do find it highly valu­able as it pro­vides plenty of oppor­tu­ni­ties to reflect on the nature of teach­ing and learning.

For the moment I’m read­ing some chap­ters in the book “Learn­ing to teach in higher edu­ca­tion” by Paul Rams­den. What I’ve found is encour­ag­ing: Rams­den dis­cusses teach­ing in many dif­fer­ent sub­jects, fre­quently refer­ring to sci­ence and engi­neer­ing edu­ca­tion. The book does not adopt the sim­plis­tic view that I’ve met with some lec­tur­ers (even in this course) that tra­di­tional lec­tures are “old fash­ioned” and that sem­i­nars and other more sup­pos­edly “acti­vat­ing” ways of teach­ing are just bet­ter, period.

In real­ity, Rams­den says, nei­ther way is intrin­si­cally bet­ter; what way of teach­ing that works best is con­tex­tual and depends both on the con­tent being taught and on the stu­dents’ capa­bil­ity to inter­pret and under­stand the content.

It is a relief for me to meet this undog­matic per­spec­tive in this clas­sic and author­i­ta­tive book, because it rep­re­sents a more schol­arly per­spec­tive on teach­ing than I’m used to meet. Instead of telling me that the pre­dom­i­nant method of teach­ing in engi­neer­ing is wrong, Rams­den inte­grates mod­els of teach­ing and stu­dent learn­ing into one whole and tells me that a pro­fi­cient teacher is able to focus on the sub­ject and at the same time reflect on how to adapt her teach­ing to pro­mote stu­dent understanding.

I’ve also enjoyed read­ing about the gen­eral aims of higher edu­ca­tion, real­is­ing that we give this high level per­spec­tive way to lit­tle thought in engi­neer­ing edu­ca­tion. I feel inspired — now all I need to do is turn all these great insights into practice…

SPS’11">Won’t make it to SPS’11

Unfor­tu­nately I’ve not had time to com­plete my arti­cle for SPS’11 in May. I was afraid this would hap­pen already when I sub­mit­ted my abstract, but as you know hope is tha last thing that dies. But I’ve been too busy with other things, for exam­ple child­care: I’ve only worked one day per week since last sum­mer as I’ve been on parental leave. (We have a gen­er­ous sys­tem here in Swe­den with paid parental leave where the time off can be shared between the par­ents.) In the end I’ve had to use my scarce work time to do other things.

Manufacturology turns one year

Man­u­fac­tur­ol­ogy turns one year today. Dur­ing that time I’ve had 13000 page views, which trans­lates to some­what fewer indi­vid­ual vis­i­tors since some view mul­ti­ple pages.

My first post, which was sim­ply called Wel­come, was pub­lished on Jan­u­ary 13 2010. When I started out I had the idea and ambi­tion to focus solely on pro­duc­tion research. As it turned out, I have been writ­ing about a quite broad range of top­ics, includ­ing lean pro­duc­tion, man­u­fac­tur­ing strat­egy and strate­gic inno­va­tion. I par­tic­i­pated in the Four Stone Hearth blog car­ni­val with this post about iron­mak­ing in a bloomery fur­nace. I also pub­lished some opin­ions on books that I read dur­ing the year, for exam­ple “Smile or die” by Bar­bara Ehren­re­ich (here), “The prin­ci­ples of prod­uct devel­op­ment flow” by Don­ald Rein­ert­sen (here), and “Let my peo­ple go surf­ing” by Yvon Chouinard (here).

One post attracted far more vis­i­tors than any one else. It was called Ash cloud over Europe and for some rea­son it made it to the front page of the Huff­in­g­ton Post’s Euro­pean news sec­tion. The Huff­in­g­ton Post is a lead­ing Amer­i­can news site, and my post attracted 933 vis­i­tors dur­ing the day it was pub­lished and only slightly lower num­bers dur­ing the days that fol­lowed. It has now attracted more than 3500 vis­i­tors in total. For some rea­son my post bub­bled up through the media alarm to the top of a lead­ing news site, there is no log­i­cal expla­na­tion but hap­pened by chance.

I con­tinue to write, although maybe less focused on man­u­fac­tur­ing and indus­try, and more towards soci­ety at large. I’ve con­sid­ered chang­ing the blog lan­guage to Swedish, but so far I con­tinue to write in Eng­lish. Hope you enjoy it and that you drop by here every once in a while. See you around!

Fascinating photo from solar eclipse of January 4 2011

From where I live, those who were lucky enough to have a cloud free sky could see a par­tial solar eclipse at sun­rise last Tues­day. Although I couldn’t see it from my house in Falun, I heard from col­leagues that it could be seen from the neigh­bour­ing town of Borlänge.

How­ever, I’ve now learned that this event was more than an ordi­nary par­tial solar eclipse. I stum­bled upon a ref­er­ence to the blog Bad Astron­omy, which fea­tured a post called “INSANELY awe­some solar eclipse pic­ture”. It shows just that: An insanely awe­some photo of the eclipse.

Here it is:

Tran­sit of the ISS dur­ing the solar eclipse of Jan­u­ary 4 2011 from Oman. Photo: Thierry Legault, used with per­mis­sion. Click to enlarge.

Look for your­self, but look care­fully! The dark sil­hou­ette of the moon dom­i­nates the photo, but there is more to be seen. Click to enlarge the picture! Do you see the pecu­liar shape of one of the small sunspots? It turns out that the upper one is no sunspot at all, and this is the insane part of it. It is the inter­na­tional space sta­tion, ISS!

Appar­ently, astronomer and pho­tog­ra­pher Thierry Legault trav­elled from France to Oman in order to time the dou­ble eclipse of the sun with the moon and the ISS, an event that hap­pened only there, and which lasted only for one brief sec­ond dur­ing which the ISS trav­elled in front of the sun!

Thierry Legault has also taken other excep­tion­ally fas­ci­nat­ing pho­tos that he fea­tures on his web page. The one below shows how the space shut­tle Atlantis, docked to the ISS, passes in front of the sun on May 22 2010. This event lasted only 0.49 sec­onds. I sug­gest that you go to Thierry’s home­page your­self in order to learn more about his fas­ci­nat­ing photos.

Solar tran­sit of ISS and Atlantis on May 22 2010. Photo: Thierry Legault, used with per­mis­sion. Click to enlarge.

Blogging on the iPad: Edited version

[This is an update of my pre­vi­ous post, “Blog­ging on the iPad”, which I wrote on the iPad. I’ve now edited it on my reg­u­lar PC but I kept the old post unchanged in order to illus­trate my points. In addi­tion to the prob­lems men­tioned below, there were also a prob­lem with insert­ing pic­tures, which you can see if you com­pare the two posts.]

I’ve now been the owner of an Apple iPad for abouth one month, and it is no under­state­ment to say that it has changed my com­puter habits rad­i­cally. Whereas I used to spend about an hour a day in front of my sta­tion­ary PC, I now do almost all my casual brows­ing and email­ing from the iPad.

One of the first things I wanted to do was to upload my library of sci­en­tific papers in order to always have them at hand with­out pow­er­ing up my PC. After test­ing some aler­na­tive solu­tions I found that this was eas­ily accom­plished using Apple’s iBooks. I now carry with me about 500 papers wher­ever I go, and read­ing on the iPad’s screen works very well. Indeed, this was one of the main rea­sons why I wanted an iPad in the first place.

How­ever, I’m dis­ap­pointed with the poor sup­port for blogging.

After some ini­tial googling, I decided to install an app called Blog­ger, only to find that it didn’t sup­port stand alone blogs like Man­u­fac­tur­ol­ogy. Instead I chose to install the Word­press app, which I’m using to write this post. I’ve been hav­ing prob­lems with the app crash­ing, and the poor sta­bil­ity in com­bi­na­tion with another annoy­ing bug, namely that all line­breaks between para­graphs dis­ap­pear when I save a post, means that I’m not very impressed. Hope­fully things will improve, I’m eagerly await­ing an update that solves these problems.

To some extent my change in com­puter habits, in com­bi­na­tion with the less than per­fect blog­ging expe­ri­ence on the iPad (an under­state­ment)  explains why I haven’t been updat­ing the blog for some time. How­ever, my ambi­tion is to get back on track and keep on blog­ging, so remem­ber to check back in here at Man­u­fac­tur­ol­ogy every once in a while!

[Addi­tional note: Despite the prob­lems with blog­ging from the iPad, it is use­ful as a pro­duc­tiv­ity tool. I’ve been writ­ing some fairly lengthy doc­u­ments in Apple’s word­pro­cess­ing app called Pages, and it works quite well. (I’d like to see improved sup­port for style/format mange­ment though.)]

Blogging on the iPad

[Note: An updated ver­sion of this post is avail­able here: http://www.manufacturology.com/2011/01/blogging-on-the-ipad-edited-version/. You may want to check out both.]

src=“
http://www.manufacturology.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/20101220–231558.jpg“
alt=”” class=“alignnone size-full” /> I’ve now been
the owner of an Apple iPad for abouth one month, and it is no
under­state­ment to say that it has changed my com­puter habits
rad­i­cally. Whereas I used to spend about an hour a day in front of
my sta­tion­ary PC, I now do almost all my casual brows­ing and
email­ing from the iPad. One of the first things I wanted to do was
to upload my library of sci­en­tific papers in order to always have
them at hand with­out pow­er­ing up my PC. After test­ing some
aler­na­tive solu­tions I found that this was eas­ily accom­plished
using Apple’s iBooks. I now carry with me about 500 papers wher­ever
I go, and read­ing on the iPad’s screen works very well. Indeed,
this was one of the main rea­sons why I wanted an iPad in the first
place. How­ever, I’m dis­ap­pointed with the poor sup­port for
blog­ging. After some ini­tial googling, I decided to install an app
called Blog­ger, only to find that it didn’t sup­port stand alone
blogs like Man­u­fac­tur­ol­ogy. Instead I chose to install the
Word­press app, which I’m using to write this post. I’ve been hav­ing
prob­lems with the app crash­ing, and the poor sta­bil­ity in
com­bi­na­tion with another annoy­ing bug, namely that all line­breaks
between para­graphs dis­ap­pear when I save a post, means that I’m not
very impressed. Hope­fully things will improve, I’m eagerly await­ing
an update that solves these prob­lems. To some extent my change in
com­puter habits, in com­bi­na­tion with the less than per­fect blog­ging
expe­ri­ence on the iPad explains why I haven’t been updat­ing the
blog for some time. How­ever, my ambi­tion is to get back on track
and keep on blog­ging, so remem­ber to check back in here at
Man­u­fac­tur­ol­ogy every once in a while!