Teaching socio-cultural impacts of technology in advanced technical courses: a case study

ABSTRACT

Engineering education has traditionally focused on the development of technical skills and knowledge. Nowadays, the need for educating engineers in non-technical skills, such as reflective thinking, is being recognised internationally. This paper proposes that socio-cultural impacts of technology be studied together with the technology itself through the integration of social awareness modules into advanced technical courses, providing a venue for students to exercise their reflective thinking skills in the context of technologies that are of interest to them. The paper presents an exploratory study of the essays of senior year engineering students on the socio-cultural impacts of computer vision technologies. It provides insights on the themes that are of interest to the students and on the students’ strengths and weaknesses relating to their reflective thinking abilities. Similar modules would apply well to other advanced courses in the engineering curriculum, to help contextualise technology and enhance the reflective abilities of engineering graduates.

KEYWORDS:

• Computer vision
• contextualisation of technology
• engineering education
• reflective thinking abilities
• socio-cultural impacts

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Melissa Cote received the B.Eng., M.A.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Engineering from Polytechnique Montreal, QC, Canada, in 2003, 2006, and 2010, respectively. From 2010 to 2012, she worked at the Laboratory for Robotic Vision, Simon Fraser University, BC, Canada. In 2012, she joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Victoria, BC, Canada as a postdoctoral fellow, where she is currently a research associate. Her research interests include computer vision, image processing, and pattern recognition.

Alexandra Branzan Albu was born in Bucharest, Romania. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electronic Engineering (1992) and a Ph.D. degree (2000) in Electronic Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, Romania. In 2001, she joined the Computer Vision and Systems Laboratory at Laval University, QC, Canada as a postdoctoral researcher and became an Assistant Professor at Laval in 2003. She moved at the University of Victoria, BC, Canada in 2005 where she is currently an Associate Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and cross-listed with Computer Science. Her research interests are related to image analysis, computer vision, and visual computing. She works towards expanding her teaching style with problem-based solving and experiential learning techniques. Dr. Branzan Albu is a registered professional engineer in the Province of British Columbia, Canada.

Notes

1 By using the phrase ‘so-called soft skills’, our intent is not to submit to the ideological demarcation between ‘real’ engineering knowledge (hard skills) and ‘other’ knowledge (soft skills), but to problematise the division between soft and hard skills. In fact, our proposed approach seeks to remove such dichotomies by enlarging the technical focus of engineering education to include reflections on the socio-cultural impacts of technologies via non-technical assignments.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Learning and Teaching Centre of the University of Victoria, through the Learning without Borders Initiative, under an internal grant from the University of Victoria (no grant number).