A couple of years ago, we undertook a grand revision of our General Education curriculum, the set of core liberal arts courses that all students are required to take in order to graduate. The old system was very specific, requiring a large-ish number of courses in very specific areas, and was biased toward Western culture in a way that really doesn't reflect the modern realities of academia-- students were required to take four courses in either American or European history and culture, or four courses in Classics, and that was it. Nobody was happy with this, so it needed changing.
In the course of the overhaul, the idea of a "Sophomore Research Seminar" was invented. This is intended as a course that all students will be required to take in the sophomore year, that will serve as an introduction to research methods and scholarly writing.
The original discussions of this were a real "Two Cultures" sort of moment for me, as it was clear that people in humanities and social sciences assumed that everybody on campus does research in exactly the same way, and that the skills they find important are transferable between disciplines. They're really not-- I set foot in the library for research purposes maybe twice a year, the distinction between "primary" and "secondary" sources is basically meaningless (nothing written down is a "primary source" in science), and the citation practices and writing style favored in science are completely different than what they teach in the humanities. I was a little skeptical, bordering on cynical about the whole thing.
There was a panel discussion yesterday that provided a sort of progress report on the implementation (this is the first year of the new system), though, that improved my opinion of things quite a bit.
There were two faculty from the engineering division on the panel, though (one computer scientist and one mechanical engineer), who described project-based classes that sounded really interesting, and even useful. The CS class was team-taught (including at least one person who reads this blog), and looked at questions of product design-- how do you design things so that they're usable by random people, where do designs go wrong, and that sort of thing. The mechanical engineering class asked students to find solutions to various tricky problems, and the final research project was to look up a toy design from 1900 or earlier, and re-design it to appeal to modern third graders.
Those sounded really great to me-- the students were doing real problem-solving sorts of tasks, that would actually let them learn some useful things about how to approach scientific research. It sounded a whole lot cooler than the library-based image I had of the whole thing-- mostly because it went for real "primary" sources, namely experiments and field work (interviewing actual third graders, for example).
It also got me wondering whether there isn't something that could be done with the biomechanics stuff that last week's speaker talked about. And, of course, you could probably do some fun things with Fermi problems. When I was talking about it at dinner, Kate suggested mythbusting, and that sounds like an idea with possibilities as well, and...
Dammit, I don't have time for this.
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I vote Fermi problems. Well, maybe not a whole semester of Fermi problems, but some exposure to some is both good for the students (and has cross-disciplinary benefits) and fun. Caltech has a class called Order of Magnitude Physics.
My professional career is, intentionally, an attack on C. P. Snow's "Two Cultures" hypothesis.
At Caltech, I spent 5 years to get 2 degrees, instead of 4 years to get 1. I started as a Physics major, switched to Astronomy, rebooted, and ended with a double B.S. in Mathematics and English Literature.
Caltech has a small but outstanding faculty in Humanities and Social Sciences. It would indeed be a terrible mistake for those majoring in Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Engineering, Phsyics, and the like to ignore the riches of the Arts and Humanities.
It is, in my opinion, foolish to stay out of the library. Well, technically Caltech has several libraries. But some of the English faculty at Caltech also came to this great university to have access to the amazing Huntington Library a couple of miles to the South.
I do a lot of writing based on World Wide Web research, and have literally thousands of pages published on the Web. But there is no substitute for holding an actual page in one's hand, or even viewing a parchment under glass.
The Huntington's exhibits on Isaac Newton, curated by a Caltech History professor, were spectacular. Seeing Newton's actual writings (with scholarly and popular interpretation), seeing Leonardo da Vinci's actual codices -- this is an experience as glorious as anything in the laboratory or observatory.
biased toward Western culture in a way that really doesn't reflect the modern realities of academia
DIVERSITY is jackbooted State compassion-mandated rule of dark-skinned incompetent louts. I hope you get it good and hard.
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/Kipling.html
"And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought" (Cf: New Orleans)
http://www.masada2000.org/nobel.html
http://www.jinfo.org/Nobel_Prizes.html
Racially biased statistics
If you do not like American Standard porcelain, go to India. The Black community denies Barack Obama for being an erudite achieving first generation African-American rather than a Welfare-gorging subliterate descendent of Arab-captured slaves. When did historic Caucasian Protestant patriarchal oppression of People's of Colour ever do that?
For those who don't know, Uncle Al is a regular commenter on the Molecule of the Day blog (and even on that blog's blogroll for reasons I don't understand.) He is given to somewhat unusual opinions.
Uncle Al is a regular semi-troll around here, as well, so your warning may seem slightly redundant to UP regulars.
"I set foot in the library for research purposes maybe twice a year, the distinction between "primary" and "secondary" sources is basically meaningless (nothing written down is a "primary source" in science)"
I would like to suggest that, as stated, the above is simply wrong. In my own little corner of the philosophy of science world, I have had the opportunity to track back (and forward) a bit of how some important ideas in the early days of general relativity were systematically ignored, and then thoroughly misrepresented, in no small part because the "primary source" was set aside in favor of a "more contemporary rendering" (that totally missed the central ideas). This ideas continue to be misunderstood, to the extent that they are attended to at all.
While (again, based upon the limits of my own research) I am inclined to agree that the tendency within the physical sciences is to ignore the primaries, it seems to me that this is done at some peril to both the assumptions and conclusions of the research involved.
Another fizicist that goes to the library once a year. With online journals so prevalent, and the archive....well its just easier to do it in MY office. As a theorist, I don't care about primary, secondary, whatthehelleverary, if I can't do it myself on paper (or computer if need be) well I'm not gonna be able to trust it. And I'd rather see an elegant "contemporary rendering" than go through the whole historical path with missteps in it. There can be something to learn from the latter, but for me its at best in the second significant digit, not the first.