Abstract
Conway’s Law, which states that ‘the design of a system will map to the social structure that created it’, is a well-established principle in social network theory, as well as design. But the concept has deeper implications as well. In order for a design to be executed, the knowledge for the design must first be constructed. That observation led to what has been called ‘The Intermediate Corollary’, which then implies that different types of social structures can be mapped to specific knowledge structures. What is then required is a system of social evolution that shows the different social structures in some evolutionary form. For the case of this paper, the social system evolution model is taken from Spiral Dynamics, an outgrowth of Clare Grave’s seminal work, elaborated on by Don Beck and Integral Philosopher Ken Wilber. This system, when modified with the overarching principles contained in Conway’s Law, yields a fundamental basis set of knowledge structures that maps well to fundamental concepts in engineering education. From knowledge fragments, to advanced synergistic heuristics, all have maps from the social structures that create them, to classroom situations where optimal social structures can be utilized for acceleration of student learning. This paper explores the nexus of these main concepts, as well as the notion of optimal classroom groupings for learning different engineering concepts.
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Pezeshki, C., Koch, D.A. (2019). Knowledge Structures as a Basis for Learning Strategies in Engineering Education. In: Auer, M., Tsiatsos, T. (eds) The Challenges of the Digital Transformation in Education. ICL 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 917. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11935-5_79
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