THE FOUR FORCES THAT INFLUENCE THE QUALITY OF KNOWLEDGE PROVISION SERVICES: Re-Thinking Engineering Education through a Law-Professor

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THE FOUR FORCES THAT INFLUENCE THE QUALITY OF
KNOWLEDGE PROVISION SERVICESRe-Thinking
Engineering Education through a Law-Professors
lenses

• Ben Koo, Tsinghua University
• John Cha, Beijing Jiaotong University
• Edward Crawley, MIT

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Designing a Learning Organization

• Is about
• To support a miniature society
• By providing various functional services such as
• Knowledge Aggregation, Dissemination, and
  Creation
• Using effective forces to improve service
  qualities
• Not only about
• Individual performance
• Statistical metrics of individual performance

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Creator of the Four forces

• Lawrence Lessig
• Law Professor at Stanford University
• Author of the following books
• And most recently REMIX

benkoo_at_tsinghua.edu.cn
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What are the four forces

• Architecture/Law ltgt Pre/Post Constraints
• Market/Norm ltgt Pull/Push forces

Market
Law
Learning Organization
Architecture
Norm
Modified from LessigsCode v2.0
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Architecture

• A Pre-Emptive Force
• The stable properties of a system that
  constraints the activities of its inhabitants
  BEFORE they act.

Example The Great Wall of China Courtesy Dr.
Nan Tu
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Law

• Enforceable consequences AFTER certain rules are
  broken

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Market

• A force of enticement, attraction, pull
• For 5 bucks an hour, you may ask me to believe
  in anything you want!
• Winston Zeddemore applying for a Ghost Buster
  position
• (played by Ernie Hudson)

Source Wikipedia on Ernie Hudson and Ghostbusters
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Norm

• A force that expels or pushes agents to act in
  conformity.
• It can be embarrassing to be different, even just
  a little bit.

http//www.faithdoubt.com/be-a-little-different
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How do we use these forces?

• If we treat schools as miniature societies
• We may use the forces to improve the
  performance of engineering schools as service
  agencies.
• but, what are the goals of our schools?
• Providing knowledge? Nurturing engineering
  culture?
• Then, how do we start testing these ideas?
• Start with two consecutive courses at THU IE
  Dept.
• Data Structures and Algorithms
• Database Concepts

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Conceiving a Service Product

• Goals of our Knowledge Provisioning Service
• Knowledge Aggregation
• Aggregate people and resources
• Aggregate experience and traditions
• Aggregate momentum/interests
• Knowledge Dissemination
• Disseminate to fellow students
• Disseminate to other dept/schools
• Disseminate to the society
• Knowledge Creation
• Create knowledge based on incremental aggregation
• Create knowledge based on cross-pollination
• Create knowledge based on innovation

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A Pact with the students

• The goal/requirements were developed with
  iterative inputs from students
• All students are informed in the beginning of the
  course, that our collective goal is
• not to just get a passing grade on one course,
• but to exercise our rights and responsibilities
• to benefit-from and contribute-toknowledge
  provisioning services.
• They are encouraged to integrate any content
  knowledge from other courses and their life
  experience.

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The first bit of Remix

• Lets meet the students at the beginning of the
  semester
• Establishing a vocabulary amongst the students
• They are relatively shy and not so well prepared
• How do we communicate with the students in their
  local language?
• The first bit of Remix
• Video excerpts from Prison Break

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Goal-oriented architectural plans

• Technical Architectures
• Choosing between various dialects of scientific
  languages to express the technical content
• Organizational Architectures
• One instructor lectures to many students
• Many students prepare lectures to help others
• Team-based structures to facilitate co-opetition
• Workflow Architectures
• How do we choose between different format of
  student/instructor interactions to enforce
  learning?
• Weekly lectures, recitations, homework submission
  standards,

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Some Technical Decisions

• Under Tsinghua IEs environmental context
• We require students to use at least two
  languages, and use as many complementary tools as
  possible.
• Most students will need least 5 languages, many
  learned close to 30 different new languages and
  tools in one semester.
• All students has a series of required homework,
  create an executable programming language from
  scratch.
• All homework are managed using networked version
  control systems (SubVersioN, a.k.a. SVN)
• Computational literacy is the key, the more they
  learn, the faster and easier it gets.

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Technologies enables new possibilities
A quick demonstration of technical possibilities
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Organizational Decisions

• To instill a societal context, all students are
  considered a member of the Knowledge City.
• Teams headcount cannot exceed 9, and each team
  is divided into three functional sub-teams.
• Model for Data Management
• View for Human-Machine Interactions
• Controller for algorithm/process definition
• The organizational policy is modeled after the
  practice of Extreme Programming

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2007 Teams labor division
VIEW
CONTROLLER
MODEL
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Workflow Decisions

• Classroom is a venue for Town Hall meetings
• Students are to actively demonstrate their
  learning progress, not just to passively listen
  to some lecturers.
• Stringent requirements for student-prepared
  lectures. At least two rehearsals before they
  go-live. Afterwards, a review lecture must be
  prepared and presented the following week.
• All teams might be randomly selected to present
  theirweekly progress.

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Quality Control Process
A short video demonstrating a typical workflow in
class.
19 / 36
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The Pre-Emptive Forces

• Technical Architecture
• The vocabulary, grammar, and the application
  context of a scientific language, pre-determines
  the cognitive scope of students technical
  knowledge.
• Organizational Architecture
• Effective interaction mechanisms amongst
  students/lecturers could pre-emptivelyeliminate
  communication bottlenecks
• Workflow Architecture
• Creates learning experiences that can be
  reproduced and managed in prescribedprocess
  patterns

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Laws that complements Architectures

• Laws should specify the consequences of policy
  violation.
• The ability to enforce the law, as well as
• The strength of punishment
• Example
• Late assignments are
• Punishable by point deduction
• Plagiarism are
• Manual/Automatically detected?

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Points of Law Execution
Weekly Lecture Ends
Quiz
Student Progress Reports
First Rehearsal
Review Video Production
SVN Version Control Service
Student Lecture
Second Rehearsal
Weekly Lecture Starts
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The Power of Law

• The Power of Reasoning
• Are students aware of the consequences?
• Their technical vocabulary helps them to
  effectively describe what they might have
  violated.
• Their organizational structure may help them
  filter the illegal intellectual
  content/activities
• Their workflow patterns will further reduce the
  unnecessary mistakes, and identify the
  differences between aggregation, dissemination,
  and creation
• The process of claiming a creation requires
  iterative and community-based reasoning.

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Market and Intellectual Currencies

• There are many currencies in the marketplace
• Three currencies are discussed here
• Student Grades
• Who gets higher grades?
• How to motivate students by grades?
• Student feedback on teaching
• Is this a fair exchange?
• Time as a currency
• Time spent on improving the learning organization?

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Norm and Peer Pressure

• The right to be different
• A shared value across knowledge city
• Why is sharing good?
• Share the vision of contributing free
  knowledge.
• The effect of free to the infrastructure and
  architecture of Knowledge City.
• How to instill an engineering culture?
• Find/Create ones own voice
• Stephen Coveys 8th habit
• Find your voice and inspire others to find
  theirs.

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A bit of Remix

• Lessigs latest book, Remix, talks about the
  civil rights and case studies on the Remix
  copy-righted intellectual material.
• Lets watch a 3 min. video of Remix at
  Tsinghua.
• The lecture was on Applications of Data
  Structures and Algorithms.
• A typical in-class workflow is illustrated in the
  video

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The whole is greater than the sum of its parts!
Market
Law
Learning Organization
Architecture
Norm
Modified from LessigsCode v2.0
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Balance and Symmetry

• Designing organizations is about checks and
  balances! The four forces are balanced in their
  complementary directions. Before/After,
  Pull/Push, makes it rather complete to cover all
  angles of social dynamics.
• The four force framework is symmetrical,
  becauseapplies to a broad range of scales and
  types of social dynamics it explains. Its basic
  principles would apply to a small engineering
  class, or a large engineering school.
• This framework was originally conceived by
  Lessig, for the explanation of the entire
  Internet-infested society.

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How can we apply it?

• The four forces can be used as a shared
  vocabulary to describe the dynamic properties of
  learning organizations.
• A curriculum design workflow may be deduced from
  the four forces
• Choose architectures to fit the learning goals
• Define rules based on architectural capabilities
• Choose fair grading policies to encourage
  learning (Market)
• Establish a norm that values knowledge sharing

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Conclusion

• One or two courses may not be considered a
  curriculum,
• but it could have a tipping effect of students
  overall learning behavior.
• A good starting point to implement CDIO, without
  too much political uphill battle.
• We might learn a few tricks from a lawyer,
  (Lawrence Lessig), who cares about the philosophy
  and new civil rights primarily established by a
  great engineer, Richard Stallman.

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Acknowledgement

• Thanks go to Wang TianJu, who created many
  diagrams in this presentation.
• We must also thank the students and other
  participants in this Tsinghua-CDIO experiment,
  who truly dedicated their time, and creative
  energy to push the envelop on many fronts.
• Welcome to join us at the Knowledge City during
  2009 Summer Time.