A Peaking and Tailing Approach to Education and Curriculum Renewal for Sustainable Development

Contextual factors for sustainable development such as population growth, energy, and resource availability and consumption levels, food production yield, and growth in pollution, provide numerous complex and rapidly changing education and training requirements for a variety of professions including engineering. Furthermore, these requirements may not be clearly understood or expressed by designers, governments, professional bodies or the industry. Within this context, this paper focuses on one priority area for greening the economy through sustainable development—improving energy efficiency—and discusses the complexity of capacity building needs for professionals. The paper begins by acknowledging the historical evolution of sustainability considerations, and the complexity embedded in built environment solutions. The authors propose a dual-track approach to building capacity building, with a short-term focus on improvement (i.e., making peaking challenges a priority for postgraduate education), and a long-term focus on transformational innovation (i.e., making tailing challenges a priority for undergraduate education). A case study is provided, of Australian experiences over the last decade with regard to the topic area of energy efficiency. The authors conclude with reflections on implications for the approach

Sustainable development as a meta-context for engineering education

At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, there is unprecedented awareness of the need for a transformation in development, to meet the needs of the present while also preserving the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. However, within engineering, educators still tend to regard such development as an ‘aspect’ of engineering rather than an overarching meta-context, with ad hoc and highly variable references to topics. Furthermore, within a milieu of interpretations there can appear to be conflicting needs for achieving sustainable development, which can be confusing for students and educators alike. Different articulations of sustainable development can create dilemmas around conflicting needs for designers and researchers, at the level of specific designs and (sub-) disciplinary analysis. Hence sustainability issues need to be addressed at a meta-level using a whole of system approach, so that decisions regarding these dilemmas can be made. With this appreciation, and in light of curriculum renewal challenges that also exist in engineering education, this paper considers how educators might take the next step to move from sustainable development being an interesting ‘aspect’ of the curriculum, to sustainable development as a meta-context for curriculum renewal. It is concluded that capacity building for such strategic considerations is critical in engineering education

Memorandum to Business and Professional Women\u27s Club Delegate

A memorandum from the Business and Professional Women\u27s Clubs

NEW YORK COURT OF APPEALS CASE COMPILATIONS: PEOPLE V. THOMPSON

PEOPLE V. THOMPSON (Decided November 14, 2002

Student objectivity in peer assessment in an EFL speaking class

This research was aimed to investigate to what extent students doing peer assessment can be objective when they assess their friends in speaking and to find out their perceptions toward peer assessment. Peer assessment is an interesting teaching and learning technique. Teachers rarely use it as a final assessment because of doubts about the objectivity of peer assessment itself. Thus, the writer was interested to find out the objectivity of peer assessment. The subjects were students in a Public Speaking Class at UIN Ar-Raniry in Banda Aceh. The results from document analysis showed that peer assessment was objective as proven by the SPSS analysis. There was no significant difference between the results from peer assessment and the value assessed by the teacher which proved that the peer assessment done by the students was objective. In addition, the interview results showed that the students supported doing peer assessment in the classroom. As a result of this research teachers are recommended to implement peer assessment in their classrooms as a teaching technique as well as doing it for final assessments.

Analysis of Producer and Consumer Cattle Surveys

This thesis presents two separate studies focusing on producers and consumers in the United States cattle industry. The objective of the first study was to analyze the differences between a text cheap talk script and a visual cheap talk script in an online choice experiment to see if it decreased or eliminated hypothetical bias. The product evaluated was Tennessee Certified Beef, specifically USDA Choice boneless ribeye, with other attributes to complement the beef product. Using a random parameters logit model, results indicated that willingness to pay (WTP) estimates for respondents who saw the visual cheap talk script were higher than the WTP estimates for respondents who saw the text cheap talk script. The study also evaluated the respondent’s preferred learning style (visual or verbal) and found that this too had an impact on WTP. The second study’s objective was to analyze the differences between operating and closed dairies in the Southeastern United States through farm and operator characteristics. Probit regression model results indicated variables that were related to the operational status of a dairy such as the number of cows and the dairies average daily production. The study also found there were other factors besides the size of the dairy operation that were significant in determining the operational status of the dairy