TECHNOLOGY-BRAZIL: Engineering for a Knowledge-Based Society

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 28 2000 (IPS) - A degree in information engineering is a new item to be found on the university menu, and is something Brazilian education strategists believe is the ticket for keeping up with the global trend towards a so-called knowledge-based society.

This educational “experiment” is set to begin next year at the Association of Postgraduate Programmes in Engineering (COPPE) at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, with two groups of 30 students each.

The degree is a ground-breaking project in Latin America and is similar to programmes in industrialised countries, such as the United States and some European nations, because it is not just an extension of computer or library sciences, explained Marcos Cavalcanti, one of the degree’s creators.

It responds to “a strong demand by large corporations” made up of diverse professionals who are currently served by computer production engineers or by a team of specialists in computers, telecommunications and social communication, he said.

The goal is “fusion,” not the sum of the various parts of knowledge, which is why a university degree was the format of choice, and not a graduate programme, currently the most common solution worldwide for meeting the new demands of the market.

The project’s designers hope to prevent the degree from being based on consolidated training, which is usually less flexible and tends to incorporate a slant that is difficult to eliminate later, explained Cavalcanti, himself a graduate in mathematics who then became a production engineer.

The degree should also overcome what Cavalcanti considers a negative idiosyncrasy of higher education in Brazil: seeing graduate degrees as “complementing a university education, to the detriment of research.”

COPPE, for the first time, will offer a degree that takes it beyond its traditional limits. It will be “profoundly multi- disciplinary,” Cavalcanti emphasised.

Engineering has expanded its focus in order to keep up with the technological revolution. There are a dozen specialties at COPPE, ranging from construction, to nuclear, to telecommunications engineering, and soon there will be one more.

The future information engineer will take classes in philosophy, theory of communication and of learning, knowledge management, electronic games, databases and multimedia.

But the students will begin with two years of basic engineering, as a certain level of mathematics and technological knowledge is essential, said Cavalcanti. In the two final years of the degree, the courses will be much more diverse, with students choosing their own areas of interest.

A challenge for the professors, who will come from across the academic spectrum, will be to impart knowledge in an integrated way and avoid fragmentation.

Once they graduate, the new information engineers will be ready to work in computer programming and in major industry, in activities such as training or knowledge management. They will ideally be flexible enough to keep pace with changes in the labour market, according to Alvaro Coutinho, another of the programme’s founders.

The hope is “to train new Bill Gates,” since from the start the degree develops the enterprising spirit, going beyond mere training to be an employee, the track traditionally followed by universities, Cavalcanti pointed out.

The new degree is part of the Ministry of Science and Technology’s national “Knowledge-Based Society” programme, which is intended to prepare the nation for the future, in part, by making the Internet more available to the population.

“This is a road Brazil must run at a gallop, as an issue of life or death,” commented Ren Dreifuss, a political scientist specialising in the behaviour of transnational corporations.

Dreifuss is directing the creation of the Virtual Institute, also within COPPE, to unite experts from various specialties to study the trends of global changes, whether climatic or social.

But Carlos Afonso, an Internet specialist in Brazil, doubts an information engineering degree will be effective in training leaders for the “new global economy.”

He prefers the proven route of a graduate degree, which can target those who have a talent in key areas, like statistics, as is often the case with people who have degrees in biology or mathematics, he explained.

Afonso, an engineer with a graduate degree in economics, has little confidence in his professor-colleagues and less in conventional courses, which he says are too slow-moving for the current speed of technological changes.

“Four or five years is an eternity,” meaning many talented young people find jobs or open their own Internet business or an information-related company before they even finish the degree, he said.