Last week, I was lucky to experience TIME - RONE at the Art Gallery of WA. I walked room by room, looking at the decaying technology from the time of my grandparents, much of it was familiar to me as a small child in their homes. The big black Bakelite telephone, Rolodex filing of family and friends’ addresses, the apparent chaos of telephone switchboard rooms, the stickiness of waxed floorboards, hair curlers, “no credit accepted” signs in shops. All of this dusty and covered in cobwebs. It made me wonder at the vast changes in our world since my parents were born, and a growing insight that our current technology will also be viewed by our grandchildren as decrepit, low tech, unbelievably basic. And so it is in this reflective space, that I look back on my 30 years in the School of Engineering, and forward into the unknown.
Image: The Making of Information Age: Enfield Telephone Exchange, circa 1955. The Science Museum.
When I was asked to help teach the first-year unit Introduction to Engineering in 1995, a year after I’d joined the School of Engineering, I looked over the unit description in the UWA Handbook. For fun, I started tracking back over the Handbooks of previous years and decades to see how the unit had evolved with time. To my horror, I realised that the unit description and format had remained essentially the same since my father was in first-year Engineering. For decades we had taught the same unit, in much the same way. In those days, I taught writing on transparent film that was projected onto the wall. When we finished one sheet, we wound the film on to a blank section. At the end of the day, the writing would be wiped off the film, ready for the next day’s lectures. It was so frustrating when you wound the film on during a lecture, only to find the notes from a previous lecture still on the film.
How times have changed! During my 30 years in Engineering at UWA, not just what, but particularly how, we teach has radically changed.
Carolyn Oldham
Engineering had always been a hands-on degree (compared to many others), but often had too strong a separation between lectures, laboratories and practicum. As lecturers we now better understand that we all learn so much more through doing, rather than just listening and reading. Experiential learning sticks to our brains. Learning to drive a car from a manual or website, is radically different to learning to drive behind the wheel. All learner drivers know this. Understanding theoretically the physical and emotional triggers of pain, does not equate to experiencing pain. You never forget what you have experienced. As this world of experiential learning embedded itself into our consciousness in the 1990s, the curriculum started to transform. Pioneers of this way of teaching were no longer the outliers among our staff.
Thank goodness we moved away from simply delivering content, expecting students to memorise the details, then regurgitate it back in exams, only to forget it all within a week. As many have said, our undergraduates these days will have jobs that aren’t even invented yet. New types of engineering appear every year and we aim to be nimble enough to embrace this future. I hope our exciting curriculum and the ways we encourage active experiential learning support our undergraduates to seize hold of the future and their role in it.
And in no time at all, the technology I’m using to create this reflection, my phone, my car, the internet as we know it, will all be obsolete; relegated to a museum for future generations to stare and wonder at.