Latest News

New CIRTLcast Video Featuring TAMU's Bruce Herbert

Submitted by cefisher2 on Tue, 07/27/2010 - 7:56am

We are happy to announce a new 10 minute condensed version of Bruce Herbert's CIRTLcast from June, 2010. In this video Bruce talks about engaging students in Learning Through Diversity (LtD) using environmental case studies, including the recent BP oil spill. This is a very interesting and informative video that you should certainly check out. A special thanks to Erin for her great job editing and producing the video!

Video: http://www.youtube.com/user/CIRTLNetwork#p/u/6/DJ7hHmEgo0Q

More information on past CIRTLcasts: http://www.cirtl.net/cirtlcasts/archive

A National Look at College Completion

Submitted by cefisher2 on Thu, 07/22/2010 - 9:44am

Be sure to read the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education and see where your state ranks in all levels of education.

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/A-National-Look-at-College/25701/

 

Documents mentioned in the article:

http://advocacy.collegeboard.org/sites/default/files/Progress_Report_2010.pdf  Read More »

Tenure, RIP: What the Vanishing Status Means for the Future of Education

Submitted by cefisher2 on Tue, 07/06/2010 - 11:23am

Great article from "The Chronicle of Higher Education" about the rise of part-time college instructors over the more traditional tenure track.

"Over just three decades, the proportion of college instructors who are tenured or on the tenure track plummeted: from 57 percent in 1975 to 31 percent in 2007. The new report is expected to show that that proportion fell even further in 2009, dropping below one-third. If you add graduate teaching assistants to the mix, those with some kind of tenure status represent a mere quarter of all instructors."  Read More »

CIRTL/Vanderbilt TAR Project Wins Best Paper Award

Submitted by cefisher2 on Tue, 07/06/2010 - 10:43am

A TAR project and paper from Jonathan Wellons, Julie Johnson, and Renee McCauley recently won the best paper award in the session for Engineering Concepts, Relations and Methodologies at the IMETI 2010 conference in Orlando, FL. Their paper "Planning and the novice programmer: How grounded theory research can lead to better interventions" was the result of the work they did last fall in the Vanderbilt TAR program. Congrats to all!

Link to the TAR poster by Wellons, Johnson, and McCauley: http://www.cirtl.net/node/5606  Read More »

Does The Quality of Faculty Instruction Matter?

Submitted by DrBruceHerbert on Tue, 06/15/2010 - 5:20pm

A new study of the impact of Faculty teraching quality on student learning finds that professors who rate highly among students tend to teach students less. Professors who teach students more tend to get bad ratings from their students -- who, presumably, would just as soon get high grades for minimal effort.  Read More »

Motivating Students with Application Projects & Poster Sessions

Submitted by cefisher2 on Tue, 06/15/2010 - 9:07am

This is a guest post by Derek Bruff for "The Chronicle of Higher Education" about how to get students to apply mathematics tools they learned in the classroom and apply it to real-life situations.

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Motivating-Students-with/24780/

 

 

Interesting Article in the NY Times called "Daring to Discuss Women in Science"

Submitted by cefisher2 on Tue, 06/08/2010 - 2:17pm

This article discusses the recent legislation passed by the House of Representatives to "fulfill the potential of women in academic science and engineering." The author of the article, John Tierney, thinks that the possible law (still waiting Senate approval) will give support to the myth that "girls can't do math" and could possibly widen the gender gap in science.  Read More »

VU Engineering Students Create Mobile Apps for Fun, Profit, and Credit

Submitted by derekbruff on Tue, 06/01/2010 - 10:48am

This spring, the Vanderbilt School of Engineering’s magazine ran a story profiling Ben Gotow, a senior computer science major (now graduated, presumably) who has designed some very successful iPhone apps, including the drawing apps NetSketch and Layers.  Gotow designed those apps on his own, but he was also a student in an Engineering course that focused on mobile app development:  Read More »

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Using Open Atrium to Manage Collaborative Academic Projects

Submitted by cefisher2 on Wed, 05/26/2010 - 1:45pm

Interesting article in "The Chronicle of Higher Education" about self hosted work groups.

"As scholars, we are always involved in one project or another. Whether it is a funded grant project, a writing project, development (as in web/game/interactive/software/etc), or even curriculum/teaching work, it often becomes quite a challenge to manage things (especially if many collaborators are involved).  Read More »

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