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Towards technology stewardship: tools for encouraging student engagement

Publication . Williams, Bill; Neto, Pedro; Carvalho, Isabel S.

Getting more specialist engineering faculty members involved in the practice of high quality engineering education research (EER) has been a recurring concern at conferences and has been addressed in various initiatives over the last decade. We consider the technology stewardship concept proposed by Etienne Wenger et al. to be a fruitful area for engineering educators who have been increasingly faced with decisions relating to IT-based tools arising from a rapid proliferation of IT technology and tools and a growing emphasis on quality assurance in higher education. Choices need to be made in areas of technology selection, design and adaptation and as these decisions require competences from both engineering and pedagogical domains, the engineering instructor needs to be able to draw upon both these areas of knowledge and in this paper,as part of a pedagogical framework, we set out to illustrate the processes of tool design, adoption and adaptation in the service of teaching and learning from a technology stewardship perspective.

2011Conference object

Open access

Facilitating the adoption and dissemination of active and cooperative learning methodologies in engineering education using a learner activity index approach

Publication . Williams, Bill; Carvalho, Isabel S.

The overall aims of the project are centred on the adoption and dissemination in engineering education at institutional and inter-institutional level in Portugal of good practice with regard to Active and Cooperative Learning (ACL). We aim to achieve this over a three-year project lifetime through a two-phase strategy: i) Initial implementation of ACL techniques in formal teaching contexts at departmental level in two engineering colleges through the use of self and peer observation using a semi-quantitative tool to measure a Learner Activity Index; ii) Subsequent dissemination of the approach to other departments and colleges using online Community of Practice (CoP) cultivation strategies and Web 2.0 tools.

2009Conference object

Open access