Engineering Student Design Team Projects at a Distance

On Friday, May 1 I had the honor of judging University of Hartford College of Engineering, Technology and Architecture Class of 2020 Senior Team Design Projects. I spent three semesters at Hartford as a visiting professor before coming to Holyoke Community College and had many of the students participating in the 2020 design competition in my classes.

I wrote about my experience at Hartford in an earlier post - after 20 years they were my introduction back to the traditional age group (18-22) engineering classroom. The last time I had students this age in one of my classes was 1998 and I had no idea what to expect. To say I was pleasantly surprised was an understatement.

Fast forward to the May 1 competition when this group once again impressed me. Senior project work runs over the fall and spring semesters with final projects evaluated and scored at the end of the spring semester by invited judges. Shutting down the campus at the half way point this spring hit them at a critical point in project completion. Student teams continued to work together online from their homes and student teams presented their projects together to us in online meeting rooms. 

I am so proud of them - each team member was able to rise to the challenge - focusing, planning and completing their projects at a distance. In some cases that distance was 6 or more times zones away. This spring has been difficult and unexpected for all of us. These students were able to adjust, make necessary changes and complete their project work. You can check out some of the projects here. 

We don't have control over what is happening but we are able to control how we view and react to it. Valuable lessons. Congrats to the Class 0f 2020!

Experience with students in my classes at Holyoke Community College has been exactly the same. I’ll write about that in my next post.

Unified Communications: Changing the Way We Work and Learn

It's been more than a couple of days since my last post - I was in Philadelphia for the American Association of Community Colleges Annual Convention. Great convention and always so good to reconnect with community college friends from around the country. We had a large National Science Foundation ATE Center contingency there with representation from 14 Centers along with the National Science Foundation.

At the conference, there was a lot of conversation about Web 2.0 applications and how they can be used in the classroom and workplace. I found myself often indirectly referring to an excellent Marketwire post titled IBM Predicts Five Future Trends That Will Drive Unified Communications

The post lists five future trends predicted by IBM Lotus General Manager Mike Rhodin in his VoiceCon 2008 Conference keynote address. Here's what Rhodin says will increase demand for the fast-growing unified communications market and reshape the way businesses and workers communicate and collaborate worldwide:

1) The Virtual Workplace will become the rule. No need to leave the office. Just bring it along. Desk phones and desktop computers will gradually disappear, replaced by mobile devices, including laptops, that take on traditional office capabilities. Social networking tools and virtual world meeting experiences will simulate the feeling on being there in-person. Work models will be changed by expanded globalization and green business initiatives that reduce travel and encourage work at home.

2) Instant Messaging and other real-time collaboration tools will become the norm, bypassing e-mail. Just as e-mail became a business necessity, a new generation of workers has a new expectation for instant messaging (IM) as the preferred method of business interaction. This will fuel more rapid adoption of unified communications as traditional IM becomes the core extension point for multi-modal communications.

3) Beyond Phone Calls to Collaborative Business Processes. Companies will go beyond the initial capabilities of IM, like click-to-call and online presence, to deep integration with business processes and line-of-business applications, where they can realize the greatest benefit.

4) Interoperability and Open Standards will tear down proprietary walls across business and public domains. Corporate demand for interoperability and maturing of industry standards will force unified communications providers to embrace interoperability. Converged, aggregated, and rich presence will allow businesses and individuals to better find and reach the appropriate resources, removing inefficiencies from business processes and daily lives.

5) New meeting models will emerge. Hang up on routine, calendared conference calls. The definition of "meetings" will radically transform and become increasingly adhoc and instantaneous based on context and need. 3-D virtual world and gaming technologies will significantly influence online corporate meeting experiences to deliver more life-like experiences demanded by the next generation workers who will operate more efficiently in this familiar environment.

It's happening - this is where work is going and we must keep pace in our classrooms to properly prepare our students.

You can watch Mike Rhodin's keynote by clicking here and get more information on what he and the IBM Lotus group are doing at: http://www.ibm.com/lotus/uc2

Getting Ourselves in Sync

A couple of days ago eWeek.com put up an interesting piece titled Programming Grads Meet a Skills Gap in the Real World. Here's a summary quote from the piece written by Darryl K. Taft:

"In short, many people on both sides of the equation—teachers as well as potential employers—say the educational system is not doing enough to keep pace with the ever-changing needs of IT, and that entering the work force often is as much of an educational experience as is college, particularly for programmers".

Ari Zilka, chief technology officer at Terracotta, in San Francisco, is also quoted in the piece, saying he understands the skills gap after having worked his way in the high-tech industry, while attending the University of California, Berkeley. According to Zilka:

"I found that UC Berkeley had an excellent curriculum but not only was my schooling lagging behind work, it became very hard to even go to school because work had me learning the concepts and their applicability and nuances that teachers didn't even seem to know."

The eWeek piece goes on:

"Zilka noted that many of the new hires he's seen during his career continue to echo the same sentiments as he did".

"Some of the things the school didn't teach Zilka and many who are now entering the work force include issues around communication, development skills, and business and product design.

On the communication front, Zilka said, "Presentation skills are critical, and selling and influencing peers is critical."

"Some of the development skills that schools might emphasize more include design patterns, coding style and practices, scalability and performance tuning, and a focus on the entire software development lifecycle, Zilka said. He noted that things like quality assurance, unit testing, and stage and release are not usually taught".

The piece continues with more comments on the skills gap from faculty at Texas A&M, Carnegie Mellon and Monroe College. Most are in agreement and generally comment that programs are changing to close the gap.

Chris Stephenson, executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association, in New York, has an excellent quote:

".....but what is really exciting is that I have seen more and more educators (both at the K-12 level and the university level) willing to make these skills part of their curriculum."

Stephenson goes on, believing that subjects like Computer Science should no longer be taught as an "isolated discipline":

"There is little effort made to address issues such as effective team work, project planning and time management, and conflict resolution let alone helping students gain the cultural competencies and effective communication skills that are the key to success in a global economy,"

"Also, not enough effort has been made to show students how computing connects to problem solving in the real world,"

"The good news, however, is that an increasing number of educators are building these skills into the classroom experience. Teachers now have students work in teams on real world projects where the failure to plan together, work together, and communicate effectively are a big part of the evaluation that the students receive."

I'll finish the quotes with one that I feel really hits the need/gap on the head from Rawn Shah, IBM developerWorks Community Programs Manager:

"....software development is becoming much more of a group activity, and there is a lot of sophistication to that in the industry that isn't being replicated in a smaller closed environment like a college," Shah said. "Very often, they simply can't because of the time limitations of the semester-based programs."

If you are an academic - are your students working in teams? Can they communicate effectively with their teams? Are they learning relevant information? Are they ready when they graduate for work? Are there things that you are teaching that are out of date? Are there other courses in your curriculum that could be replaced with more relevant ones? How often do you make revisions to your curriculum? How do you know what you should be teaching?

If you are a business person - how can you help? What can you do to make a difference - to assure graduates you are hiring are properly prepared?

We ask ourselves these kinds of questions daily at our National Science Foundation funded National Center for Telecommunications Technologies - if you would like to learn more feel free to drop me an email at gsnyder@stcc.edu


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Read Show Notes and listen to Mike Q and my latest Podcast titled Enterprise 2.0 linked here.
Podcasts also free on iTunes.
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Business Week: Keeping Jobs Onshore

In this blog I continue to take a look at the August 20 and 27 Business Week feature “The Future of Work”.

Let’s start today by taking a look at offshoring and let’s take it from the perspective of a 22 year old college student. That’s what Business Week Software Editor Steve Hamm does in his piece How to Keep Your Job Onshore. Hamm talks about Matt Cavin, a freshman Theology student at Valparaiso University who, one day while on a summer study program a couple of years ago in China, happened to be reading Friedman’s The World is Flat in a Chinese park. As Matt read it was as if a light bulb went off in his head – experiencing first-hand the intensity of Chinese students as they studied English, Math and Science – Friedman’s words about the movement of U.S. jobs off-shore really hit home.

Fast forward – Matt gets back to the U.S. and remaps his future – he ditches the Theology major and will finish a triple major next spring – International Business, Economics and Mandarin. Today Matt sees opportunity – he is not scared but he is running as fast as he can. Matt understands that today just about any job that can be done over the web can be off-shored. It’s not just the computer programmers anymore – it's lawyers, pharmacists, accounting, banking, medicine….. the list is almost endless.

In his piece Hamm also discusses “multidisciplinary skills” and mentions one of my favorites (likely because this is my background) – computer science/engineering and biology. He goes on to discuss how young people in the U.S. must really sit down and plan their careers, Hamm says they must break down their jobs into the tasks that are easy to move and those that are not. They must prepare and ensure that they are excelling in the areas that cannot be easily moved if they want to stay in this country and have successful careers.

Alan S. Blinder from Princeton published an offshorability index study last March. The study pdf is linked here and it's another must read. In the study he classifies 8.2 million current jobs in the U.S. as being “highly offshorable” and 20.7 million more jobs as being “offshorable”. According to Blinder the most likely white collar positions heading offshore are software programmers, data entry clerks, draftsmen and computer research scientists.

How do we react? How do we plan? For us academics – what do we teach? For our students - what do they study? What aspects/pieces of our respective disciplines are offshorable? What pieces are not? As we update our curriculum are we focusing on the parts and pieces that are not highly offshorable? How are we preparing tomorrows workforce?

Like Matt, the student at Valparaiso - are we (you, me, our colleagues, our students) running as fast as we can?

Business Week: Collaboration and Team Work

Today I’ll continue with the Business Week August 20 and 27th issue that focuses on the future of work. A recurring theme throughout the issue is collaboration and teamwork. Multi-national companies like IBM are hiring sociologists to connect people that have never met into virtual teams. Virtual world applications, like Second Life, with 3D avatars are being used to promote social networking and corporations are creating their own virtual “campuses”, offering thousands of online courses.

Cultural and generational "idiosyncrasies" are paramount as these virtual teams are constructed. Think about creating a virtual team that, for example, is a mix of Chinese, Eastern Europe, U.S. and Indian employees….. people that have never met in the real world, may not speak each others language…… and then mix in the difference in age – the digital immigrants versus the digital natives. Now bundle in the time differences between the U.S. and distant locations….. It almost seems impossible .......

Let’s dig a little deeper into the generational differences. Here’s some startling quotes from the article:

"Dow Chemical expects 30% of its 20,000 workers to retire in the next 5 years".

"Meanwhile, enrollment in U.S. chemical engineering schools is declining and companies like Dow are fighting against the oil and gas companies for a shrinking chemical engineering talent pool".

So what is a company like Dow doing? The company is trying to persuade older employees not to retire by offering flexible hours, three day work weeks and letting those that do retire know they can always come back. So now we’ve got a company like Dow creating teams of workers that may span over 40 years in age difference, probably have never met, speak different languages and work in different time zones. How different is this from a modern college “classroom”? Except for the time zone differences the scenario sounds a lot like a typical community college campus! How many languages is your college website available in? What are the age ranges of students in your classrooms? The next time you walk around campus listen - how many different languages do you hear students speaking?

How are employers dealing with these differences? Companies, like Nokia are looking for employees with a “collaborative mindset”. Nokia is very careful to build task forces that include a range of nationalities, ages and education levels. Members are encouraged to network online and share personal information like photographs and biographies.

And then there is IBM.... IBM’s Web-based services group has a 360,000 member staff that works closely as one big virtual team. The company has started an “innovation portal”, allowing any employee with an idea for a product to build online teams, organize resources and access company talent and other assets.

Corporations are working to create a “seamless global workforce”. We must continue to push and innovate in the academic community, following the lead of companies like Dow, Nokia and IBM, as we structure our modern “classrooms”.

Business Week: The Future of Work

The August 20 and 27th issue of Business Week cover story is titled The Future of Work and it is excellent. I’ll take a good look at some of the interesting content that is relevant to technology and academic communities over the next few blogs. I highly recommend you buy this issue and keep it close - in fact I would consider it to be a must read. Now let's get to the content.

Before we look ahead we need to get some perspective on where we have been and where we are now. Here's a few quotes from the issue:

"According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 34% of adult workers in the U.S. now have bachelor’s degrees, up 29% from 10 years ago".

"The modern workplace no longer resembles an assembly line – it now more closely resembles a design studio where the core values are collaboration and innovation".

"Talented people are still in high demand, and there is no evidence yet that work has become less interesting because of outsourcing".

"The rapid growth of broader, richer channels of communications – including virtual worlds – is transforming what is meant to be “at work”.

Good stuff so far right? Communication channels, collaboration, virtual worlds, future, doing things differently, risk, trying new things….. all the things Mike Q and I write about and have been podcasting about over the past couple of years. Here’s a few more interesting pieces:

"College tuitions have risen 60% since 2000".

"The percentage of 25-29 year-olds with at least a bachelor’s degree has fallen during the last decade".

This is disturbing – could the next generation of Americans be less educated than the previous generation at the same time employers are requiring a higher level of worker education? Have 4-year institutions priced themselves of of the mainstream market?

Perhaps there is some gold here or those of us closely involved with the 2-year schools. Is this an opportunity for community colleges to provide the first two years of a 4-year degree? Translation - many 4-year schools may have priced themselves out of the market for much of the U. S. population. Community colleges are much less expensive and provide an opportunity for a student to economically obtain the first two years of a 4-year degree. We've always done it - it may be time to ratchet transfer up.

Now a little more:

"A Conference Board survey results found 47% of workers were satisfied with their jobs in 2006, in 1995 the same job satisfaction survey indicated 59%".

"Lynn Franco, consumer research director at the Conference Board, believes technology may have something to do with these results – specifically the fact that it is much more difficult to get away from “work”.

From a survey conducted by Beta Research Corp for Business Week: "36% of those surveyed believe they actually got more work done prior to email".

I find this last item incredible - let's think about it a bit - time warp your brain back 10-15 years if you were around then. How connected were you then? Did you have email? How dependent were you on technology to get you job done? If you are an academic - what kind of technology were you or your faculty using in your classrooms? Overhead projectors? Maybe you were one of those on the cutting edge and you had a document camera? Seriously - were you or your faculty more efficient? Personally my answer is no and I really hope yours is too. I'm guessing but believe that many of those who said they were more productive without email have not bothered to keep up with modern technology. Or perhaps they have not had sufficient support from their superiors......

Technology, globalization, communications, ubiquitous broadband, collaboration, virtualization….. exciting times for us in the academic world as we prepare our students for the new world of “work".

CafeScribe: Textbooks 2.0

Fourteen40, a Salt Lake company that derives it's name from the year 1440 when Gutenberg invented the printing press, has released (in beta) CaféScribe, an e-book marketplace and social network for students. CafeScribe is much more than just a bunch of PDF's students pay for and pull off the web. Provided are some interesting and useful tools including the ability to share notes with others and organize digital books based on things like subject matter along with other tools like digital color-coded color-coded highlighters.

The social networking component is most interesting - to give you an idea of how it works - here's some details from the CafeScribe website:

Upload and share any of your PDFs with your friends or classmates.

Share notes with others who are reading the same stuff. Academics call it "collaborative learning", we call it "divide and conquer" Why not share notes and figure out what is most important more quickly?

Rank others on how well they take notes. Find the genius note taker for your classes

The ability for students to form virtual study groups on their own campuses and across other campuses is very appealing for both the traditional classroom and distance delivery,

Even though CafeScribe is currently in beta you can still register on the website and start using it. This may be an interesting way for faculty to distribute documents for student collaboration. I'm going to experiment with it this fall with my students.

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Listen to Mike Q and my latest podcast "Niche Search" linked here.