annotated + abstract

(1.) Education and Research in Japan’s Construction Industry

Nanni, Antonio., Takeechi, Hikaru., Yahagi, Kazuhisa. J. Profl. Issues in Engineering Education and Practices. Volume 118, Issue 3, pp. 284-289. Jully 1992

This article discusses the different between engineering and architectural education at Japanese universities. In the U.S., the article explains, engineering and architecture are two completely different programs, there is a clear cut difference, each has its on college, curricula is different and each has its on profession. Where as in Japan, civil engineering and architecture or just two different programs in the college of engineering. So engineers and architectures backgrounds are very similar in Japan and therefore can potentially have a better relationship and better understanding of each other when it comes to real world jobs. Also noted, is the fact that undergraduate seniors do not do senior projects or final research papers. The article also provides great information on the breakdown of teams in contracting firms. It shows which duties are given to certain teams and how goals are met and accomplished. The article also mentions a handicap in global engineering as a whole. It explains how the Japanese are very knowledgeable about U.S. technology and scientific production but U.S. does not know much or Japan because we cannot read Japanese literature. This was a very interesting and informative article that did not have any shortcomings in my opinion.

(2.) Civil Engineering Undergraduate Education in Japan: System Overview

Tsuji, Masonari., Nanni, Antonio. J. Profl. Issues in Engineering Education and Practices. Volume 120, Issue 2, pps 135-144. April 1994

This article discusses the undergraduate education of civil engineers. It provides a short history of Japanese education and how the Ministry of Education supervises the education as a whole. This came to be by the Education at in 1947, which was designed after WWII and was purposely drafted to emulate U.S. systems (Tsuji). The article also ranks the top universities in Japan based on the difficulty of entrance exams. Later it goes on to discuss the faculty make-up. Similar to U.S. models of teaching, Japanese universities have professors, associate professors, and lectures. All promotions and rankings are based on age and time spent. The article also provides a sample of courses offered and universities and gives insight to jobs offered and accepted by graduate students. This was also a very informative article that gave very helpful knowledge but did not have any shortcomings as far as what I expected from it.

(3.) Biochemical Engineering Education in Japan: A Survey of the Status as it is

Unno, Hajimi . EUR. J. ENG. ED., 2000, VOL. 25, NO. 3, 197–206

This article provides a history of scientific universities in Japan. It provides us with a brief history and background of scientific education, beginning with teachings during WWII and how they have arrived at more recent practices since. It later goes on to discuss the significance of genetics education in Japan along with a history as well. The article provides examples of how biology is taught along with a list of undergraduate and graduate courses provided. The article also explains how biological engineering education has only a few experimental based classes but is mostly theoretical based. In another article I found while doing my research but did not include in this bibliography was one that noted how most Japanese education practices were much influenced by British practical based learning. It would be very interesting to see why biochemical engineering decided to go in the direction of a theoretical approach.

(4.) Japanese Education and Its Problems

Ushiogi, Morikazu. Higher Education, September 1997, Vol. 34 Issue: Number 2 p237-244, 8p;

This article discussed some of the problems that the Japanese education system as a whole has been dealing with. One major problem discussed was why the number of students in graduate education does not match in proportion to the number of undergraduate students. The article gives a few reasons for this. One was that graduate schools in Japan aim at training university professors and not at training business and or public service processionals. Secondly, it provided statistics of hired employees at a private manufacturing company. The data showed that 72% were high school graduates, 26% were college graduates, and 2.7 had a master or Ph. D degrees. These are great findings because why would someone attend another 4-5 years of education when they can acquire a position immediately out of high school at the same company. This was a very insightful article but lacked information on the process students went through to complete graduate school. It also failed to note the pay difference between high school and college graduates. How does higher education differ the employs starting position? Or does time spent on the job outweigh knowledge? Those are a few questions that would have been worth mentioning in the article.

(5.) Method and Effectiveness of an Individualized Exercise of Fundamental Mathematics

Yoshioka, Takayoshi; Nishizawa, Hitoshi; Tsukamoto, Takehiko. Community College Journal of Research and Practice, v. 25 no5/6 (June/July 2001) p. 373-8.

This article discusses the two paths high school grads can take to become engineers through higher education. Students may choose to attend 4-year universities or they can do a program called ‘Kosen’ which is a small university that provides learning in liberal arts studies, natural sciences and engineering. This private schooling program provides students with individualized learning based on each students needs. Challenged students can chose to do simple assignments while, more accomplished can work on more challenging problems. Statistics from the article show that students with lower grades improve the most from individualized exercises. Another very informative article but did not go into much detail about the experience of students at 4-year universities in comparison to those at ‘Kosen’. This article did a great job of highlighting the positive aspects of the individualized learning methods but did not spend any time noting the adverse effects.

Abstract

Education is different throughout the world. No one-way is the “right” but all have great qualities about them. Although Japanese education style has been know to be strict (and does so for a reason), new practices are beginning to emerge. Japan has implemented and individualized teaching style that has proven to improve students learning abilities. Struggling students can chose to do simple assignments while, more accomplished can work on more challenging problems. It has progressed as one of the world’s leaders in engineering and has produced some of the world’s greatest engineers. In this paper I will discuss some of Japans fine education practices, its dilemma in the number of graduates students, and areas in which its education system could improve. But in all, I hope to show that the Japanese’ advances in the engineering world are due to its outstanding practices of education and training.

ReWired: Asian/TechnoScience/Area Studies - Call for Participation

THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA HUMANITIES RESEARCH INSTITUTE presents
in conjunction with the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa 
 

SEMINAR IN EXPERIMENTAL CRITICAL THEORY (SECT VII)

ReWired:

Asian/TechnoScience/Area Studies

August 1-10, 2011 at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa

The Seminar will address how technoscientific knowledge-systems are re-ordered when geo-political formations shift.

   You "don't invent the future," John Seely Brown famously noted - "you unleash it by leveraging the global community mind."

    Today the fastest expansion of technoscientific knowledge production and urban development is occurring across multiple Asian sites in the throes of techno-economic boom. Seely Brown's observation, made in conversation with Paul Duguid, was meant to characterize late 20th century knowledge institutions and sites of technological production in the US. It nevertheless uncannily predicts the radical de-centering of global technological futures in the 21st century, not least in the Asian context.

    The 2011 Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory (SECT VII) seeks to elucidate these rapidly transforming landscapes of knowledge production, the shaping of contemporary knowledge institutions, their impact on social life in intense urban contexts, and this century's techno-scientific horizons of possibility. Comprehending these movements, forces, and structures requires integrating deep understandings of history and politics represented by Asian and critical Area Studies with emergent work on the transnational dynamics of science and technology as well as on market economies and their modes of governance.

    The social life of information emerges in particular kinds of institutional structures and historical conditions. It refracts, reflects and embeds larger social forces and modes of production, extending some ideas and undercutting others. What are the impacts and influences of varying social arrangements and socio-technical assumptions on each other, and on learning practices and institutions? What sorts of networks are conducive to knowledge making now? How do the shapes and impacts of open source knowledge arrangements, for example, compare with proprietary ones?  What do these recent formations and experiences tell us about the knowledge institutions and production arrangements to come?

    Envisioning the technological future has too often seemed the province of western technologists. Recent media and economic analyses accurately identify the importance of new technological practices in contemporary Asia. Nevertheless, they often reduce complex historical processes to simplistic narratives: about the invisible hand of technoscience, or about the formerly ignorant attaining progress and becoming newly-empowered individuals and societies. The dominant questions that follow are equally misleading: Does information technology liberate developing countries from their legacy of poverty? Is Asian science as good as western science? Are women empowered by the digital revolution?

    This way of viewing things presumes Asian modernities to be marked by lack and belatedness. It views technology as the sole or dominant driver of social, economic, political and cultural change. It sees scientific ability as inherent to certain kinds of peoples. And it highlights the Asian "tiger "and "dragon" as representative of particular techno-political threats to US dominance.

Sect VII--ReWired: Asian/TechnoScience/Area Studies--will seek a more nuanced understanding of these processes by engaging a diverse set of critical accounts of science and technology as they apply to the historical conditions of these developments in Asia. Computing practices, unlike older forms of technoscience from physics and mathematics to botany and forestry, are increasingly recognized as emerging via networks shaped by, in, and across the formerly "underdeveloped" world, including India, China, South Korea and Taiwan. The Seminar will experiment with juxtaposing histories of "older" sciences with the contemporary practices of "digital natives;" integrating critical knowledge of states, science, and social movements from the histories and social sciences of Asia; engaging studies of cultural production in Asian contexts; and broadening studies of peer-to-peer creative and community-based practices generated by the transnational digital sphere.

Asia has long been part of global flows of knowledge, commodities, and culture, all too readily overlooked in conventional accounts of its "emerging" development. Accordingly, SECT VII will avoid euphoric claims of radical novelty, as well as assumptions of simple continuity with colonial pasts. We approach Asia's disparate hybrid modernities without postulating a unifying Asian modernity, seeking to understand their various, often contradictory but productive discourses of science, technology, digital revolution, political economy, community, nation, and identity.   

    In this experimental critical space, SECT VII will seek to nurture, across disciplinary and regional borders, discussions of the kind that have not flourished within the more established Area Studies or disciplinary paradigms. The seminar space will be one of practical invention and intellectual innovation. We find continuities with other ongoing projects: most notably, the Digital Media Learning initiative of the UCHRI, and the HASTAC program, that aim to create "a generation of scholars equally at ease with current (which is also to say historical) knowledge in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, on the one hand, and with the technological, scientific, and engineering knowledge on the other, with a view to facilitating development of new discoveries and new relations between currently available knowledge sources, in order to digitally prompt new bodies of important knowledge." SECT VII similarly builds on the Poor Theory Manifesto developed out of UC Irvine's Critical Theory Institute that sees the past, present, and future as mutually constitutive and "heterotemporal", attending to the "unsystematic" and undisciplined "practices of the everyday."

SECT VII: ReWired is thus concerned with the large questions of infrastructure and information, social technology and technoscience, institutions of knowledge making and learning. It will be of particular interest to those concerned with Science and Technology Studies, Asian Studies, Global Studies, Digital Media, and their interface. And it will appeal to those drawn to theoretical modesty, tinkering and improvisation, appropriation and recombinatorial experimentation, to relationalities and rearticulations.

Dates: August 1-10, 2011

Location: University of Hawai'i at Mānoa

Instructional faculty:
Itty Abraham, University of Texas
Ivan da Costa Marques, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Wendy Chun, Brown University
Joe Dumit, UC Davis
Roger Hart, University of Texas
Cori Hayden, UC Berkeley
Tim Lenoir, Duke University
Kavita Philip, UC Irvine
Achal Prabhala, Wikimedia Foundation
Sha Xin Wei, Concordia University, Montreal
Nishant Shah, Center for Internet and Society
Lucy Suchman, Lancaster University
Siva Vaidhyanathan, University of Virginia
Kath Weston, University of Virginia

Application Fee: $20

Registration Fee: $1250

Registration fee includes shared housing, instruction, and some meals. 

Applicants are urged to seek funding from their home institutions. A very limited number of scholarships may be available to full time registered students.

Presented by the University of California Humanities Research Institute and the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Hawai'i, Mānoa. For additional information, please visit http://www.uchri.org/sect.php or contact us at sect@hri.uci.edu or 949-824-8900.

Research Progress Report #1: China

I originally wanted to do research about Engineering in Brazil, however I had a very difficult time finding information about this topic. When attempting to narrow down the topice I also had difficulty deciding what aspect I wanted to focus on. As a result I decided to pick another country that would allow for more available research. That is how I landed on China.

Through previous classes I have studied a small amount about China and its in depth history. In comparison to any other country, China’s history is extremely different due to its relationships with neighboring and European countries. Between its European influence, massive immigrations out of the country to seek refuge beginning in 1600‘s and multiple dictatorships, the history of the Chinese people includes many outside influences. Even though these factors have had enormous impact on the country, China is still one of the few countries that carries a strong sense of nationalism and national identity that has stayed evident throughout time.

With this brief knowledge of the countries history it made me wonder how it impacted on societal positions of professions, such as engineering, and the education that leads to this position. Currently my main topics of my paper will include the history of country and how it corresponds to the development of education within a technical field, especially engineering. In addition, how this education has progressed and what social representation it creates for that individual. The next point will focus on the mass immigrations out of the country and how this affected the work force by population decrease, influence of the government and other external factors. The last part of my paper will be dedicated to the equality of the field between gender roles. When and if women were introduce to this technical field, what obstacles they have had to overcome and how their social role in society affects their ability to obtain this particular profession.

From what I have currently researched the the entrepreneurial talent has been incorporated into business activities to create wealth and establish an economy boom. Within China entrepreneurs are classified into three dominant groups: “Peasants-turned entrepreneurs; officials-turned entrepreneurs; and overseas-returned and engineers-turned entrepreneurs” (Zhang 178). In combination with the rise of all three of these engineers and the “replacement of position-based rights with property-based rights,” the Chinese economy has become the most stable it has been in decades.

The questions I am searching for feedback is if my topic is too board or if I am incorporating to many topics? Should I focus more in depth on one of the mentioned topics above or incorporate them all in hopes it makes a more comprehensible report. I still I am working on a specific thesis, and I believe that having so many topics is what is giving me difficulty. Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Research Project Report #1: Alana Snelling - Asian Engineering Education

Some of the fastest growing economies, educational systems, and expansion of new ideas have been emerging from Asian countries. To be honest, everything that we buy now comes from an Asian country and is shipped to the United States. Much of their infrastructure is being rebuilt so that they can use the land available to it’s highest potential. The only way to get the highest potential out of the small amount of land available to them, is to use highly skilled engineers that are able to compete amongst others all around the world. This type of skill requires a high status educational system and that is what I plan to study more in depth. My project will be the types of education needed in Asia to become an engineer, what being an engineer means, and how race and social status effect the possibilities of becoming an engineer.

I have read some studies informing me that many of the Asian countries do not have a formal style of engineering accreditation, yet many are moving in the direction of a more formalized western style education. I would like to find out why this is and the specific steps that Asia is taking in this new move. For China specifically, the growth of education for engineering is linked specifically with the growth of China’s economy. Another article claimed that China has the largest amount of students graduating from college than any other country in the world. My interest is in the number of students that graduate from engineering fields. Korea for example is trying to create accredited programs that allow for the students who graduate to become global competitors in the engineering world rather than specifying in techniques that apply only to Korea.

Engineering accreditation within all of the Asian countries seemed to differ slightly depending on many different factors. I believe that this differentiation is due to how education is dealt with in the Asian cultures. In my international political economy class, I learned that children’s education is the most prioritized thing of the family/house in Japan and China. The mother stays home to learn the information that their children are learning so that when the child comes home from school, the mother can then teach their children even more. Privatized after school programs were also put into place that help prepare students at age 5 for a test that will eventually be take at the age of 17. This test then is the ultimate deciding factor of what college they will attend and more importantly the life they they will lead. Another important factor to the level of education for engineering in Asian countries is the religion that the country associates itself with. Some countries may relate their religious ideas to Buddhism or Hinduism. More interestingly is the close connections with religion and political involvement. Many of these countries are regulated by the government who then have the final say in what is accepted and what is not in education. In some countries education may be on lock down by the government, while others lack in any sort of structure. I believe that all of these subjects have very strong impacts on the way Asian Engineering education is formed and how it has been shaped over time. I plan on researching how these cultural and social topics impact engineering education in more depth to grasp a deeper understanding of the engineering education system put into place in Asia.