Marilyn A. Dyrud

Group Projects and Peer Review.

not shown up to any of our get together (we have even scheduled thcm around her, not to mention immediately following class today). We have bcen putting hcr [name] on our memos, because we have been taking her word that she is doing well and is on schedule with ourselves. We found out today that she has not finished her section, we have no idea what she has done. All she had to say was, &dquo;Don’t worry, it will be good.&dquo; We havc no idca what we should do, and I am so frustrated! I hate to have to bring you into this, but I don’t think it is fair that we have been working so hard on this project to have our grade possibly dropped by one person. Thank you for your time, it helps just to vent!

The Third Wave: A Position Paper

age as a &dquo;swirling phantasmagoria,&dquo; marked by an unprecedented acceleration. The First Wave, agriculture, spanned thousands of years, while the Second Wave, industrialization, encompassed centuries. The Third Wave, he predicts, will take just decades. Unlike the first two, the Third Wave is an &dquo;information bomb ... exploding in our midst, showering us with a shrapnel of images and drastically changing the way each of us perceives and acts upon our private world&dquo; (p. 172). And the character of the Third Wave is decidedly electronic in nature; displacing the Second Wave technology of print, which both engenders and reflects linear thought patterns, electronic communication is fragmented and simultaneous, a somewhat bewildering collage of experience and perception. As if in fulfillment uf Toffler’s prophecy, education is rapidly becoming more Third Wave in character, with virtual universities popping up like mushrooms, enrolling hundreds of thousands of students, and distance education offerings in traditional venues multiplying like rabbits. As reported in a January 2000, Ne4v York 1 imes article analyzing the 1997-8 findings of a Department of Education report based on a survey of 1,601 US colleges, universities and other postsecondary institutions, about 34% offered dis-

Ethics à la Dilbert

T E A C H I N G E T H I C S is a tricky business. Most of us who want to include ethics in our business and communications courses may find that we require substantial research to augment our knowledge of an area in which we are interested but have no formal training. Then there’s the problem of how to approach such an enormous field and do it in a way that logically, coherently, and seamlessly complements course content. While casebooks provide examples and assignments,

Presentations and the PowerPoint Problem

IN THE ARTICLE preceding this column, Wim Blokzijl and Roos Naeff report their research on students’ responses to both lecture content and instructor when that instructor uses PowerPoint slides to present course material. Their students demonstrated some ambivalence toward the software. However, many writers on the subject of PowerPoint are less sanguine about its use and more critical of its misuse. The most recent salvo in the skirmish over presentation software comes from Edward Tufte (2003), guru of graphic design, who has recently published a monograph critiquing the “cognitive style” of PowerPoint. With its predesigned templates and auto-content features, Tufte charges, PowerPoint encourages a “foreshortening of evidence and thought,” and “a deeply hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organizing every type of content” (p. 4). Because that software is “entirely presenter-oriented, and not content-oriented, not audienceoriented,” Tufte charges that it leads users to “a preoccupation with format” rather than ideas, a phenomenon he terms PowerPoint “Phluff” (p. 4). And he reinforces the comment with a visual of the jarred marshmallow goo immediately to the right of his paragraph. Author Ian Parker (2001), writing for The New Yorker, is similarly concerned about the effect of PowerPoint on thinking. He charges that the software “edits ideas,” and that its template structure, with headings

Team Teaching, Part I

TEAM TEACHING: ALTHOUGH the concept is some 40 years old, many still consider it a “new” methodology, and a fairly threatening one at that. Giving up control of what used to be a solo classroom venture requires detailed planning, trust in one’s fellow instructor(s), flexibility, and consistency in crucial details such as class goals and activities, learning outcomes, and grading. Thrice in my 30-year career I have been involved in team-teaching adventures: twice in my own department and once in a cross-curricular integrated senior project, still going strong in its 9th year. The departmental endeavors, sadly, have reverted to individual efforts. What makes team teaching successful? While the literature indicates a number of beneficial outcomes, such as exposing students to multiple perspectives and teaching styles, emphasizing collaboration across the disciples and within departments, blurring disciplinary boundaries, and encouraging innovative teaching methodologies, one of the true benefits, at least from this author’s point of view, lies in the excitement of a new undertaking with trusted colleagues and the ensuing commitment to maximize the educational experience. As Beavers and DeTurck, team teachers at the University of Pennsylvania, suggest, “Team teaching is a little like participating in a semesterlong jam session, where musicians who share a deep love for the

Cases for teaching engineering ethics

This paper offers suggestions for integrating ethics education into engineering classes, primarily by using a case-based approach. It focuses on both micro and macro cases in three engineering disciplines: software, civil, and mechanical.

Presentations and the Powerpoint Problem—Part II

EVEN A CASUAL SEARCH of the LexisNexis database for articles on PowerPoint returns hundreds of references. For every article that insists “PowerPoint Makes You Dumb” (Thompson, 2003), another just below it on the list encourages you to follow these “44 Tips and Tricks to Help Turbocharge your PowerPoint Presentation” (Finkelstein, 2003). And so the discussion continues. If we reached any consensus from our discussion in Part I, it was that the fault lies not with the software but with the user, or, as one article claims in that LexisNexis list, “Bullet Points May Be Dangerous, but Don’t Blame PowerPoint” (Simons, 2004). The authors in Part II of this Focus on Teaching column represent exactly that point of view. In their teaching of the oral presentation, they focus on the development of content, on the written report that forms the basis for the presentation, and on the proficiency of the presenter. PowerPoint software becomes merely the tool for demonstrating mastery of the other skills. In the first article, authors William Baker and Michael Thompson focus on the message more than the messenger in their teaching of the oral presentation. They encourage students to design a basic information structure with ample supporting stories, analyses, and examples, and then to design the presentation itself. Using campus videotaping facilities, they help students improve their delivery by using positive feedback from instructors and coaching from peers.

Lessons learned from an integrated senior project

This paper describes an integrated senior project in civil engineering and focuses on lessons learned from the first-year experience that have been applied to the second, specifically the meaning of integration, faculty teamwork, assessment, and administrative issues.

Engineering Ethics: Looking Back, Looking Forward

The eight pieces constituting this Meeting Report are summaries of presentations made during a panel session at the 2011 Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE) annual meeting held between March 3rd and 6th in Cincinnati. Lisa Newton organized the session and served as chair. The panel of eight consisted both of pioneers in the field and more recent arrivals. It covered a range of topics from how the field has developed to where it should be going, from identification of issues needing further study to problems of training the next generation of engineers and engineering-ethics scholars.

Blogs: Getting Started.

project experience. Whether you are a clueless newbie or an experienced Webster, blogging is a rapidly growing form of information exchange, one that we, as business communication instructors, cannot afford to ignore. As Andrew Sullivan, creator of the well known blog Daily Dish, suggested, blogging “harnesses the web’s real genius—its ability to empower anyone to do what only a few in the past could previously pull off . . . [it] actually harnesses rather than merely exploits the true democratic nature of the web. It’s a new medium finally finding a unique voice” (Siemens, 2002).