Stein,Jared & Graham,Charles R (2014) Essentials for blended learning Routledge (New York & London) isbn 978‐0‐415‐63616‐2 210 pp £19.99 http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415636162/

This reader‐friendly jargon‐free volume is a down‐to‐earth and visual guide for practitioners seeking new ways to improve educational opportunities in times when quality needs to be enriched by simple but effective online experiences. It is a must for those involved in integrating technology into the classroom. If this book deals with a subject likely to be relevant to you, I recommend you buy a copy. Jesus Garcia Laborda     

Model-based event-triggered multi-vehicle coordinated tracking control using reduced order models

The coordinated tracking problem where a group of followers intercepts a dynamic leader is studied. It is shown in this paper that reduction of inter-agent communication is obtained and improved performance is achieved when each follower implements dynamical models of neighbors and by using an event-triggered control strategy that requires each agent to send measurement updates only when necessary. The results in this paper consider directed graphs and the possible existence of cycles. Performance bounds on the tracking error have been obtained, which are functions of the communication topology and the event thresholds. This approach is extended to consider measurement noise and similar bounds are presented for this case.     

The rewards of human capital competences for young European higher education graduates

Abstract

The labour market rewards for a number of required human capital competences are analysed using a sample of young European higher education graduates. Factor analysis is applied to classify competences by jobs into eight orthogonal groups, namely participative, methodological, specialised, organisational, applying rules, physical, generic and socio‐emotional competences. Estimates for the total rewards for competences are obtained through conventional wage regression, whereas estimates of the total rewards are derived in terms of job satisfaction through ordered logit regression. Explanatory variables include personal characteristics, job attributes, occupational titles, fields of study, type of higher education institution and country dummies. Results on wage rewards show that jobs with higher requirements of participative and methodological competences are best paid; conversely, jobs with higher requirements of organisational, applying‐rules and physical competences are worse paid. Results on total rewards suggest that jobs with higher requirements of competences increase graduates’ satisfaction, the only exception being applying‐rules competences.     

Exploring the Role of Family Support and Ethnic Pride in Cultivating the Academic and Career Resourcefulness of Underserved Youth in an Afterschool Program

The Urban Review - The purpose of this study was to identify the internal and external factors that support the academic and career resourcefulness of adolescents from underserved backgrounds. This...     

Making the implicit explicit: Supporting teachers to bridge cultures

In this paper, we report the results of a longitudinal action research project in which elementary teachers used a cultural framework (individualism–collectivism) to understand differences between the culture of immigrant Latino families and the culture of U.S. schools. Making explicit the culture-based beliefs implicit in home and school practices allowed teachers to think differently about their students and their own teaching, and with that change in thinking came the immediate and ongoing creation of a wide range of innovations to bridge home and school cultures. Shifting to a preschool emphasis, we discuss how the individualism–collectivism framework has been used in professional development for early childhood educators. A broad view of professional development is discussed including the role of college faculty, early childhood program administrators, teachers, and families. We suggest how such professional development might be mounted through use of methods and materials that promote explicit models of immigrant cultures to reduce home–school cultural mismatches for immigrant children.     

EDLE: an integrated tool to foster entrepreneurial skills development in engineering education

Academic papers on entrepreneurship in engineers’ education have been growing in the last decades. However, studies on entrepreneurship in engineering have not sought to analyze how entrepreneurship education, in connection to active learning, design thinking, and Bloom’s Taxonomy, inserted in an integrated way, as a tool, might help the process of engineering students’ entrepreneurial skills development. Thus, this study has the goal to propose an integrated tool, linked to the principles of entrepreneurship education, active learning, design thinking, and Bloom’s Taxonomy, to foster engineering students’ entrepreneurial skills development. The tool, called Entrepreneurial Dynamic Learning, is operationalized and validated in a 2-year case study in a Brazilian public university. The study also produces practical implications, and five are highlighted: (1) at the level of governments and policy makers; (2) engineering scientific associations; (3) universities, coordinators, and professors of engineering undergraduate programs; (4) engineering education researchers; and (5) the Brazilian National Confederation of Industry.     

Investigating the Impact of Using a CAD Simulation Tool on Students’ Learning of Design Thinking

Engineering design thinking is hard to teach and still harder to learn by novices primarily due to the undetermined nature of engineering problems that often results in multiple solutions. In this paper, we investigate the effect of teaching engineering design thinking to freshmen students by using a computer-aided Design (CAD) simulation software. We present a framework for characterizing different levels of engineering design thinking displayed by students who interacted with the CAD simulation software in the context of a collaborative assignment. This framework describes the presence of four levels of engineering design thinking—beginning designer, adept beginning designer, informed designer, adept informed designer. We present the characteristics associated with each of these four levels as they pertain to four engineering design strategies that students pursued in this study—understanding the design challenge, building knowledge, weighing options and making tradeoffs, and reflecting on the process. Students demonstrated significant improvements in two strategies—understanding the design challenge and building knowledge. We discuss the affordances of the CAD simulation tool along with the learning environment that potentially helped students move towards Adept informed designers while pursuing these design strategies.     

Letter to the editor concerning the article “Bar velocities capable of optimising the muscle power in strength-power exercises” by Loturco,Pereira, Abad,Tabares, Moraes,Kobal, Kitamura & Nakamura (2017)

Loturco and co-workers (2017) recently published data in the Journal of Sports Sciences to present the optimum loading magnitudes regarding the maximization of the “mean propulsive power” of the leg and arm muscles. Among the most important findings were that (1) the recorded power in the squat and squat jump exercises was markedly low, (2) the optimum external load that maximized the power in the same exercises was close to 100% of body weight, while (3) the ballistic bench press throw revealed smaller power than the regular bench press typically performed with relatively low level of muscle activation towards the end of the propulsive lifting phase. The findings are either counter-intuitive, or contradict the literature findings, or both, and we believe that they originate from apparent methodological flaws. The first one is neglecting the force acting against the body segments moved together with the external load that is particularly high in squat exercises. The second one is an erroneous calculation of the propulsive phase that included a part of the bar’s flight time. Both of these methodological flaws are frequent in the literature and could be associated with the improper use and calculation of variables when utilizing linear position transducers.     

Resisting,Rejecting, and Redefining Normative Pathways to the Professoriate: Faculty of Color in Higher Education

The Faculty of Color Cohort 2014 (FOCC2014) consists of 20 scholars in faculty positions across the country. Here we use the theory of transformational resistance and data from our private Facebook group webpage as a way to understand the resistance enacted by the FOCC2014 as first-year faculty members. Through critical discourse analysis, we investigate how the FOCC2014 Facebook webpage is used to encourage members to actively resist, reject, and redefine what it means to be a faculty member in higher education. Findings provide empirical evidence of the utility of social media as a space for engagement and community for faculty of color across multiple campuses where the racial/ethnic diversity of faculty is limited.