Connections, confidence, and competence: the meaning of professional development for community college support staff personnel

Using a qualitative, phenomenological methodology this dissertation study describes and examines the meaning of participation in professional development for community college support staff and the perceived meaning, benefits, and challenges to both the individual participant and the institution. The research site is an urban Midwestern U.S. community college that offers a comprehensive staff development program. The study includes the perspectives of both support staff participants in professional development and administrative staff who work closely with the program. A total of 15, all female, participants---11 support staff and four administrative staff---took part in the study.;This study was of interest because, despite the fact that over 25% of the employees in U.S. community colleges are classified as support staff, no substantive empirical research regarding any aspect of community college support staff participation in professional development could be identified. Additionally, the literature has strongly suggested that focused professional development programs have been shown to have a positive effect on the personnel who participate in them and on the institutions in which they work. Literature reviewed for the study includes community college professional development, the learning college and learning organization, and women\u27s ways of knowing and learning.;Study data were analyzed using the Moustakas modification of the Stevick-Colaizzi-Keen method for analyzing phenomenological data. This analysis resulted in nine textural themes: gaining knowledge, personal improvement, social enjoyment, attaining career/educational goals, support and encouragement, organizational issues, equity of access, obstacles, and opportunities and three structural themes: connections, confidence, and competence. Recommendations for practice from the study results include: providing equitable professional development opportunities for all staff in the college; providing and supporting opportunities for informal learning and networking for support staff personnel; and providing a wide range of personal and professional development activities at flexible times that are open to staff and faculty across the college

Rogowski and D-Dot Sensors for Nanosecond High-Voltage and High-Current Pulse Measurements in Impedance-Matched Pulse Generators

To measure the output voltage and current in our impedance-matched solid-state Marx generator we developed a voltage and current sensor integrated with the IMG structure. One of the advantages of our IMG structure is the coaxial inner transmission line (TL). The end of this TL is the output connection, which consists of a grounded ring and a smaller high-voltage (HV) inner conductor (coaxial). This structure is ideal for fitting D-dot and Rogowski-coil sensors, as these sensors can benefit from the strictly defined electric and magnetic fields in this waveguide. We developed D-dot and Rogowski-coil sensors on printed circuit boards (PCB) and show their usability in our application for measuring HV pulses. The sensors have a bandwidth of about 200 MHz, measure voltages up to 20 kV, and currents up to hundreds of amperes. Their simple PCB design makes them easily reproducible and cheap compared to commercial sensors. Although designed for our IMG, they can be fit on any coaxial line. Next, we made passive integrators to partly integrate the differentiated sensor signal, which improves the signal quality when measured with an oscilloscope. Finally, after software signal postprocessing, we achieve far better voltage measurements and similar current measurements compared to commercial probes.</p

A delay spread cancelling waveform characterizer for RF power amplifiers

A two channel 65 nm CMOS RF-waveform characterizer is presented that enables multi-harmonic Adaptive Matching Networks (AMN) or Adaptive Digital Pre-Distortion (ADPD) in RF-power amplifiers. The characterizer measures the DC component and the first 3 harmonics of RF signals by applying a DFT to 8 (ideally) equally spaced quasi-DC output voltages. Conventionally in these types of systems accuracy is limited by sample timing accuracies, which in our case are mainly due to delay cell mismatch. We introduce a novel way to cancel delay cell mismatch, that significantly increases measurement accuracy at the cost of only a small power and area increase. The RF-waveform characterizer achieves 6.8-bit measurement linearity together with a (clock feedthrough limited) 24 dB SFDR. The measured power consumption for our proof-of-principle demonstrator is 18.6 mW at a maximum input signal frequency of 1.1 GHz under continuous operation