29 – 31 October 2008, Washington DC
National Science Foundation Principal Investigators’ Conference

This is the fourth year I have attended, it is for the section of the NSF called Advanced Technological Education, which is mostly community college instructors and administrators who do research into new teaching frameworks and methodologies, together with industry representatives who tell us who they need to hire.

The first keynote address was from an astronaut, Captain Robert “Hoot” Gibson, who started his career in a community college. It reminds us that we never know how far our students will go!

The second keynote was from a journalist, Paul Gillin, who wrote “The New Influencers: the Marketers’ Guide to the New Social Media.” Gillian noted that 20% of American journalists were laid off this year, because information is cheap and plentiful. He says search is the new circulation.

My colleague Michael McKeever from Santa Rosa Junior College gave me some good tips on how to use CCC Confer. When conducting a class on CCC Confer, he receives student questions and comment via chat. He also suggested using VOIP for me to talk and for the students to hear.

Other notes I picked up at the conference:
Workforce development drives economic development
I should give students a career pep talk ASAP

Employers say:
-Give me someone who knows how to learn.
-I will take someone with a strong set of soft skills over someone with a strong set of technical skills.

My colleague Louise Yarnall and I led a workshop on “Envisioning what your students can learn through a project-based task.” This was the first time I had presented anything at a conference, so I was pleased to have 16 people attend. Louise had designed a couple of small group activities which worked great. We got lots of good feedback.

This was the debut for our friends in San Francisco who just got a grant for $3million over 4 years for their Mid-Pacific Information and Communications Technologies Center (MPICT). I will probably be presenting a workshop at their winter conference 8-9 January.

I met some community college instructors who have a thriving computer games development program in Raleigh, NC. They have to turn students away because their classes are so full. Their students can get jobs without transferring to university for a four year degree.
http://raleigh-wake.org/games/
They are more than willing to share their curriculum with us, and they gave me a CD with all their materials on it. I have forwarded all their stuff to John Berry, who teaches games development at Foothill.

The talk that covered a topic so much like ours was called “Photon PBL: Assessment of Student Learning in Problem-Based Learning.” They made the point that we need to assess students on 2 scales, the % of contribution that a student makes to the project and the % contribution that a student makes to the team. Someone at the talk mentioned that he had a method for assessing students that involved a spreadsheet quanitifying these two things, as assessed by the instructor and the rest of the team. I did not get that participant’s name, though.
The talk was by Nicholas Massa form Springfield Technical Community College, and Michele Dischino from Central Connecticut State University