Profile: Inspiring Alumni Leaders

This issue of Profile and my impending departure have given me another opportunity: the chance to think about leadership. Why does it matter? What are the elements of effective leadership? And how is it present in Morris alumni? In the pages that follow we focus on several alumni who provide examples of leadership for the rest of us to study and emulate. As we emerge from a summer of violence in this country and around the world, and as we bear witness to an extremely polarized political election season, it seems appropriate to take some time to reflect on what we value in leaders and in leadership. --From Chancellor Johnson\u27s messagehttps://digitalcommons.morris.umn.edu/profile/1062/thumbnail.jp

Multiple data sources: Converging and diverging conceptualizations of LOTE teaching

The study, uncovered Japanese Language Other Than English (LOTE) teachers\u27 understandings of communicative language teaching (CLT). Using the idea of multiple data sources, the project relied on open ended interviews, classroom observations, and LOTE teacher survey responses. The data provided answers to two research questions: 1) What are LOTE teachers\u27 beliefs and knowledge about (communicative) language teaching? and 2) How do LOTE teachers implement CLT in their classrooms. The multiple data sources provided information that both converged and diverged, providing insights not only into communicative language teaching, but also teachers\u27 views of language teaching in general. The various sources allowed a richer and deeper conceptualisation of LOTE teachers and captured nuances, subtlety, and complexity that these Japanese LOTE teachers dealt with in their daily professional lives. Such databases have much to offer researchers in dealing with understanding the many aspects of LOTE teacher education in particular and teacher education in general

Profile: Outcomes of a UMN Morris Education

In this issue: An endowed Psychology chair gift to impact generations of students; Former Physics professor provides out of this world support for Cougar Athletics; Scholarship support veterinary careers; Center for Renewable Energy storage technology launched; University of Minnesota Morris holds first Morris Youth Challenge Institute; Bartlett and Kivi are Fulbright finalists; Sustainability Careers and Pathways webinar series will focus on agriculture; NCHC posthumously honors Sam Schuman with Founders Award; Prayers for a Feverish Planet debuted during Earth Week; UMN Morris creates life-long community, career for international student; Spotlight; Alumni News; Class Notes; Cougar Newshttps://digitalcommons.morris.umn.edu/profile/1075/thumbnail.jp

Grand Valley Magazine, vol. 14, no. 4 Spring 2015

Grand Valley Magazine is a quarterly publication about Grand Valley State University produced by University Communications since 2001.https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/gv_magazine/1049/thumbnail.jp

Washington University Record, November 1, 2007

https://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/record/2123/thumbnail.jp

By hand and by computer – a video-ethnographic study of engineering students’ representational practices in a design project

In engineering education there has been a growing interest that the curriculum should include collaborative design projects. However, students’ collaborative learning processes in design projects have, with a few exceptions, not been studied in earlier research. Most previous studies have been performed in artificial settings with individual students using verbal protocol analysis or through interviews.  The context of this study is a design project in the fifth semester of the PBL-based Architecture and Design programme at Aalborg University. The students had the task to design a real office building in collaborative groups of 5–6 students. The preparation for an upcoming status seminar was video recorded in situ. Video ethnography, conversation analysis and embodied interaction analysis were used to explore what interactional work the student teams did and what kind of resources they used to collaborate and complete the design task. Complete six hours sessions of five groups were recorded using multiple video cameras (2 – 5 cameras per group). The different collaborative groups did not only produce and reach an agreement on a design proposal during the session – in their design practice they used, and produced, a wealth of tools and bodily-material resources for representational and modelling purposes. As an integral and seamless part of students’ interactional and representational work and the group’s collaborative thinking bodily resources such as “gestured drawings” and gestures, concrete materials such as 3D-foam and papers models, “low-tech” representations such as sketches and drawings by hand on paper and “high-tech” representations as CAD-drawings were used. These findings highlight the cognitive importance of tools and the use of bodily and material resources in students’ collaborative interactional work in a design setting. Furthermore, our study demonstrates that a focus primarily on digital technologies, as is often the case in the recent drive towards “digital learning”, would be highly problematic