Newsletter of the
Australasian Association
for Engineering Education
Apr 2006
From
the Editor
This month sees all the usual AAEE news –
News from our President, the upcoming conference in
As well, we have two special articles, one on resources for teaching Communication Skills for your students and a second on Factor 10 Engineering from the Rocky Mountain Institute.
Joining AAEE
Go to http://www.aaee.com.au/join/ to download the application form.
Invitation to the 2006 Conference!
The Bibliography of Engineering Education Project
How communication-ready are your students for the
workplace?
Peer Support Network for New Academics in
Engineering
Continuing Professional Development
From the President …
The new teaching year is well underway. I always find it is exciting
to begin teaching a new group of students in a course, and to introduce them to
the mysteries of a branch of engineering.
I am currently teaching a group of external students in a course in
urban and regional planning, with students living in
I am sure that you, like me, are already feeling the pressures of competing priorities: Do I focus on improving my teaching, or my research, or on improving course materials, or applying for learning and teaching awards, or engaging with ‘my’ communities? It seems that each year we are challenged to do more with less. There seems to be a growing list of good things for us to do at a time when the pots of available resources are shrinking. To survive we have learned to work smarter and to collaborate with others to create new ways of doing things. The question that is always at the back of my mind is what effect is all of this having on our students?
I hope that your involvement with AaeE will help you to meet these challenges and to thrive in your educational environment.
Best wishes for 2006
David Dowling
Campus representatives
The Executive Committee has decided to
appoint an AaeE representative at each university or institution to promote the
Association and distribute flyers about conferences etc. We would like to hear from members at the
following universities who would like to be an AaeE representative: UWS,
Invitation to the 2006 Conference!
17th Annual
Conference of the Australasian Association for Engineering Education
10 – 13 December
2006
Auckland
University of Technology, Auckland, NZ
Creativity, Challenge, and Change:
Partnerships in Engineering Education
This conference seeks to explore new and existing ways in which our partnerships with students, teachers, researchers, industry, government and society are enhancing engineering education outcomes.
We are confirming international key note speakers to lead discussions on issues related to the conference theme, (watch for updates!) and the social programme will enable a good acquaintance with one of the most beautiful cities in the world
Start planning your contribution
now!
You are invited to submit
papers for peer review with particular reference to partnerships between:
· Teaching and learning
· Teaching – research nexus
· Sustainability and interdisciplinary partnerships
· E-learning and engineering education
· Engineering and society
· Maori and engineering (Treaty of Waitangi)
· Industry and education
· Professional bodies and education
· Government funding and institutions
· International engineering education providers
· Local and international engineering education providers
Deadlines:
Expressions of Interest Now open
Call for abstract or workshop brief 16
June 2006
Acceptance of Abstract 7 July 2006
Full paper/workshop submission 4 August 2006
Final Submission 13 Sept 2006
The Bibliography of Engineering Education Project
A new initiative from AaeE aims to develop a working bibliography for educators extending their practice in engineering education through engagement with 'new-to-them' concepts and ideas. At this stage, the project aims to identify key, introductory material across a range of broad domains. Ideally, these references would provide educators with exposure to key aspects of pedagogy and/or their application within engineering education.
We invite you to provide us with your best 'picks' in the following areas:
· The journey: from engineering expert to engineering education expert; scholarship in learning and teaching, education theory, reflective practice, writing 'teaching philosophy' portfolio materials
· Assessment: self, peer, group, attributes
· Learning: styles, adult learning theory
· Teaching Methodologies: pbl, groupwork, roleplay, 1st year, design, lecturing to large classes
· Diversity: gender, inclusivity, international/globalisation, culture
· Curriculum design: pbl, attributes, integrated curriculum, professional development/practice; flexible curriculum design
· Multidisciplinary: sustainability, workplace learning, ethics
Send your references and links to documents to: Holger Maier (hmaier@civeng.adelaide.edu.au)
Annual awards
Start thinking now about applying
for or nominating a colleague else for the 2006 awards.
As educators, our primary
function is to produce graduates who are well prepared to take their role as
engineering professionals. In doing so, our teaching staff must be innovative,
effective and highly committed to optimising their students’ outcomes. As we
strive to encourage our students to aim for excellence, it is appropriate to
also recognise those who facilitate that excellence. The AaeE Awards, judged by
a panel of their peers, recognise in a tangible way the commitment and
contribution of our excellent teachers.
The value of each Award for 2006 is $2000.
The four
awards for 2006 are:
·
Excellence in Teaching and Learning in Engineering Education
·
Excellence in Curriculum Innovation in Engineering Education
·
Excellence in Inclusive Practice in Engineering Education
·
Excellence in a Curriculum Team Project in Engineering Education
Closing date for Applications/ Nominations: 30 June 2006
The
awards will be presented at the 2006 conference dinner in
The criteria for these awards are listed on
the AaeE website below.
Please note that these criteria are a close
match to the AAUT Teaching Award criteria.
The
application process has been simplified to encourage either self nomination or
nomination of your colleagues. Details and application/ nomination forms are
available on the AaeE
website.
Any questions …?
Please contact Liz Godfrey [l.godfrey@auckland.ac.nz]
or
These awards are
sponsored by AaeE (with the support of the Australian and NZ Councils of Deans)
and Engineers
How communication-ready are your students for the workplace?
A special contribution from Diane Lee, a writer, editor and teacher based in Adelaide SA. Diane has worked in and with government, education and not-for-profit organisations in the diverse area of communication. She can be contacted by email dianeleeconsulting@adam.com.au or by mobile 0416 075 890.
In my work as a writer, editor and teacher, I have worked with many organisations and their staff and graduates. Some graduates are very successful; they work the opportunities presented to them brilliantly, and develop flourishing careers. Others, it seems, just coast along, not quite sure how they fit into the organisation, or how to make it work for them.
I have also worked with graduate engineers – many from non-English speaking backgrounds – who chose to study engineering because there was not that ubiquitous requirement for “communication” when compared with other tertiary courses. Many have admitted they aren’t good communicators, and would like to improve in this key area.
As educators, there are strategies we can put in place to ensure our students - particularly those for whom English is not their first language – can meet the communication requirements needed to flourish in the workplace:
· Teach listening skills – active listening is an underrated skill, and one that can be taught and then assessed in a variety of ways. Go to http://www.ericdigests.org/pre-928/listening.htm for more information
· Encourage teamwork – real teamwork - where everyone in the team shares a vision, commits to achieving common goals, and is organised with tasks that reflect skills, abilities and interests - is highly regarded in the workplace. Discourage group learning situations where one or two people “carry” the group. Go to http://web.mit.edu/tll/library/teamwork1.htm and http://web.mit.edu/tll/library/teamwork2.htm for more information
· Model great writing – ensure your students know how to write well. Expose them to various forms of good writing models – reports, business cases, project management plans, proposals. Ensure they can write fluently, succinctly and in plain English. Further information is available at http://owl.english.purdue.edu/
· Build confidence – ensure your students know which questions to ask, how to ask them and when. Teach them to show initiative, to articulate themselves, and to be organised. Show them the merits of planning and research – in fact – assess them on it! Further information is available at http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/Articles/Confidence/start.htm and http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/k9911sti.htm
My final point is this: teach your students not to underestimate the impact of culture on a person’s communication ability. A workplace has a “personality” and ways of doing things, and this affects how each of us fits into an organisation and adapts to its requirements; there needs to be synergy if a long-term fit is envisaged. Go to http://gbr.pepperdine.edu/031/culture.html and http://www.pac-inst.com/clients/1004-WaCEO-p54.pdf
Peer Support Network for New Academics in Engineering
The start of an academic career can be particularly difficult. Regardless of whether it's a shift from industry to academia, or the move from postgrad to lecturer, there are a wide range of challenges that have to be encountered for the first time. To help with this transition, AAEE runs a Peer Support Network for New Academics. It is an opportunity for new (and not so new) academic staff to share their experiences with each other, and to help tackle the issues that are relevant for new academics today, in the Australasian context.
Somewhere in your Faculty there is a new academic: someone who has only just joined up this semester. Please help us help them by directing them to http://www.aaee.com.au/networks/psn/ so they can see all of the goodies we have to offer. This month's Guru of the Month is Gerard Rowe, the winner of the 2005 AAEE award for excellence in Engineering Education in the Teaching and Learning category.
Want more information? Contact the organiser, Euan Lindsay – e.lindsay@curtin.edu.au
Factor 10 Engineering
From: Imran Sheikh <isheikh@rmi.org>
I am a researcher at Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), a non-profit applied research center, working on a project entitled ‘10xE’ (Factor Ten Engineering) with our CEO Amory Lovins. We would like to invite the AAEE community to join us in accelerating the reform of engineering pedagogy and practice. We aim to change how engineers think about design by showing them principles, examples, and benefits of whole-system, integrative design.
The vision for the project is to assemble an outstanding group of diverse engineering practitioners and teachers from around the world to write a casebook of integrative, radically efficient engineering. The book will include a thorough engineering analysis of several dozen of the most interesting cases, organized in facing-columns format with the standard practice case, explaining the difference in design principles between the integrative design and the standard practice. Our aim is to have the design principles build on each other, so that by the end of the book the reader’s ‘mental furniture is irreversibly rearranged’ so they never can go back to designing in isolation. The cases will span the range of engineering disciplines and common applications, and typically achieve order-of-magnitude energy and resource savings -- sometimes considerably more -- with lower-than-normal capital cost. Through astonishing but, once understood, blindingly obvious cases, we aim to bring to firms and classrooms worldwide a sound and compelling pedagogic basis for the nonviolent overthrow of bad engineering. While we believe the target of ten-fold resource productivity through better engineering is achievable, it is clearly not trivial. This optimization will need an extraordinarily high degree of cross-disciplinary thinking in the engineering design process.
Over the past 24 years, RMI has developed a considerable body of practical experience, in 22 sectors of the economy, achieving expanding rather than diminishing returns to investments in energy productivity. As explained in Natural Capitalism (http://www.natcap.org), the 1999 publication written by RMI’s co-founders and Paul Hawken, we ‘tunnel through the cost barrier’, making very large energy and resource savings cost less than small or no savings, in two ways:
1. optimizing whole systems for multiple benefits (rather than isolated components for single benefits) -- thus getting multiple benefits from single expenditures
2. ‘piggybacking’ retrofits onto changes being made anyhow for some other reason.
Some examples of integrative design and the approximate resource savings include heat transfer engineering (the Singapore hotel HVAC system, factor ~6-10), power engineering (grid vs. distributed generation, factor ~10-15), computer engineering (RLX blade servers vs. typical servers, factor >8), process engineering (for Interface Inc. industrial process pumping loop, factor 7-15).
In recent years, we have redesigned about $20 billion worth of facilities on these lines. Our clients are happy to learn how to do such radically efficient designs, but we are not so happy, because we keep seeing the same design errors over and over. If the designs had been properly done in the first instance, such improvements would not be necessary. Indeed, the incorrect methodologies that underlie much of the inefficiency we observe are clearly set out in all the leading engineering textbooks! Rather than correcting these errors in minute particulars, it would be far better to change engineering pedagogy and practice so such errors are ultimately extirpated. And to this end, we have hatched the ambitious 10xE plot.
We are starting to assemble a portfolio of high-brain-Velcro cases and first-rate practitioners and teachers applying whole-system design. In order to build our collection of cases and network of engineers who think this way, we need help from engineering community. Please connect us with people that think this way and send us case ideas that are elegant, repeatable, whole-system solutions that ‘tunnel through the cost barrier’ and show a radical increase in resource productivity.
Imran
Sheikh
Research
Fellow
Factor 10 Engineering (10xE)
1739 Snowmass Creek Rd
Snowmass, CO 81654
USA
Direct
Phone: +1.970.927.7206
Main Office:
+1.970.927.3851
Upcoming conferences
ASEE Annual Conference in June
http://www.asee.org/about/events/conferences/annual/2006/index.cfm
5th Global Colloquium on Engineering Education
Quoted from: http://asee.org/about/events/conferences/international/2006/index.cfm
Conference Overview
5th Annual ASEE Global Colloquium on Engineering Education
“Engineering
Education in the
October 9 – 12, 2006
Le Meridien Hotel
The American Society for Engineering
Education (ASEE) presents an annual global colloquium that unites the diverse
elements of the international engineering education world while focusing on
issues of interest to the international engineering education community. The
colloquium, held annually in locations such as
This year,
ASEE is pleased to present the 2006 Global Colloquium in
For more information, please go to the above address.
Past ASEE conferences, including full access to papers
http://asee.org/about/events/conferences/
IGIP Symposium
On behalf of the Organizing Committee we
extend a warm invitation to you to participate in 35th International
IGIP Symposium that will be held in
The
motto of the Symposium "Engineering Education - Priority for Global
Development" refers to the significant role of
engineering education in overall development. Discussions will be held on
international aspects and experiences of engineering education on a global
scale. The Symposium will concentrate on establishing common milestones for
engineering education for the future, on the progress of engineering pedagogy,
and its experiences in teaching technical subjects. The symposium will also
discuss future developments in engineering education due to the
The aim of the discussions is to exchange experiences and
develop closer contacts between participating organizations. The participation
of four good partners – IGIP (Internationale
Gesellschaft für Ingenieurpädagogik - International Society for Engineering
Education), IEEE (the
IGIP
is hosted by the biggest university of engineering
and technology in
Symposium Language: English and German (translation service for plenary sessions)
Special Topics:
· Curriculum Development
· International Aspects of Engineering Education
· K – 12 Education (pre-college engineering education)
· Knowledge Management and Computer Aided Technologies
· Language and Humanities in Engineering Education
· Learning Café
· Mathematics and Natural Sciences in Engineering Education
· People and Technology
· Postgraduate Training
·
Technical Education in
· Technical Teacher Training
· Women in Technical Careers
·
Working with Projects
Important Dates:
Abstract submission deadline May 1, 2006
Notification
of acceptance May
15, 2006
Hotel reservation deadline June 10, 2006
Final
Papers (camera-ready) due June
15, 2006
Registration
fee payment deadline August 1,
2006 (to
guarantee printing in proceedings)
Pre-Symposium September 17, 2006
Symposium September 18 – 21, 2006
Post-Symposium September
22, 2006
More detailed information could be found from
Symposium homepage http://www.igip.ee or from IGIP homepage http://www.igip.info
Jüri Vanaveski
Chair of Local Organizing Committee
IGIP Symposium 2006
Telephone:
+372 620 32 55 Fax:
+372 620 32 15 E-mail: cp@ttu.ee
Books to read
Thanks to David Radcliffe for the following recommendations:
· How People Learn http://newton.nap.edu/html/howpeople1/
· The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century (2004) http://darwin.nap.edu/books/0309091624/html/
·
Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering
Education to the New Century (2005)
http://fermat.nap.edu/books/0309096499/html/
More general reading:
·
Capitalism as if the World
Matters (about sustainability)
http://shop.earthscan.co.uk/ProductDetails/mcs/productID/640/groupID/2/categoryID/5/
· Cradle to Cradle (also sustainability) http://www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cradle.htm
· The World is Flat (about the future) http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/worldisflat.htm
Read an interesting book lately? Send me the details and I’ll put it in the next newsletter.
Some useful websites
International Journals in Engineering Education
· Journal of Engineering Education (ASEE)
· European Journal of Engineering Education (SEFI)
· International Journal of Engineering Education
ASEE Connections Newsletter
· http://www.asee.org/about/publications/connections/index.cfm
Carrick Institute
· See http://www.carrickinstitute.edu.au/carrick/go for more information. The Australian Awards for University Teaching are now available.
Flinders Foundations of University Teaching
· Staff development at Flinders: http://www.flinders.edu.au/teach/nustaff/ffout.htm
SEEK Newsletters from the Environmental Engineers
·
http://www.ieaust.org.au/about_us/colleges/environmental/publications.html
EA Accreditation – new guidelines
· See the new guidelines at: http://www.engineersaustralia.org.au/./membership/accreditation.html
Journal of Learning Design
· Visit the JLD at: http://www.jld.qut.edu.au/
Other EE and HE organisations
· See the AAEE Links page.
AJEE articles
New plans are being developed for the revitalisation of the Journal. Stay tuned for more information.
Continuing Professional Development
This is a space for program coordinators to describe new and interesting programs to AAEE members. Send details to the editor.
Job opportunities
Coming to the website will be an area for jobs to be posted and browsed. So, if you are advertising an academic position post it here: www.aaee.com.au/members-only/jobs
Future AAEE Conferences
2008 and beyond
Expressions of interest are invited for hosting the 2008 (and beyond) conferences, preferably by June. A copy of the guidelines for prospective hosts may be obtained from Wageeh Boles at QUT, w.boles@qut.edu.au.
Newsletter contributions
Share your good ideas, conference announcements, book titles, great websites, etc with other members. Send them to Roger.Hadgraft@RMIT.edu.au for inclusion in the next Newsletter.