Engineering and Technology Studies at Illinois

The last installment in the movie series Movies Even an Engineer Would Love for the fall semester, Bush Mechanics, will be shown Wednesday, November 12, 2008, 7-9 pm at the Spurlock Museum: 

What do you do when your car breaks down in the Australian outback? Bush Mechanics celebrates automotive ingenuity among the indigenous peoples of Yuendumu, Australia. Produced by an Aboriginal media collective in the Western Desert, it includes lessons such as how to make a clutch out of wood and how to use the windshield wiper reservoir as a fuel pump. 

A discussion of the film follows the showing.

The 2008 Workshop on Philosophy and Engineering (WPE-2008) has posted extended abstracts (here) for the gathering that will be held next week 10-12 November 2008 (Monday-Wednesday) at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London.  More information is about the workshop is available on the website here.

Interestingly, WPE and Engineering and Technology Studies at Illinois (ETSI) trace their roots to the same blog post in 2006 (here).

The 2008 Workshop on Philosophy & Engineering (WPE-2008) to be held 10-12 November 2008 (Monday-Wednesday) at the Royal Academy of Engineering (London) posted its full schedule on its website (here).

iFoundry’s co-director Dave Goldberg will speak on The Creativity Imperative and the Technology Professional of the Future (see here).

Abstract. The world is apparently flat. It is being given over to a rising creative class, and it requires a whole new mind. A common conclusion drawn from authors such as Friedman, Florida, and Pink is that technology professionals in advanced economies must excel at creating new categories of product and service. Returns to routine engineering/technology labor are declining because of the ease with which these tasks may be outsourced. The talk will discuss this situation and the work of the iFoundry for Innovation in engineering education.

Bio. David E. Goldberg, is the Jerry S. Dobrovolny Distinguished Professor in Entrepreneurial Engineering and the co-director of iFoundry at UIUC and co-founder of ShareThis Inc., a web2.0 startup company. He is the author of Genetic Algorithms in Search, Organization, and Machine Learning (1989), The Design of Innovation (2002), and The Entrepreneurial Engineer (2006).

Related videos and powerpoints are available on iFoundry’s YouTube channel and SlideShare page.