By Sherra E. Kerns
WE CAN SHARE INFORMATION
WITH FAR-FLUNG PARTS OF THE WORLD ALMOST INSTANTANEOUSLY,
BUT THERE REMAIN ENORMOUS BARRIERS TO SHARING COMMON
GOALS AND VALUES.
I first watched The Global Brain, a film
based on the famous book by Peter Russell, while staying
at a quirky one-bedroom bed and breakfast in the Pacific
Northwest in the late 1980s. There were crystals on
the nightstands and a pyramid in the center of the room,
so I expected a "cosmic" message and got
one. The film begins with the Gaia Hypothesis—a
theory that the Earth is a single, living organism that
maintains conditions necessary for its survival. That
conclusion is based on the remarkable constancy of global
temperature, ocean salinity, atmospheric composition,
and more than a dozen other factors—and despite
the mucking around of humankind.
The film suggests—by making analogy to the
complexity of organisms with nervous systems—that
the Earth is on the brink of developing its own consciousness,
which will supersede and link the consciousnesses of
humans worldwide. That is, we will be neuron equivalents—the
communications elements in the Global Brain.
You can relax because we're not there yet.
You can still have your individual thoughts. However,
during our lifetimes, human society has developed ever
increasing levels of synergistic activity. We achieved
worldwide commerce, then Internet-enabled, low-cost,
and near-instantaneous international communications,
and now a willingness to move people and jobs from country
to country with the same ease that we used to move them
from city to city.
Some of the elements of globally linked human thought
are already present. A very real interest in the exchange
of ideas and practices across many areas of human endeavor,
the sharing of quality standards for education and professional
practice, and knowledge and appreciation of the potential
economic, political, and cultural contributions of people
in other societies are growing rapidly around the world.
I've recently had the honor of representing
ASEE at two major international conferences and several
in the United States. In Beijing this past September,
ASEE held its 3rd International Colloquium on Engineering
Education. The attendees included three groups: China,
the United States, and other nations. Such a balance
has been a formula for the success of our international
colloquia. We focus on the pair-wise relationship between
two nations or regions and complement it with participation
from others in the world. We're now in the phase
of exploring deep relationships with these groups.
Also in September, ASEE co-sponsored the IGIP annual
symposium, which united the societies and presidents
of four major engineering education organizations: ASEE,
IEEE Education Society, IGIP, and SEFI. This was the
first time in many years that these latter two organizations,
representing different regions of Europe, had met together.
Discussions at these international conferences centered
on educational reform and best practices, much as they
did at ASEE's annual conference and at the recent
ASEE co-sponsored Frontiers in Education conference.
Conversational horizons have rapidly expanded and the
commitment of prestigious foreign institutions and government
groups is startling. Many new faces are talking about
familiar issues.
Next year, the ASEE International Colloquium will
be held in Sydney, Australia. A goal of this meeting
is to broadly recognize the need to advance engineering
education through meetings of not only conference attendees
but also representatives of major multinational corporations
and national, regional, and global organizations (including
segment-oriented groups, such as continuing undergraduate,
graduate, and other education-focused groups), and government
and ministerial authorities. In this meeting, we will
press forward on ASEE initiatives and forge collaborative
relationships between societies devoted to furthering
excellence in engineering education worldwide. As the
pace of the world accelerates, fostering communication,
understanding, and global dialog have become fundamental
priorities for ASEE. We will seek to coordinate the
founding of a cooperative association or federation
of groups worldwide that are devoted to engineering
education.
We have learned a lot this year. In China, which
educates approximately one-half of all of the world's
engineers, engineering education is valued as a preparation
for contributions in government, policy, innovation,
intellectual property, broad engineering disciplines,
and manufacturing—in short, for ensuring the future
of the nation. China is clearly interested in moving
to outcomes-based education and in engaging even larger
numbers of youngsters in engineering education. We also
learned of forecasts for the distributions of future
engineering jobs around the world, including functional
foci, such as manufacturing engineering and computer
science, designated as target opportunities for the
countries outside the western hemisphere. Clearly, the
rate of cultural change is accelerating and increasingly
affected by choices made in other nations.
Stepping Back
So, then, what is the present state of planetary
humankind and how is ASEE involved? We are deeply interconnected
through information exchange. Information is the messenger,
sometimes the message, and even the effluent of the
Internet age. The rapid growth of exchange via the Internet
has compromised the quality, enhanced the quantity,
and blurred the boundaries between information and opinion.
Innovative information quality standards are needed
to realize benefit from this voluminous exchange.
We are already deeply interdependent. Teaming is
widely recognized as a skill essential to professional
success. In the United States, knowledge of languages
and appreciation of cultural distinctions remain frontiers
for our parti-cipation in a multicultural citizenry.
For all of the power of connectivity we can access,
most of the world's people still tend to have
a local orientation. Our world's connectivity
now extends beyond the reach of our personal perspectives.
The Global Brain, in its nonscientific, quasi-rational
way, broached this issue by noting, "We've
lived as fleas living on an elephant," and suggested
that we should jump back and see the whole in order
to recognize our circumstance and appreciate our opportunities
Given our vastly different circumstances of health,
comfort, education, and religious and societal ethic,
is it possible to share our sense of what is real, or
meaningful, or profane? Can we, at a minimum, come to
respect the value of hearing each other's views,
or the recognition that perspectives from different
societies may bring value and substance to engineering
education and larger multisocietal endeavors? Awareness
of local circumstances and solutions can certainly inform
and enhance the positive impact of our global actions.
Yet extending conversations across values boundaries
is difficult because they too frequently insult principles
we hold sacred. We often choose to remain comfortable
by listening only to those who think and believe as
we do.
As members of ASEE, we share the values of science,
mathematics, and the belief that transforming theories
to reality through innovation and engineering is what
makes life interesting, worthy, and exciting. In today's
world, technology forms the foundation for economic
growth worldwide. Engineers are the innovators and engineering
education the fundamental, binding foundation for success.
Future successes will not be isolated or contained within
just the United States or Europe but must be considered
in a truly global context. As an international society
of engineers, it is our moral obligation to recognize
change and work together to rationally meet the challenges
of globalization – for the good of all our people.
As members of ASEE, we hold another position of extreme
advantage in at least one respect: engineering and technology
offer us a common global language, a rational, shared
way of understanding complex systems. This shared language
of our profession provides us a basis for forging solutions
in support of our common body—the societies respecting
the shared ground of our planet. By sharing language,
we are inherently empowered and able to engage in moving
a dialog forward.
ASEE, through our international colloquia, our global
online memberships, and other initiatives, is working
to enhance clear communications, to reduce barriers
between engineering educators, and to strengthen our
beneficial interactions. Within the next year, ASEE
intends to catalyze the formation of a strong alliance
between organizations throughout the world that teach
and speak the language of engineering and technology
education. We will link these elements together into
a network capable of unprecedented global vision and
cooperation. While this will not create an overarching
global consciousness, it will strengthen connectivities
and help us to better address the common and extraordinary
issues that face us. ASEE's international initiatives
provide a strong complement to our other endeavors,
broadening our communications, understandings, and appreciation
of different perspectives, stimulating our ability to
"think globally," and expanding the network
of shared ideas to improve engineering and technology
education.
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The
National Building Museum and the National Engineers
Week Foundation welcome families, groups, and young
guests to the Engineering Family Festival to be held
Saturday, February 19, 2005, from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.
The festival is the D.C.-area kick-off event for Engineers
Week 2005, February 20-26, 
