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| November 2009 | Subscribe |
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In This Issue:
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II. Congressional Hotline |
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HEALTHCARE REFORM PASSES FIRST HURDLEThe House narrowly passed an ambitious healthcare reform bill. Final vote: 220-215, with only one Republican voting in favor. Now the Senate, which also has a Democratic majority, is under pressure from the White House to pass a version before the end of the year. That won't be easy to engineer. The Senate leadership needs every one of its 60 members to vote yes to give it the supermajority it needs to avoid a GOP filibuster. Former President Bill Clinton -- whose presidency was nearly upended when he failed to get a healthcare overhaul passed 15 years ago -- huddled with Senate Democrats at a private luncheon to urge passage. Said Clinton afterwards: "It's not important to be perfect here. It's important to act, to move, to start the ball rolling. The worst thing to do is nothing."
ASEE PUBLICATIONS HIGHLIGHTED AT CAPITOL HILL PANELSarah Rajala, immediate past president of ASEE, showcased two Society publications during a Capitol Hill panel discussion on innovation: Creating a Culture for Scholarly and Systematic Innovation in Engineering Education, by Leah Jamieson and Jack Lohmann; and the recently issued eGFI (Engineering: Go For It). She also cited Family Engineering, in which ASEE is a partner, as a means of generating early interest in the field. Key to future innovation, she said, is to create learning opportunities in which students' curiosity and creativity can explode. In traditional teaching, "many times we go out of our way to eliminate" such opportunities, she said. Faculty typically get no formal training in teaching, and as a result teach the way they were taught. The panel was part of the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology annual meeting.
SENATE APPROVES MEASURE THAT INCLUDES NSF FUNDINGThe 2010 Commerce, Justice, Science spending bill, including $6.9 billion for the National Science Foundation (with $5.55 billion for research, $122 million for research equipment and facilities, and $857 million for education programs) was okayed by the Senate, though senators voted down an amendment to wipe out NSF's political science program, which nevertheless got 36 votes. The bill now goes to a conference committee.
7 CONGRESSMEN PROBED FOR LINKS TO LOBBYING FIRMSeven out of 16 members of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee are being investigated for ties to a lobbying firm that was notably successful in securing earmarked appropriations and raising campaign cash, the Washington Post reports. The now-defunct PMA Group, which hired former Hill staffers, has represented five colleges and four universities, according to official records. It's not known whether the schools are in any way touched by the probe. Numerous universities pay Washington lobbying firms. Watchdog groups continue to complain that defense earmarks take money away from support of U.S. troops at war. Still, a veteran lobbyist doubts the ongoing investigations will have much of an impact on the fiscal 2010 defense appropriation, arguing that the House members involved are unlikely to back off. Why? They strongly defend their ability to shape defense spending and help out local companies and universities.
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III. Teaching Toolbox |
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LEARNING IN 140-CHARACTER BITESTwitter can improve teacher-student communication, in and out of class. By David Zax In most respects, Prof. Natasha Neogi's aerospace engineering class is like any other. It's a large, hour-long lecture-style course at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. But at the halfway mark, Neogi's class takes on a new twist. She invites her students to log on to Twitter – the "micro-blogging" service that limits messages to 140 characters – and write in with questions. Neogi sifts through the "tweets," in Twitter-speak, addressing the most common sticking point at the end of class. Once widely dismissed as an instrument of vanity, Twitter is now showing up in serious places. Its citizen-journalistic role after last June's Iranian election was much celebrated; in May, a NASA astronaut became the first to tweet from space ("From orbit: Launch was awesome!!"). Bit by bit, Twitter is finding a role in education. Of course, plenty of professors — engineering and otherwise — have long been using Twitter. They tweet about interesting links they've come across; they complain about their flight delays; they keep us updated on their cats. But there are also professors who, like Neogi, have begun to bring Twitter into the lecture hall or seminar room. And not simply to write, "I'm teaching a class right now." Rather, they've moved beyond the tweet-as-status model to harness the organizational, aggregating, and social possibilities of the technology, recognizing it as a potent educational tool. In the spring of 2008, well before Twitter acquired its current prominence, Scott McDonald and Cole Camplese of Pennsylvania State University at University Park co-taught a course called "Disruptive Technologies in Teaching and Learning." They decided to experiment with the relatively new social networking tool, instructing class members to carry on a Twitter conversation – "essentially asking students to pass notes during class," as the Chronicle of Higher Education put it. Soon, the professors found the Twitter feed had emerged as a rich "back channel" where students discussed what interested them or puzzled them. The professors, meanwhile, kept an eye on the feed, getting a read of what concepts needed further explication. Gordon Snyder, who directs the National Center for Information and Communications Technologies at Springfield Technical Community College in Massachusetts, has also experimented with the back channel. He assigned his class a "hashtag", Twitter-parlance for label to include in your tweets to make them easily searchable (they begin with the hash mark #). Students could thereby keep tabs on their neighbor's notes and thoughts and even revisit them using Twitter's search engine after class. He also has found Twitter useful for getting a read on a room. Professors are familiar with the inscrutable sight of a lecture hall full of mute students. Are they listening? Understanding? Many professors have adopted "clickers," polling devices used to quiz students on a topic recently covered or to gauge students' opinions when venturing into politically sensitive subject matter. Snyder, whose center is funded by the National Science Foundation, considers Twitter a "modern and much more effective" clicker. Of course, skepticism in academia remains the norm ("You mean as part of a class? Instead of students just wasting time?" a Massachusetts Institute of Technology official responded when asked for her take on Twitter). But Twitter evangelists have ready answers for skeptics. Does it erase a necessary distance between professor and student, eroding professional authority? That depends on your view, says McDonald: If you think, "'Well, I'm the teacher, and people just need to listen to what I have to say'... then Twitter is not useful for you." Does Twitter distract students? "I see it as a way to keep students engaged," says Snyder. Besides, some argue, students often are already using these technologies in class; professors are simply co-opting a tool that would otherwise serve as a distraction. "If you can't beat 'em, might as well join 'em," sums up Kathy Schmidt, director of the Faculty Innovation Center for the College of Engineering at the University of Texas - Austin. Still, Schmidt is the first to acknowledge that "sometimes turning our classroom into an experiment, per se, is risky business." Professors should carefully consider what Twitter contributes before bringing it in, she says: "The pedagogy has to drive the reason for using the technology." Danger of 'Parallel Discussions' Punya Mishra, associate professor of educational psychology and technology at Michigan State University, notes that — despite his title — there is "no such thing as an educational technology." Rather, "there are various technologies, and instructors need to repurpose them for their own needs." Last year, Mishra tried integrating a micro-blogging service similar to Twitter into a graduate seminar, but "I felt two parallel discussions were going on, but they didn't pull together productively at the end." He spent the week considering what went wrong and then designated a block of time near the end of class for students to catch up on the contents of the micro-blogging feed. Afterward, the class reconvened to continue a newly enriched discussion. With this bit of thoughtful tinkering, micro-blogging proved useful. Mishra followed that experiment with a more ambitious one: using Twitter to join students from different continents. MSU is located in Lansing, Mich., but also offers a master's degree for students in Plymouth, England. Mishra's online "distance" course has content similar to the one in Michigan, so his local class and its British counterpart have recently been Twittering using a shared hashtag. He praises Twitter for "this ability to connect people... The sense of community can be very useful and powerful." But just because Twitter has found success in some classrooms doesn't mean it's right for all engineering educators. After all, most of the experiments have thus far been led by professors of educational technology or social media itself — hardly a neutral or representative sample. One common concern is that Twitter currently isn't equipped to deal with engineering's lingua franca: mathematics. "It's hard to type funny symbols in Twitter," says Michael Webber, a UT Austin engineering professor. Though an advocate for new classroom technologies, he doesn't foresee using Twitter in courses heavy in equations and scientific formulas. "There's something organic about a concept flowing from your brain to your hand to the board, and from the board to their hand and their brain," he says. "Something about that process seems very valuable." Should engineering educators shun Twitter as a teaching tool, there are still other uses. MIT's Nextlab, for one, has become a model of innovative Twitter use. By coupling micro-messaging with mapping technology, Nextlab has enabled Indian villagers to warn one other about floods and helped citizens of Caracas, Venezuela, to document crimes, locate them on a map, and share that information immediately with others. If such innovative applications fail to interest engineers, Webber suggests that Twitter's social networking still might come in handy. For some tech-savvy but shy engineers, Webber notes wryly, it's "easier to get a date through e-mail or Twitter rather than normal mechanisms that humanity has developed over millennia."
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IV. JEE SELECT |
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RETENTION IS NOT THE PROBLEMWomen aren't being drawn to engineering in the first place. By Clemencia Cosentino de Cohen "Study Seeks to Improve Retention Among Women Engineering Students," declares a 2008 news release announcing a grant to four universities. Countless other articles cite female retention as a grave problem. This focus on retention drives a host of strategies to increase the number of women engineers. But is low retention behind the problem? Are women underrepresented in engineering because they enroll only to eventually drop out? The answer, as documented in the July 2009 Journal of Engineering Education, is a resounding "No!" The paucity of women in engineering is indeed severe. Women earn about 20 percent of university degrees in engineering annually, although they earn over half of all bachelor's degrees; are interested in mathematics and science; and are well-prepared to tackle engineering courses (45 percent of mathematics and 52 percent of chemistry undergraduate degrees went to women in 2005). With support from the National Science Foundation, Urban Institute colleagues and I compiled a dataset on about 2,400 undergraduate engineering programs enrolling close to 400,000 students across 22 engineering subfields. Our goal: to produce national retention estimates, compare female and male graduation rates (using a "parity index") and female enrollment-to-graduation rates (constructing a "proportionality index"), and find explanations for observed disparities. Much to our surprise, we found that overall, and in most (but not all) engineering disciplines, women earn engineering degrees at rates equal to or higher than those for men. But the number of women enrolling in engineering is so small that even if all of them stuck with the major, we would still observe serious female under-representation. In a nutshell, the number of women studying engineering is simply too small. The real problem is low enrollment, not low retention. The implications are clear. Recruitment efforts are coming up woefully short. Is it because they are insufficient, ineffective, or both? Universities can do only so much outreach into middle and high schools. Are young girls being inspired at school to become engineers? They know what a doctor does (they see doctors) and what mathematics is (they study it in school). But do they realize that engineers not only build bridges but also design computer systems and golf balls, create ceramic teeth and prosthetic legs, and help protect the environment? Boys seem to, or are at least more willing to give engineering a try. Why not girls? Very young boys enjoy watching Bob the Builder, so maybe it's time for Ellie the Engineer. To build a solid foundation for developing a diverse engineering workforce, early education is key. Schoolteachers – and in later years career counselors – need to encourage girls to become engineers by exposing them to engineering professions. Across the nation, engineering topics and objectives must be explicitly incorporated into K-12 standards, curriculum, and testing. Also needed is a better understanding of the many paths to engineering degrees, as our study and others suggest that women are likely to transfer into engineering. But to study these paths, researchers need longitudinal, nationally representative, individual-level data. I know from experience that universities may scream about obligations under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and institutional review boards (IRBs), but researchers can easily comply with the confidentiality issues and use data responsibly. An understandable – if unwarranted – conclusion from this study is that support programs to retain women engineering students are not needed. Some universities and a handful of disciplines have low retention among women, unfortunately, and would benefit from these programs. Although we did not study retention efforts, our research may actually be indirectly documenting their effectiveness. What is certain is that we must focus on attracting women to the field. To depend on retaining a few volunteers is simply not a road map for success. Clemencia Cosentino de Cohen directs the Program for Evaluation and Equity Research (PEER) of the Urban Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan policy research organization in Washington, D.C. This article is based on "Widening the Net: National Estimates of Gender Disparities in Engineering" (With Nicole Deterding) in the July 2009 Journal of Engineering Education.
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V. JOBS, JOBS, JOBS |
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Job-hunting? Here are a few current openings:1. Mechanical Engineering -- 13 opportunities 2. Civil Engineering -- 6 opportunities 3. Electrical Engineering -- 3 opportunities 4. Department Head -- 3 opportunities Visit here for details:
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VI. COMING ATTRACTIONS |
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A SNEAK PEEK AT PRISM'S UPCOMING DECEMBER ISSUECOVER STORY: Engineers are late to the game of trying to rescue America's failing news organizations, but they're trying to make up for lost time. Prism's cover story explores a new collaboration between journalism schools and computer scientists to develop technologies that could transform the way news is reported, distributed and consumed. This collaboration may also produce new generation of news business professionals: computer scientists and journalists who share a deep understanding of both disciplines. FEATURE 1: This fall, the nation is beginning to repay the debt owed to veterans who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. The new GI bill offers the most generous educational benefits since the original post-World War II legislation that enabled many veterans to gain a college education, producing lasting benefits for the nation. Our feature looks at what the influx of veterans to university campuses means for these returning soldiers and for the schools they attend. FEATURE 2: A number of pilots were lost in training accidents during World War II. The reason: They were flying planes with a set of unfamiliar controls. Such mishaps point up the need for a better understanding of the relationship between technology and the people who use it. A growing and increasingly visible discipline called cognitive engineering seeks to improve this relationship in a myriad of spheres, from medical care to robotics. TEACHING: A program based in Oakland, Calif., has women engineers and other technical professionals mentoring girls from underrepresented minorities.
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VII. COMMUNITY ANNOUNCEMENTS |
1. ENGAGE -- Engaging Students in Engineering
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