CONCLUDING REMARKS

In the introduction, it was suggested that engineering students are often blinded by details. It was also suggested that engineering education has very little time allotted for reflection. It is the conviction that even the smallest amount of reflection will increase the quality of education substantially and help to educate more competent practitioners.

The primary contribution of the paper is that it identifies design principles which should be considered by educators who wish to use computer based tools to facilitate asynchronous discussion. The design principles guided the implementation of two cases--course discourseand final project. The cases are on-going and no extensive evaluation has been performed. However, the preliminary evaluation of the two cases suggests that it is the method of using the technology and not the technology itself that has an effect on educational activities, as can be seen in [7,8]. Course discourse allows the educator to sustain a discussion over the whole course. All activities during the course can be explicitly linked to the discourse. Guests and other external resources can be present over time. The final project increases the time allocated to thesis writing without interfering in other activities. By exposing their ideas publicly, students are more thorough in their thinking and writing. By interacting with others, their ideas are gradually refined and finally formulated into a research question.

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