Digital Design with KP-Lab

KP-Lab is an EU Integrated Project envisioning a learning system that facilitates innovative practices of sharing, creating and working with knowledge in education and workplaces. The project exploits a novel pedagogical view, the knowledgecreation metaphor of learning. According to such “trialogical” approach, cognition arises through collaborative work in systematically developing shared “knowledge artefacts”, such as concepts, plans ,material products, or social practices. The paper presents the plan of a pilot course to test the KP-Lab methodologies and tools in the field of Digital Design. 1 Engineering education today In spite of the recent hype on new educational technologies and their potential for a novel approach on learning and acquiring knowledge, university education has remained the same that it has been since the first universities have been established, many centuries ago. The transmission model is still dominant and now, as in the Middle Age, students of higher education take many years in acquisition-oriented and teacher-centered studies. Technical education at a university level has a different history, since the first engineering schools in Europe were established only during the nineteen century. For example, the origins of the University of Genoa go back to the thirteen century, while its first technical school, the “Royal Naval School” has been established only in 1870. Before the diffusion of formal engineering studies, the practitioners got their training outside a classroom, usually by joining a community of people already engaged in the exercise of the profession, acquiring and sharing knowledge, information, processes and practices. A natural and deep learning resulted from the deep interaction among people themselves and among people and the objects of their practice. The accelerated rate of technological innovation brought about by the industrial revolution showed the limitations of this ageless mode of learning and prompted the birth of formal technical education. An engineering school is, in fact, more effective in transmitting knowledge at a fast pace and in providing the stronger theoretical background necessary for the new technologies. An unwanted casualty of this process has been, unfortunately, the active learning mode typical of the former mode. Engineering curricula are able to adjust their contents to support the new technologies, but are still based largely on frontal lectures, assembled into courses that provide fragmented pieces of knowledge and skills. There is hardly any explicit continuation from one course to another. In conclusion, today’s engineering curricula embody in large part the paradigm of instructional, transmissive pedagogy and often fail to provide students with the right competencies to solve the complex problems of professional life.