Teacher's guide for Reflecting on the human dimension of socio-technical systems

by Yvonne Toft

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Introduction

Use this Insight Reflector to help university level engineering and interdisciplinary students reflect on the human dimensions of socio-technical engineering. The goal is to get students prompting open reflection. The students are first presented with links that should be a catalyst for questioning the status quo of the engineering profession and whether the profession delivers 'socially responsible engineering'. The concepts are presented in the context of ethics and sustainability across the life cycle. The second set of web links are designed to take students out of the comfort of reflecting as a member of a profession and re-examine what they themselves would be prepared to do to deliver on their 'truths' about engineers being 'socially responsible'.

Overview

Main Topic:	Human dimensions in socio technical engineering
Subtopics:	sustainability, ethics, life cycle , systems approach
Grade Level:	University
Subject(s):	Interdisciplinary
Learning Goal:	prompting open reflection

Vision and Reality

If the learning goal were achieved in the most ideal of perfect worlds it would look something like:

Engineering and other educators will understand and champion the human element in system design. The educators will feel motivated to work through the activities together with others or on their own but will also find it exciting to consider the possibility of integrating the activities into their own class rooms to help their students gain some foundation knowledge in human factors. The learning activities might also be used in a workshop format.

However, what I anticipate probably looks more like:

Based on the Vision set for this activity, the actual reality is more likely to be that the educators will only engage if the activities require a short time to complete and have maximum punch. The activities will need to be very usable for students without much tinkering for the educators to use them in that way.

The What - If Inventory

To give the activity its best chance at helping students learn, I assembled this list of possible resources:

Technology Resources

This activity will require individual participant access to LAN or broadband internet capable computers. Ideally the participants would be able to cut and paste into word processing software on the same computer. Access via modem can be successful with a little patience. Access to a common discussion board / blogg or other will be required if there is no opportunity for participants to debrief face to face.



Internet Potential

There is lots of potential for extending the learning activities with current events. On line news reports have huge potential for presenting multimedia catalyst material for helping participants understand their need to learn about this. Take time to explore the potential of How Stuff Works and Bad Human Factors Design pages to further supplement learning.



Possible Collaborations

The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society of Australia has a very active ergonomics community who would love to collaborate. If you would like to bounce ideas off the 'real world' then visit http://www.ergonomics.org.au/erginfomail.htm and subscribe to one of the email lists.



Special Events

AaeE conference, HFESA conference and CRC Centre for Integrated Engineering Asset Management workshops are all coming up in 2005. Contact the author for more information.



General Resources

End user resources are likely to be LAN / library electronic resources. A variety of software capability and understanding / experience of learning opportunities via the web.



Standards

These learning activities are congruent with engineering professional competency standards & HB59 The Human Factor (Australian Standards Association).

Conclusion

I would see this as an activity best completed individually but then debriefed as a class (face to face or online) to bring out key themes. This activity would be complimented by others activities in the human centred engineering learning resource centre (http://peopledesign.cqu.edu.au).

created by Yvonne Toft email: y.toft@cqu.edu.au http://web-and-flow.com/members/ytoft/topic1/reflector.htm