Using History of Technology to Promote an Understanding of the Impact of Engineering Solutions among Engineering Students

Abstract

Immediately prior to joining IEEE in 1997, he was Group Manager at Eric Marder Associates, a New York market research firm, where he supervised Ph.D. scientists and social scientists undertaking market analyses for Fortune 500 high-tech companies. He is also a registered Patent Agent. He holds S.B. degrees in electrical engineering and in anthropology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in anthropology from Harvard University. His research focus has been on the history and social relations of technology. He has worked as an electronics engineer for the Department of Defense, and he has held teaching and research positions relating to the social study of technology at M.I.T., Harvard, and Yale University, including a stint as Assistant Collections Manager/Curator at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

In Search of Integration: Mapping Conceptual Efforts to Apply STS to Engineering Education

“…Some of the main themes include ethics, global context, the environment, societal context, and ABET. One of the papers that directly addresses the EC2000 standard that graduates "understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context" is Geselowitz and Vardalas' "Using History of Technology to Promote an Understanding of the Impact of Engineering Solutions among Engineering Students" [6]. This paper exemplifies the parallel development of the new accreditation criteria and a greater emphasis within LEES on the interweaving of science, technology, and society.…”

Semiconductors and Society: A First-year Seminar

“…Another approach has been to use history of technology courses to introduce students to the societal impact of engineering through the study of multiple technologies ranging from preindustrial to modern eras [8,9]. In many cases, these efforts have been billed as a way to address ABET criteria mandating knowledge of the societal impact of technology in engineering students.…”

Teaching Non-major Students Electrical Science and Technology

“…4 For engineering students, using history of technology to understand the impact of solutions has been recently proposed. 5 This paper describes methods of teaching a course for an audience of non-technical upper class undergraduate students who have completed a First Year Seminar course with a college writing component. While STS serves as a common descriptor at many schools, terminology in the field varies; at Messiah College, a Christian college of the liberal and applied arts and sciences, the requirement has been designated as Science, Technology and the World (STW), within the category of Interdisciplinary Studies (IDS).…”