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1. Chili Fundraiser for Paul Castle |
submitted by Catholic Campus Ministries
A chili fundraiser for Paul Castle, a junior in construction management, will be held from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., Friday, Feb. 11, at St. Albert the Great Church, 411 MacInnes Drive.
Castle was recently involved in a severe motor vehicle accident while traveling back to school to start the spring semester. Icy conditions caused the vehicle in the oncoming lane to lose control and strike Castle's vehicle. He was taken to Marquette General and later airlifted to U of M Medical Center, where he is still undergoing surgeries to repair his injuries. All proceeds go towards his treatment and rehabilitation.
There is a suggested donation of $5 or more for the dinner. Silent auction of local goods and services will also be held. Volunteers are welcome and needed.
For more information, contact Genny Gierke, president of Catholic Campus Ministries, at gegierke@mtu.edu . |
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2. Reminder: Khana Khazana Brings India to Tech |
Khana Khazana, a weekly lunch featuring international students cooking dishes from their homelands, will offer delicacies from India today.
Komal Tayal and Sachin Joshi will prepare chicken chettinad, a southern Indian dish, paneer-aloo kofta, curried cheese and potato dumplings, and seviyan kheer, a dessert made from vermicelli. Tayal and Joshi both are graduate students in mechanical engineering.
Lunch is served from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Memorial Union Food Court. A full meal costs $6 and includes a fountain drink, tea or coffee. Items also are available a la carte for $2.
Khana Khazana is a collaborative project of international students and Dining Services. The campus and community are welcome. |
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3. Environmental Engineering Seminar |
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Graduate student Lijun Chen (CEE) will present a seminar, "Prioritizing the Placement of Filter Strips in a Watershed Level using SWAT," from 3 to 4 p.m., Monday, Feb. 7, in Dow 642. |
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4. SFHI Candidate (Health) Seminar |
Edward Sander, of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Minnesota, will present "Unlocking Multiscale Mechanical Interactions in Engineered Connective Tissues," at 2 p.m., Monday, Feb. 7, in Rekhi G06.
Sander is a candidate for a position under the Strategic Faculty Hiring Initiative in Health.
For more information about the seminar, hosted by BME, contact Judy Schaefer (BME) at 487-2772 or jlschaef@mtu.edu . |
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5. Sponsored Programs Holds Session on Reading Reallocations |
Sponsored Programs will hold an educational session, "Reading an Account Statement/Payroll Reallocation," from 12 to 1 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 17, in Memorial Union Ballroom B.
This session will help department coordinators, principal investigators and financial coordinators who receive an account statement every month from Sponsored Programs Accounting.
Topics covered will include:
* Determining when a reallocation is necessary
* Avoiding the need for reallocations
* Clarifying the requirement for reallocations past 90 days
* Explaining the relationship between reallocations and effort certifications
Beverages and desserts will be available. Bring your lunch.
To register, see reallocations .
For more information, contact Dawn Pichette, Sponsored Programs, at 487-2226 or dmpichet@mtu.edu . |
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6. Reminder: Sponsored Programs Holds Session on Confidentiality |
Sponsored Programs will hold an educational session, "Confidentiality," from 12 to 1 p.m., Tuesday, Feb. 8, in Memorial Union Ballroom B.
This session will cover University standard confidentiality contract terms, approval processes, publication rights to research results, and issues related to confidential information restrictions, including export compliance and document retention practices.
This session is recommended for all PI's and Co-PI's and other individuals who are involved in sponsored programs research at the University.
Beverages and desserts will be available. Bring your lunch.
To register for this session, see confidentiality .
For more information, contact Dawn Pichette, Sponsored Programs, at 487-2226 or dmpichet@mtu.edu . |
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7. Teaching at Tech: Effort and Expertise |
by William Kennedy, director, Center for Teaching, Learning and Faculty Development
Some of the messages I took away from a recent, quick pass-through of Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers: The Story of Success" were: 1) that it does indeed "take a village," 2) that 10,000 hours of focused study and practice will prepare a person for almost any undertaking, and 3) that we are presently wasting tons of human potential in the way that we educate people.
Several other folks have since picked up on the notion that 10,000 hours of focused effort yields expert proficiency. For example, game designer and social critic Jane McGonigal has found that avid video gamers spend about that amount of time immersed in virtual-world video games from the fifth grade to the time that they graduate from high school. Her question is, "What is it that these gamers are becoming expert at?"
I did a little ciphering on back of the envelope and determined that an undergraduate who follows the rule--"two hours out of class studying for each hour in class"--would spend about 5,000 hours earning a bachelor's degree. If, as our surveys show, the typical student spends one hour out of class studying for each hour in class, the total falls to about 3,500 hours.
So, I've been thinking about these two pieces of the puzzle: the qualitative side of focused effort and the quantitative side that it takes a long time for our brains to become attuned to an expert mode of function.
Physicist Carl Wieman asserts that our present educational methods yield students who understand the terminology of what they've studied and can remember and apply problem-solving protocols laid out by their teachers--but that they can't think like professional practitioners.
My problem, like Wieman's, is this: What's being put forth as educational assessment fails to recognize that the ability to recall factual knowledge--and a familiarity with modes of problem solving developed by other people--may be necessary in the former case and appealing in the latter, but are not sufficient to develop expert practitioners.
What is it, then, that experts can actually do?
They are able to notice features and patterns of information not noticed by novices. They possess knowledge organized in an interlaced, organic way that reflects a broad and integrated understanding of their field of inquiry. They have knowledge that is richly contextualized. Through focused study and extended reflection, they are able to flexibly retrieve factual, conceptual and procedural resources that shed light on the challenge at hand.
Perhaps the utility of Gladwell's "10,000-hour rule" becomes more evident when we consider how time, varied experience, and extended reflection come together to give rise to this expert thinking.
Many of my students admit that they routinely succumb to electronic distractions, such as playing video games or spending too many hours kvetching with their comrades on Facebook.
Discussing these issues in class just yesterday, one student said that he has to wean himself off video games at the end of each summer and that he goes through an extended period of withdrawal during which he experiences depression, disinterest and lack of engagement with his studies. After a few weeks, he says, "Stuff starts to be a little more interesting." Oh, heart be still!
What keeps me awake at night is that these unimaginably successful commercial enterprises--social networking sites and MMORPG video games--continuously develop ever more-engaging and time-consuming amusements that directly compete for the time and attention of our students. Social networking and video games are consciously designed to do exactly what school doesn't know how to do: inflame the passions and capture the heart.
Rather than repeatedly asking ourselves, "What's the very least our graduates should be able to know and do?" maybe we should be figuring out how to compete with the hucksters before it's too late. |
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8. Job Posting |
Staff job descriptions are available in Human Resources or at http://www.admin.mtu.edu/hro/postings . For more information regarding staff positions, call 487-2280 or email jobs@mtu.edu .
Faculty job descriptions can be found at www.admin.mtu.edu/hro/facpers/facvac.htm .
For more information regarding faculty positions, contact the academic department in which the position is posted.
Staff Posting
2/4/2011
Staff Assistant
Registrar's Office
UAW Internal Posting Only
Michigan Technological University is an equal opportunity educational institution/equal opportunity employer. |
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9. In the News |
Associate Professor Jarek Drelich (MSE), Associate Professor Tim Scarlett (SS) and graduate student Patrick Bowen (MSE) were featured by the Polish Press Agency in a news publication, "Science and Scholarship in Poland." The story was about their work on a new way of dating ceramic artifacts that could one day shave thousands of dollars off the cost of doing archaeological research.
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10. New Funding |
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Professor Steve Hackney (MSE) has received $53,152 from UChicago Argonne for a one-year project, "Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) Characterization of Battery Materials." |
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