Technologies are developing at an unusual speed. Most of us are unable to catch up with all the developments. Either we stay on the speeding technological train and enjoy spending our time on it or a small group of technological magicians will be supplying us with solutions we will believe in, being completely in the dark as to how they work. 18/2018(24)

Polska wersja artykułu: Akcelerator Wiedzy Technicznej

Some grounds for accelerating the development of technological knowledge in the society

 

Important causes for accelerating the development of knowledge include the clearly visible acceleration of the development of technology which will be developing even faster.  A too slow development of technical knowledge in relation to the development of technology might stop the development of the economy and civilization.

In poor and developing countries there is one more reason for accelerated development of technical knowledge – catching up with rich states, following them and equalizing the opportunities for the citizens.

Other reasons for accelerating the development of technical knowledge include equalizing the opportunities of the elderly vs young ones who grow up with the use of new technologies.  With time, young people become older and can no longer catch up with the even younger ones.

A further development of technology might eliminate a big part of societies from working processes.  People need to be taught to use technological solutions at work as well as in their everyday lives. The fact that they won’t be working does not mean that they will not be using technology. Using their applications they will have to settle their taxes on their own, schedule their doctor’s appointments, design their kitchens to order proper furniture, or fill in electronic insurance forms all on their own. Resigning from work and living at the cost of the state will become illusory because when staying at home the unemployed will have more work than they have today at the workplace.  Apart from that, they will have to show more diverse competences. Products will become ever cheaper because more and more activities connected with their manufacture will be attributed to the buyer. To an ever greater extent, the customer will be paying for possibilities of the product which they themselves will have to extract from it.

For the time being, the poor working class is growing. In some states, people make ever less even though they work ever more.  If they use technologies their activities might accelerate and their work might become more productive and effective.

What is more, acquisition of deepened technical knowledge is difficult as it is based on mathematics and physics. Therefore, there are still too few people acquiring education in that field.

 

The Program for Acceleration of Technical Knowledge in Wielkopolska at the Poznań University of Technology

 

The aforementioned grounds have become the reason for development and execution of the Program for acceleration of technical knowledge at the Poznań University of Technology where I work.  The program is open and possible to implement.

In 2006, together with dr. inż. Marek Goliński and then with a bigger team first composed of researchers and then people from other institutions, in particular from the Wielkopolska Province local government, we initiated a project called Akcelerator Wiedzy Technicznej® [Technical Knowledge Accelerator – TKA].  Since the beginning, the initiative has been supported by Rectors of the University professors Tomasz Łodygowski and Adam Hamrol, We are trying to answer the question how to develop technical knowledge in the society faster in various social groups and various entities, including businesses.

Practical causes for launching the activities included the shortages of technical and professional staff both of vocational secondary as well as higher education which had been signaled by business owners many times.

I saw the first instance of such shortages when I worked for a ship engine factory between 1998 and 2004. The company was short of welders, programmers, technologists and assembly workers all the time. People took some many overtime hours than later they could not recover their days off.  The excessive workload led to a growth in defects and absences.  Nothing has changed.  Perhaps only requirements for specific competences are changing a bit as technologies are more and more advanced.

The other cause for starting works on the program stemmed directly from changes in the European Union and debates about the possibilities of accelerating economic development in the Community to catch up with leading economies, in particular the Japanese and American ones, as well as Korean and Chinese at the moment.

Fig 1. Logo of the TKA (Akcelerator Wiedzy Technicznej® – AWT®) brand – the brand is owned by the Poznań University of Technology

 

Model of operation for completion of the Program and its projects

 

Since 2010, we have been working on the basis of our model whose scheme has been presented below.

 

Fig. 2. Model of activities for acceleration of technical, mathematical and natural science knowledge developed in 2006-2014 under Technical Knowledge Accelerator (AWT®). Own study

 

We implement the model to changing needs, conditions and sources of financing of the solutions. The funding is needed more and more the more advanced the works. The scheme takes the role of research works into consideration.  They are fairly important as they make it possible to verify the purposefulness of activities undertaken as part of AWT®, particularly before the decision to move to the stage of prototyping tools or methods.

Initiatives undertaken as part of Akcelerator Wiedzy Technicznej® have been described in detail at www.awt.org.pl.

Partnerships are very important to the completion of various activities.  To date, a key role has been played by the local government in the region which has been supporting the initiative since 2008 based on two resolutions (Resolution No. 1350/08, Resolution No. 1979/08).

Current developments are reported on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/AWTPUT/ .

The most important projects within the initiative so far include:

• a system supporting communication between businesses and young adults who acquire vocational education – system.zawodowcy.org (Wielkopolski system… 2011, Szafrański, 2013, Szafrański, Goliński, 2015a, 2015b, Szafrański 2017a, Szafrański, Bogurska-Matys, Goliński 2017, Szafrański, Goliński, Graczyk-Kucharska, Spychała, 2017, Spychała, Szafrański, Graczyk-Kucharska, Goliński, 2017, Graczyk-Kucharska, Szafrański, Goliński, Spychała, Borsekova, 2017),
• a model for supplementing vocational competences by students of secondary schools of technical education in a non-formal education process – zawodowcy.org (Szafrański, Grupka, Goliński, 2008, Szafrański, Goliński, Jarmuszkiewicz, 2009, Szafrański, Goliński, 2009, Szafrański, 2014, 2015a),
• activities for the development of a Regional Educational-and-Economic Network (Szafrański, 2015b, 2017b).
• an integrated support system for access to information in city space (Integrated support system…, 2012, Szafrański, Goliński, Graczyk, Prussak, Skawiński, 2012),
• method for evaluating the effectiveness of promotion of science (Model badania…, 2012, Nauka i postęp…, 2013),

However, today, technical knowledge is not enough. A balance between it and soft competences is necessary. We should make sure that an engineer can be a humanist and a philosopher can find his way around an engineered world.   Therefore, together with partners from several countries we started cooperation on coming up with a method for accelerating the development of cross-sectional competences in students.
– www.atcerasmus.eu (The acceleration…, 2017). The competences in question are entrepreneurship, creativity, team work, communicativeness.

It can be concluded from the experience we gained during the development of AWT® that it is easier to generate specific results if different institutions can cooperate with one another. However, the more entities or the bigger the scale of the project, the more difficult it is to complete the activities. On the other hand, better social benefits are possible.

Sources:

Graczyk-Kucharska M., Szafrański M., Goliński M., Spychała M., Borsekova K. (2017), Model of competency management in the network of production enterprises in Industry 4.0 – assumptions, In: Advances in Manufacturng ed. A. Hamrol, O. Ciszak, P. Legutko, M. Jurczyk, Springer 2018, str. 195-204.

Integrated support system for access to information in urban space with use of GPS and GIS systems (2012), M. Goliński, M. Szafrański (eds), Publishing House of Poznan University of Technology, Poznań.

Model badania skuteczności promocji nauki (2012), M. Goliński, M. Szafrański (red.), Wydawnictwo MJ Media sp. z o.o., Poznań.

Nauka i postęp. Zarządzanie wiedzą dla innowacji (2013), M. Goliński, M. Szafrański, Wydawnictwo MJ Media sp. z o.o., Poznań.

Spychała M., Szafrański M., Graczyk-Kucharska M., Goliński M. (2017), The Method of Designing Reference Models of Workstations, in: Proceedings of the 18th European Conference on Knowledge Management ECKM 2017, Edited by F. Marimon, M. Mas-Machuca, J. Berbegal-Mirabent, R. Bastida, Academic Conferences and Publishing International Limited, Barcelona, pp. 930-939.

Szafrański M. (2013), Propozycja wsparcia działań prewencyjnych w przedsiębiorstwach przez wykorzystanie narzędzia Wielkopolskiego systemu doradztwa edukacyjno-zawodowego, w: Pracownik w systemach zarządzania, T. Borys, P. Rogala (red.), Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Ekonomicznego we Wrocławiu, Wrocław, s. 55-67.

Szafrański M. (2014), Laboratoria praktyk jako narzędzie wspomagające akcelerację dyfuzji wiedzy technicznej w przedsiębiorstwach, w: Pomiędzy zarządzaniem procesami edukacyjnymi a rynkiem pracy, I. Werner, E. Więcek-Janka, Przedsiębiorczość i Zarządzanie, tom XV, Zeszyt 8, Część III, Wydawnictwo Społecznej Akademii Nauk, Łódź, s. 75-89.

Szafrański M. (2015a), Praktyki zawodowe – narzędzie obniżania kosztów w przedsiębiorstwach, Przegląd Organizacji nr 1/2015, s. 29-35.

Szafrański M. (2015b), Acceleration of educating as an external factor supporting preventive and improving actions in businesses, in: Procedia Manufacturing; 6th International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics and the Affiliated Conferences, AHFE 2015, ed. T. Ahram, W. Karwowski, D. Schmorrow, vol 3/2015, s. 4948-4955.

Szafrański M. (2017a), Problem of language used to described competences in the management of acceleration in the creation of knowledge resources in businesses, Procedia Engineering, No 182/2017, pp. 679 – 686.

Szafrański M. (2017b), Models of businesses’ support for technical knowledge development in Wielkopolska Region – a qualitology approach, in: Conference Proceedings, Engines of Urban and Regional Development, 6th  Central European Conference in Regional Science, Slovakia 2017.

Szafrański M., Bogurska-Matys K., Goliński M. (2017), Problems in communication between businesses and technical education system, Management and Production Engineering Review, Volume 8, Number 2/2017, pp. 9-18.

Szafrański M., Goliński M. (2010), Interactive laboratory of technical knowledge acceleration in program of acceleration of knowledge of technology, mathematics and natural science in Poland, Publishing House of Poznan University of Technology, Poznan.

Szafrański M., Goliński M. (2015a), Monitoring demand for Professional skills in SMEs of the Wielkopolska Region, W: Management, leadership and strategy for SME’s competitiveness, Godolo: Szent Istvan University Publishing House. publikacja elektroniczna.

Szafrański M., Goliński M. (2015b), System for Professionals – monitoring employers’ demands for key competences in Wielkopolska, W: Recent Advences in Computer Science; Procedings of the 19th International Conference on Computers; 19th International Conference on Circuits, Systems, Communications and Computers, Zakhyntos, Greece 2015, pp. 184-199.

Szafrański M., Goliński M., Graczyk M., Prussak W., Skawiński T., Technological and organizational determinants of information management in the urban space (based on scientific research) (2012), Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication, ICUIMC’12ACM, February 20–22, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Szafrański M., Goliński M.,  Graczyk-Kucharska M., Spychała M., Doskonalenie kodu kompetencji zawodowych w przedsiębiorstwach – case study, Przegląd Organizacji 3/2017, s. 54-59.

Szafrański M., Goliński M., Jarmuszkiewicz A. (2009), Technical knowledge accelerator: mobile laboratory of technical, mathematical and natural science knowledge-innovation in popularizing technology, mathematics and natural sciences, in: Foundations of Control and Management Sciences, Poznan University of Technology, No. 13, Poznań, s. 75-89.

Szafrański M., Grupka K., Goliński M. (2008), Program akceleracji wiedzy technicznej i matematyczno-przyrodniczej w Polsce, Wydawnictwo Politechniki Poznańskiej, Poznań.

The acceleration of development of transversal competences (2017), M. Szafranski, M. Golinski, H. Simi (editors), Centria University of Applied Sciences,  Kokkola.

Wielkopolski system monitorowania i prognozowania w zakresie kształcenia zawodowego (2011), M. Szafrański (red.), Wydawnictwo Politechniki Poznańskiej, Poznań.