I recently re-visited a very interesting educational initiative at the Institut Francais du Petrol in Paris.
This was at the invitation of Dr Joao Silveira, a collaborator with the UT Dallas ArtSciLab, which Kathryn Evans and I co-direct.
On my first visit, over a year ago, Joao introduced me to their school focused on retraining petroleum engineers to become engineers in alternative energy (solar, wind, tidal, biofuels, geothermal, hydrogen, energy storage etc). How can dirty engineers become green and clean? The new Lab e-nov director is Olivier Bernaert.
Lots of MOOCs, micro credentials etc involved . See the work of Marie de la Villèsbrunne.
Hmm so what? Big Deal?
The IFP has been renamed as the IFP for Energies Nouvelles (IFP for new forms of energy) or more accurately: Lab e·nov. As part of this transition – the IFP has created the Lab e-nov, a dedicated lab offering “education engineering’ services to IFPEN researchers, as well as IFP school teachers and students.
Here is their current explanatory video, in French: Lab e·nov : le laboratoire des cultures digitales
Their school is now re-oriented to a re-emerging field of EDUCATIONAL ENGINEERING:
“Educational engineering is a structured process aimed at designing, adapting, or transforming a learning system in order to optimize the effectiveness of the training.”
A detailed overview can be found here.
I find this to be a very significant restructuring of how we think of systems to help people find out what they might need to learn/teach. And yes, also how to learn how to teach/learn differently that we currently do.
About the Author:
Roger F. Malina is a space scientist and astronomer, with a specialty in extreme and ultraviolet astronomy, space instrumentation and optics. He served as director of the Observatoire Astronomique de Marseille Provence and was NASA Principal Investigator for the Extreme Ultraviolet Satellite project at the University of California, Berkeley.
He is also a publisher and editor in the new emerging research fields that connect the sciences and engineering to the arts, design and humanities. Since 1982, he has served as Executive Editor of the Leonardo Publications at MIT Press. He founded, and serves on the board of two nonprofits, ISAST in San Francisco and OLATS in Paris, which advocate and document the work of artists involved in contemporary science and technology.
He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Art and Technology and Professor of Physics, at the University of Texas at Dallas and Directeur de Recherche for the CNRS in France. He serves as the Associate Director of ATEC, and founded the ArtSciLab in the ATEC program fall 2013.