Thanks for the comment, John. I agree, it is much easier to write about something one is passionate about, it feels less forced and leads to better writing in my opinion!

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Hi Arash,
Thank you very much for your comment! Appreciated! Indeed, here I wasn’t intended to materialize the concept in-depth but this is useful to me, actually for food for thought 🙂 And, yes exactly 🙂 the same chapters echoed to me as well, all these benchmarks, ranking systems… Isn’t it because of these people internalize this notion of “getting by”, what Michel Wesh mentions in his TED-talk…

Dear Dr. Nelson,
I am so glad to see your comment here! Many thanks for your time to read, your comment, and particularly the clarification that you made. Exactly. Indeed, as you said, this assumption that you are (might) “always” being watched is the moment when we start to discipline/modify our behaviors or maybe sometimes “not”, as I remember, Foucault believes, there are always some “deviants” in the society that leads people to position themselves in binary and dichotomous patterns: normal vs. abnormal. Once again, many thanks!

Hello!

I’m super excited to participate in this course with you! I suspect I’m coming at blogging from an opposite framing of the value of media outside the formal academic system of citations, books, and journals. I’ve grown up participating in in-depth discussions and content online, and especially recently have been conscious of a deep disconnect between the things my (wearable robotics & formerly brain-computer interfacing) field’s publications deem important, vs those that I find helpful.

For example, I’ve found that my field’s publications actively avoid articulating the actually difficult part- implementation- of our work. We *exclusively* discuss the theoretical math of the movement or controls of robotic systems, while leaving wholly unstated how they chose to actually implement that math. We’ll simply state “RTAB-MAP ROS library was used for automated mapping and navigation”, and not even bother stating how we configured all of the 30+ different options and settings, each of which has materially relevant consequences for the effectiveness of the final work. This means our publications only serve as boasting tools, and are functionally useless for helping others even *replicate* our work, let alone use it.

In contrast, content like popular Instructables.com tutorials will detail the entire process in plain language, concurrently educating on the actual complexity at play, and providing guideposts from which a user can work. My thesis, for example, can be uncharitably described as “following three robotics instillation & configuration tutorials, one 3d design tutorial, and one web server tutorial, with three small extremely simple scripts to glue the systems together.”

In terms of the supposed main upside of academic publications- peer review- I struggle to see how the commentary of comparable content creators in long-form media is not precisely that, but public. In my piece this week, I list quite a few Youtube creators, describing them as a new sort of “academic” due to the sheer depth and complexity of their work. You’ll notice many of them are in overlapping fields- and if you were to look through their backlogs, there are collaborations, mutual citations, and responses in the same vein as I would love to actually see in academia. Instead the peer review process is opaque to outsiders, and only ever involves at most a small number of other people, let alone significantly varied perspectives & backgrounds the way online, public discussions commonly do.

All this before exploring the chilling effect on engineering ethics research that comes with having one’s name publicly tied in academic spaces to criticism of the sociopolitical consequences of the work of others in our departments. In a department funded heavily through the work of military-centric jet engine work, how likely is a prospective professor to get tenure from their colleagues when they have published work openly critical of militaristic mentalities in engineering?

Lookin forward to class & this semester with ya!

Quick clarification on Foucault / Bentham / the Panopticon:
The premise of the Panopticon is not that you are always under surveillance but that you know that you could be. Maybe someone is watching and maybe they aren’t. You don’t know. But because you can be observed at any time you modify your behavior on the assumption that you are “always” being watched — but you might not ever actually know.

You are absolutely correct. But at the end of the day whatever field it might be (virtual dissection, evolutionary history etc.) that field would still need to tell the student all the existing information/data (“dumping”) and that student would have to learn that information (“memorization”) to quickly use that information in conjunction with his/her medical knowledge. I think this process of “dumping” and “memorization” can be changed and stretched out for a longer period in order it to be effective — but the principle of the process will remain the same.

Now I absolutely abominate weed out classes. I don’t think they prove anything.

In essence what I am trying to say is that memorization and dumping have a negative connotation but are “necessary evils” of the education system.

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Hello!
I definitely agree about the power of public, open blogging as a tool for reflection. While I’ve never successfully reliably ‘blogged’, I’ve followed a similar pattern of reflecting on social media, and for most of my life found it similarly “put stuff out there” focused with little meaningful feedback from others.

However, in 2016/2017 I participated in the early days of development of Mastodon.social, a software alternative to Twitter, which is significantly more heavily structured in support of communities rather than the monolithic, homogenized, meshing pit of Twitter or Facebook. Suddenly the same style of reflection I’d been doing on other social media started prompting external, compelling, interactive discussions that have played a huge role in my philosophies changing and growing over time.

I suspect this style of networked blogging may surprise you with just how much it facilitates external, meaningful interaction, and lets your reflection live outside you and both inspire others and prompt productive discussions that actually mutually enrich, in stark contrast with the vagueness of other formats.

I’m looking forward to the semester!

Hello!

I’m super excited to jump aboard this course with you! I like the degree of depth to which you’ve really tried to explore the consequences the readings from the week have for a question you’ve already been grappling with.

A big problem I grapple with and see echoes of in the questions you’re asking is around the idea that creating vocationally-capable students is to any real degree at odds with their larger enrichment. A concrete exploration of whistleblowing for example, that goes beyond simply a crude “do it when it needs to be done” and instead dives into the practical realities of the situation, is content that many industry reps would rather be replaced with another lecture on some wholly disembodied topic, as it can help render their future employees a liability from a strictly financial/profit-making perspective. If I’m advising a student, i absolutely would discourage them from including “trained in the practical realities of whistleblowing” on their resume at job fairs.

But the lack of that knowledge sets the student up to, as an employee in the future, find themselves gradually serving societal roles that keep them up at night, that they’re ashamed of. Society, which importantly includes the student, is worse off for the fact that the student lacks the knowledge of how to disrupt the sacrificing of ‘externalities’ such as ‘public health’ and ‘the environment’.

In addition, in my opinion, grappling with the complex nature of acting ethically in society in practice is best approached via the tackling & completion of a multitude of concrete, applied, public-serving projects. I view it as similar to how in the course I help teach, Mechatronics, most analogous courses attempt to focus on exclusively the ‘theory’, but struggle to result in effective students because all the actual complexity is in the practical, applied aspects. It’s easy to state “mass surveilance is bad”, it’s wholly another to learn to take a given problem statement and reflect on what kind of society you’re being asked to build. It’s another level of difficulty alltogether to see, in the implementation, the sociopolitical consequences of the technology at play. The Internet of Things market’s struggle to get off the ground the way they keep projecting, along with the growing massive botnets of smarthome devices that accomplish things like ‘knocking out power generation for entire regions’, both originate in those sociopolitical dimensions that would be viewed as ‘not related to job training’.

I’m not sure if I managed to convey my framing of it; in short I guess I could summarize it as:
“With a focus on ‘vocational’ training comes, necessarily, a deep lack of education on broader societal context & its material relevance to the students’ work. As a consequence of this ignorance, new students are trapped in bad employment situations, industry endeavors routinely fail outright in totally avoidable ways, and both the environment and efforts for social and political justice are unintentionally undermined.”

It’s funny that you choose medical knowledge as your knowledge because pre-med classes are largely taught that way as a weed-out method. There is so much information that it is essentially impossible for someone to know it all. However, what people can do is learn how various pathways and molecules interact to get a broad understanding of the body. Having hands-on learning or virtual dissections or even evolutionary history classes can be far more helpful for a medical student because they can see all the networks inside the body and how they relate to other possible symptoms and such. If you’re just trying to match mental flashcards to what you see, you’re going to miss a factor that the patient didn’t think was relevant.

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Hello!

I hope my use of y’all is ok; I’m not a southerner as I’ve predominantly lived in Illinois (Chicago suburbs & central) and California (the San Francisco Bay area). I’ve ended up adopting it for its incredible utility as a non-formal, second-person plural, non-gendered pronoun. That it might contribute to more local voices like yours feeling welcome in discussions is a very welcome unanticipated effect! There’s also a note to be made about attempting to intentionally prod at classism among my often-major-city-based colleagues in engineering, but I definitely lack the vocabulary to articulate it.

I’m glad to hear you share my concerns about that tension; from what I’ve seen of ALCE thru participating in the Community Change Collaborative (predominantly last year) and Dr. Matheis’ SPIA weekend courses in Spring 2018, it sounds like there’s substantially more consciousness of that tension existing at all in ALCE spaces. In engineering it can be hard to trust that I’m not simply hallucinating it, what with how industry-fixated the commonplace engineering mindset tends to be.

I’m very much looking forward to the semester!