So I got back Sunday night from a workshop at Arizona State University on Engineering and Science Ethics Education. The goal of the workshop was to explore the possibilities for blending microethics and macroethics in graduate engineering and science education; we spent 2 days talking about the history of such efforts, what micro and macro ethics might mean in the context of scientific and engineering education and practice, and how we might operationalize these ideas into 4 formats: a 3-credit course, a 9-credit course, a lab-situated set of discussions, and some online formats. The conversation was very interesting, but I worry that the PIs have been left with a monumental task of making sense of our discussions.
Tomorrow, I'm off again. I'm attending a symposium in Washington, DC on "Creating Engineering Education Opportunities: Why and How?" The symposium is on Friday; Thursday, faculty members from engineering education programs at Virginia Tech, Clemson, Utah State, and Purdue are getting together for a (so far amorphous) workshop. I'll let you know how it goes; luckily I'm anticipating being back on Friday night, so a comparatively short trip.
At the same time, I'm trying to pull together an IEECI (Innovations in Engineering Education, Curriculum and Infrastructure) grant for next week, an IRB proposal for Tuesday, and my annual review report. Yeeps!
As a result, blogging will continue to be light on my part; in the meantime, please enjoy some photos from my Arizona trip. :-)
Your photos are beautiful (as usual), but that fountain must be causing a huge amount of evaporation! Enjoy your next workshop, and then maybe when you get back and are recovered, you can tell the rest of us what macro- and micro-ethics are!
Thanks, SW. Yeah, that's what I thought about the fountain, too. There was NO EVIDENCE of asking people to conserve water, not even in the hotels. I'm sure the folks in California who are having a drought are glad to know that.