Seminars & Colloquia
Jamie Jennings
IBM
"On the Notion that Undergraduates are Actual Human Beings -- Implications for the Academy"
Wednesday May 02, 2018 09:30 AM
Location: 3211, EB2 NCSU Centennial Campus
(Visitor parking instructions)
Abstract: Scientists and philosophers love to create models. A model is implicitly a projection into a space of relevant characteristics, allowing us to reason without the distraction of 'extraneous' properties.
Undergraduate students have been modeled as customers, acolytes, apprentices, and occasionally Markov processes. But we know, of course, that students are human beings. Accepting humanity as irreducible has implications for teaching and learning, which we will explore in this talk.
Undergraduate education must be concerned with a wide range of student situations, needs, and wants. We must understand and communicate how the learning we want to occur will help each student, as an individual, achieve their goals.
In the context of engineering education, we will argue that collaborative problem solving and project-based assignments are effective parts of the learning experience, combining fundamental knowledge and practical skills in a way that addresses a range of student goals.
A portion of the talk will consist of an example (brief) classroom session aimed at a hypothetical audience of Computer Science undergraduates.
Undergraduate students have been modeled as customers, acolytes, apprentices, and occasionally Markov processes. But we know, of course, that students are human beings. Accepting humanity as irreducible has implications for teaching and learning, which we will explore in this talk.
Undergraduate education must be concerned with a wide range of student situations, needs, and wants. We must understand and communicate how the learning we want to occur will help each student, as an individual, achieve their goals.
In the context of engineering education, we will argue that collaborative problem solving and project-based assignments are effective parts of the learning experience, combining fundamental knowledge and practical skills in a way that addresses a range of student goals.
A portion of the talk will consist of an example (brief) classroom session aimed at a hypothetical audience of Computer Science undergraduates.
Short Bio: Dr. Jamie A. Jennings earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Cornell University. Her research program there, which continued at Tulane University, explored the theoretical and practical nature of tasks performed jointly by multiple mobile robots. In that work are applications of distributed systems, programming language implementation, geometric modeling, and artificial intelligence.
Subsequently, she spent 18 years at IBM, holding positions in both Research (at the T.J. Watson Lab, NY) and Development (in Research Triangle Park, NC). Among other achievements, she led an international effort among 40+ companies to create a mobile management protocol that is deployed in most of the world’s smartphones and wireless carrier networks.
She writes compilers for fun; plays ice hockey; invented the Rosie Pattern Language (http://tiny.cc/rosie); and once fixed a bug in a Lisp program with a soldering iron.
Subsequently, she spent 18 years at IBM, holding positions in both Research (at the T.J. Watson Lab, NY) and Development (in Research Triangle Park, NC). Among other achievements, she led an international effort among 40+ companies to create a mobile management protocol that is deployed in most of the world’s smartphones and wireless carrier networks.
She writes compilers for fun; plays ice hockey; invented the Rosie Pattern Language (http://tiny.cc/rosie); and once fixed a bug in a Lisp program with a soldering iron.
Host: Linda Honeycutt, CSC