Center for the New Engineer Brochure

To Get In Touch With CNE, Contact:

Peter J. Denning or Daniel Menascé,

Computer Science Department

George Mason University

Fairfax, VA 22030-4444

(703) 993-1530

cne-info@cne.gmu.edu

Purpose

The Center for the New Engineer (CNE) was established in August 1993 as an ongoing, interdisciplinary investigation into the education of engineers and scientists who operate from a new common sense about profession, education, research, innovation, and work. Engineers have an opportunity to demonstrate that the Internet is not only a mechanism to transport data, but also is a place where communities form and where human concerns are dealt with. Our main strategies are to:

Design new approaches to teaching engineering based on an interpretation of learning in which knowledge is the capacity for effective action in a domain.

Design new approaches to engineering curriculum based on an interpretation of education as an unending process of increasing one's competence and as a social process in which one takes responsibility for one's own learning and for the group's learning.

Design new approaches to engineering research based on an interpretation that research and teaching are coherent parts of education. Build social and technological mechanisms for maintaining strong links between research and curriculum.

Design a collaboration among organizations to demonstrate a new social function for schools -- K-12 and universities -- jointly transforming the community's new knowledge into curricula at all levels.

Every project depends integrally on computing and telecommunications technology to support human practices and concerns. No project of the center is considered a success unless it results in new actions by our students, faculty, and others.

Background

Higher education in America is facing an enormous breakdown. Performance of students on standardized tests has been declining. Increasing numbers of students are dropping out of school. State legislatures have been cutting funds to universities.

Towards a New Interpretation

In "Educating a New Engineer" (Communications of the ACM, 1992), Peter Denning proposed that these problems have been caused by massive shifts in the public's understanding not only of research, but of profession, innovation, work, university, and education. These shifts bring expectations that old curricula cannot meet. He proposed reforms that would adapt our curricula to the new realities.

In "Designing New Principles to Sustain Research in Our Universities" (Communications of the ACM, 1993), Denning proposed further that we have allowed research and teaching to appear to be competing enterprises. To reconnect research to the educational mission, he proposed establishing an explicit "feedback path" from research into curriculum.

We need to design and practice a new engineering common sense in which engineers are not merely the receivers of specifications and solvers of problems, but are entrepreneurs who design technologies that make human action more productive.

CNE - Center for the New Engineer

This center was founded to create a working instance of an engineering curriculum that adjusts to feedback received from other schools, businesses, and government. The initial focus is the construction of a high performance computing lab for undergraduate students, offering them introduction to advanced computing and communication technologies. The Community Learning and Information Network (CLIN) is helping to extending the lab's capabilities to regional K-12 schools through a network called CNELink.

Projects

HPC in the Curriculum -- The Feedback Path

This project creates a high performance computing (HPC) laboratory for undergraduates and a set of practices through which faculty transfer results from research domains into the lab. Through joint projects and tutorial modules, as well as the Internet, the results of this effort will be available to regional and other K-12 schools and to universities in the national HPC consortium. This project is supported by ARPA.

Education Engineers to Design Complex Systems

This project augments the CNE HPC lab project by providing for curriculum development of tutorial modules specifically oriented to teaching students how to make sense of complex systems. Methods from computational science and organizational informatics are brought in and made available for students' "design portfolios." This project is supported by NSF.

CNE Tutorial Modules

The modules developed at the CNE HPC Lab include Workflow and Coordination Systems, Discrete Event Simulation, Scalable Parallel Algorithms, Genetic Algorithms, Network Protocols, and Virtual Memory Systems. More are under development. These modules provide tutorials, demonstrations, and workbenches for students seeking familiarity with current research results. They are accessible via the World Wide Web. This project is supported by ARPA and NSF.

CNELink and New Engineer Consortium

This consortium includes regional schools, businesses, and government to assist K-12 schools in working together to transform new community knowledge into curricula at all levels. It is a testbed for the results of the other projects, and a forum for members to discuss their concerns, proposals, and offers. The network connecting them to Internet via GMU is called CNELink. This project is supported by ARPA.

Exhibitions in the Curriculum

This program offers a design exhibition course as the capstone in the computer science curriculum. Seniors form teams to work on a project selected by a company in our Collaborative Partners Program. This program not only benefits students, but also offers a unique opportunity for industries to use state of the art computing technologies to solve company specific problems.

Collaborative Space Through Lotus Notes

This project will create a "collaborative space" in which groups of students, faculty and others can form, share work, and organize their interactions. Lotus Notes offers a medium accomplishing this. This project is a collaboration with Lotus Development Corporation and the GMU University Computing and Information Services.

Improving Academic Organization Processes Through Workflow Technology

This project will demonstrate how technology for the collaborative space can be coupled with workflow management technology to prejudice significant improvements in academic work processes. It is a collaboration with Action Technologies.

Reinventing Teaching

This project is an ongoing investigation of teaching methods that take maximum advantage of new computing and networking technologies and cultivate more effective teaching and teachers. Technologies do not automatically make teaching better; we must also work with the practices and skills of faculty and students.

Sense 21

This project establishes a growing network of students and faculty devoted to developing a new shared (common) sense that would enable them to be much more effective engineers in the 21st century. The new sense is based in new interpretations of communication as coordination of action. An experimental course has been designed and is being offered every Spring.

Investigators

Peter J. Denning, Director

Daniel Menascé, Associate Director

Joe Gerstner, CNELink Director

Sam Wyman, CLIN Director

Co-Investigators

Christopher Dede - Graduate School of Education

James Gentle - Computational Sciences and Informatics

Ophir Frieder - Computer Science

Craig Jensen - Computational Sciences and Informatics

Menas Kafatos - Computational Sciences and Informatics

David Rine - Computer Science

John Wallin - Computational Sciences and Informatics

Other Participating Faculty

James Acquah - Computer Science

Dennis Buede - Systems Engineering

Richard Carver - Computer Science

Gerald Cook - Electrical and Computer Engineering

Kenneth DeJong - Computer Science

Henry Hamburger - Computer Science

Kathryn Laskey - Systems Engineering

Andrej Manitius - Electrical and Computer Engineering

George Michaels - Computational Sciences and Informatics

Eugene Norris - Computer Science

Mark Pullen - Computer Science

Donna Quammen - Computer Science

Dana Richards - Computer Science

Sanjeev Setia - Computer Science

Michael Tanner - Computer Science

Gheorghe Tecuci - Computer Science

Pearl Wang - Computer Science

Harry Wechsler - Computer Science

Edward Wegman - Applied Engineering Statistics

Elizabeth White - Computer Science

Affiliated Institutions

Consortium

The consortium for the New Engineer consists of representatives from:

Alexandria City School District, Virginia

Arlington County School District, Virginia

Fairfax County School District, Virginia

Montgomery County School District, Maryland

Prince William Country School District, Virginia

Virginia State Education Department

Advanced Research Projects Agency

National Science Foundation

Business Partners

Action Technologies

Community and Learning Information Network

Lotus Development Corporation

Media General

Morino Foundation

Other GMU Groups

Computational Science and Informatics

Graduate School of Education

School of Business Administration

University Computing and Information Services

Editors -- Michael Hieb and Nina Kaull