Class 2 week 2

Well, what can I say but thank the good Lord for an extra week. I have to be honest and upfront and say that I really haven't had much time to delve into all the work in depth, however, being as I will be gone at a conference all weekend, I will not have time to write a before the expected timeline so I will do my best with that which I've done so far.

I look forward to the ability to play with the search engines as I am one of those people who have gotten comfortable with my Google and that's basically all that I know. I have used Ask.com a little and yahoo sparingly, however, Google has been my nearly exclusive search engine for quite some time. I do like Google and find it very usefull, yet between what I learned about searching from our class combined with my knowledge that there has to be other good options out there as well, I look forward to the adventure of exploring these newer technologies.

As for the reading, (I really wish my book would get here) I have made it through Ch. 3, however, have not gotten around to reading ch. 4 yet. Ch. 3 really struck a cord with me because I find collaboration and communication amongst students to be one of my strongest strengths as a teacher and concentrate heavily on this skill as I find this to be one of the most important skills our students can learn. I see so many of my students come in with little to no social skils and know that these students will need to be able to communicate with their future co-workers, employers, and clients. Like I've always stated to my students, "you can be the brightest of the bunch, yet if you can't communicate your thoughts and ideas to anyone, all those brains don't mean a thing". In my field of Engineering and Architecture, these skills are even more so desired. In the field of Engineering, one of the greatest obstacles facing our Engineers is the lack of ability to communicate their ideas to desires to the laborers. Most of the laborers refuse to convey their thoughts to the engineers because they believe them to be too stuck up and set in their ways to change and don't believe that they have any clue about reality as it pertains to actual production. In the field of Architecture, we face this problem a little as well. In today's society, where more Architects are having to set down with the actual homeowners and decipher their desires and interests and put that onto paper, the necessity to communicate has obviously gotten more important. In addition to communicating to the homeowner, Architects must also deal directly with the General Contractor. As someone who has worked on the labor side of this, I can honestly say that there are several Architects out there who have no clue how to communicate with the GC and have no clue what it takes to build a house. I've had Architects tell me, after we've poured a foundation, that he changed the plan and we are now going to add brick, never mind that we live in Wisconsin and with our frost layers, that brick fascia would last all but a couple of winters before it was completely cracked, off kilter, or falling down. I had one Architect tell me to just stick to plans when his plans were off by 2'. When I explained to him that if I were to stick to his plan the house would be out of square by 4' he just could not believe that he was wrong until I told him I would go no further on the house until he came to the site and showed me how it could possibly work. Once arriving on site, he looked at the plan, argued with me for nearly an hour about why he was correct until I ordered my guys to set up the forms along the measurement he had provided and he saw that the East wall fomed about an 85 deg. angle vs. the 90 it was supposed to be. Ultimately, I think by teaching my students the ability to collaborate amongst eachother, I am teaching them how to respect others and their opinions. If my students are able to do this, I think they will be better prepared to express their ideas to others as well as constantly improve themselves by being attentive to the fact that others may have some knowledge they can learn from.

My classes are heavily software oriented and yes, most of these softwares claim to be interactive, however, as our text states, they are in no way, shape, or form interactive. We try to overcome this by having our students design for others rather than for themselves. For example, I just gave my Architecture students an assignment today where they have to design a home for a family of 4. The family has $350,000 to work with and I subtract from that total for a chunk of land of their choosing. I let them pick between 25 acres in the country, a 1.75 acre golf course lot, a 3/4 acre subdivision lot and 1/4 acre city lot. I then ask them to research how much these lots cost by reviewing several Reality sites and coming up with comparables. What is left of the money is what they get to work with for building the home for this family of four. It is then up to the students to ask me what the ages of the family members are, what their interest are, and what they desire in a home. I try to give each student some different criterium to go off of but ultimately, this forces the students to learn that they have to work with the family not just for the family. I commonly throw out ideas that make little to no sense and inform the students that it is their responsiblity to give their professional opinions on the ideas, yet ultimately, the people paying the bills are the one who gets the final decision. We also try to come up with several community based assignments for our students to complete. Last year our students designed the new town square recreational park for the city. I asked that the City Chairman come and speak with my class about what their desires were and what they wanted to see in the end. I then had my students ask questions and begin their designs. As our students came up with more questions along the way, I had them call the Chairman directly to get the answers from him. I think too often we as teachers feel we need to handle the interactions of our students with the community and in reality our students are extremely capable of doing this very well. In addition to learning about the process of how to design for the individual, these students also learn the best ways to deal with the client. In addition to such assignments for my Architecture class I also setup much of my Engineering class as partner based assignments. I feel that this forces our students to learn to work with others as well as respect others ideas and opinions. I get a lot of very bright students in these classes, however, a big problem I run into with these students, is that they are so worried about getting an A that they refuse to give their partners enough credit and try to do everything themselves. I usually let this go for a couple of days and then inform the students that this grade is based more on how well they can work with their partners and not necessarily on their final project. This changes things exponentially and once the collaboration begins, we usually get better finished projects than they would have otherwise.