Dear ERM members,
How are all of you holding up? For me, it’s been one day at a time. I find myself getting overwhelmed from time-to-time about all the worries I have: What will the fall semester look like? What will the spring semester look like? Will the cases spike even more in the winter? Are things going to get worse in Pennsylvania? What will my son’s schooling starting in August look like? Will he be safe? Will his teachers be safe? Will schools start up only to close again? Will my parents be safe? When will I see my work colleagues? When will I see my friends?
Sometimes my brain is on overload, just bouncing from one worry to the next. Every time I get this way, I try to remember to just take everything one day at a time. “Worry is like a rocking chair: It gives you something to do but never gets you anywhere” (Erma Bombeck). Clearly, I have been in that rocking chair too much lately, thinking and thinking, but getting nowhere! I keep telling myself, the situation right now is ever changing and all we can do is to make the best decisions we can with the information we have at the moment.
And live in that moment! I woke up in central PA today to a beautiful, warm sunny day. The wildflowers I planted in my garden last year have returned and are absolutely gorgeous. I got a lovely text this morning from a friend I haven’t heard from in a while. My dogs keep coming over to me sitting at my computer this morning to be pet and just be near. My son is also laying near me, excited for activities we have planned later this afternoon. We’ll walk the dogs in a little while in the sunshine along a beautiful tree-lined trail. Maybe we’ll do some watercolor painting later tonight. This is my new normal – balancing the worry (that we all have) with the simple things that bring me joy and bring me peace.
I’m going to try to put some music in your head today. I thought of this song and now I’ve been walking around the house singing all morning:
“Don’t worry ’bout a thing, cause every little thing’s gonna be alright” (Bob Marley)
Eventually, everything is going to be alright. ?
In the meantime, we have some super interesting “Calls for Participation” below. The PEER Unconference and the CHEER UP events offer great opportunities to network with our engineering education colleagues. And a lovely distraction from those things that may be worrying us right now.
Take care of yourself, both physically and mentally. And of course, wear a mask.
Sarah
ERM Announcements for 7/15/2020
General Announcements
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: Call for input and leadership for the EER Taxonomy
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: 2020 Online PEER unconference for early career engineering education faculty
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: Request for Faculty Productivity Study Respondents
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: Engineering faculty, staff and administrators experiences and perceptions of undergraduate student mental health
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: CHEER UP – Cambridge Handbook of Engineering Education Research – Updated Perspectives
CALL FOR PAPERS: Machine-based plagiarism: The death of originality in the digital age?
Position Announcements
POSITION ANNOUNCEMENT: Lecturer in Technical Communication at the University of Michigan College of Engineering
POSITION ANNOUNCEMENT: Post-Doctoral Fellow Position at New Jersey Institute of Technology
General Announcements
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: Call for input and leadership for the EER Taxonomy
You may be familiar with the Engineering Education Research Taxonomy of Keywords (http://taxonomy.engin.umich.edu/). Among other things, it is used by several engineering education journals as a recommended source for authors to select keywords when submitting articles. Maura Borrego and I developed the taxonomy through a series of inclusive community activities in 2013, and a “Taxonomy Review Committee” (including representatives from several journals) was tasked with periodically updating it. The committee will be meeting soon to clear out the list of proposed changes to the taxonomy.
At this year’s ASEE conference, there were many good discussions about the need to update the taxonomy to better reflect current research theory and approaches related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, among other things. It is time for a more comprehensive review of the taxonomy, led by a new generation of scholars.
I’d like to hear your thoughts about the taxonomy! If you’ve used the taxonomy, have feedback about it, and/or if you are interested in participating in (or even potentially leading) efforts to update it, please complete this google form (https://tinyurl.com/EERTaxonomyInput) before August 15, 2020. Work to update the taxonomy will involve a diverse set of participants (e.g., graduate students, faculty, other researchers, and administrators), so everyone is welcome to provide input. I look forward to hearing from you.
Thanks, Cindy Finelli (cfinelli@umich.edu).
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: 2020 Online PEER unconference for early career engineering education faculty
The PEER collaborative is a peer mentoring network for early career faculty members primarily evaluated based on engineering education scholarship. Members of PEER host a yearly one day ‘unconference’ style meeting to develop professional networks, share lessons learned, and give/get support. The unconference event allows us to self-organize breakout sessions that serve the needs of those at the conference. Everyone has a different takeaway from PEER, but past versions have left attendees with new professional colleagues, new mentors and mentees, writing groups, grant collaborations, and (best of all) a network of others living overlapping experiences.
Given the ongoing changes to academic life resulting from COVID-19, we have moved our yearly conference off of its traditional schedule during the week of ASEE. This year, PEER will be hosted in a flexible online format on July 27th and 28th
If you are, or know of, an early career engineering education faculty member who might benefit from meeting others going sharing that experience, we would love to meet you and have you join us. Participation in the unconference is free and flexible based on your schedule. We currently have 28 other early career faculty signed up from a broad range of institutions and different types of faculty positions. We would love to have anyone else who thinks they would benefit from participation. If you have considered attending PEER before, but either did not or could not, this is the perfect year to give it a shot!
For more information, or to register, please contact Todd Fernandez (Todd.Fernandez@BME.gatech.edu)
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: Request for Faculty Productivity Study Respondents
We are looking for participants for our grant, Impact of Faculty Mentoring on Faculty Productivity, from the Mentoring 360 Consortium of Arizona State University. Our mission is to develop a survey to assess the effects of mentoring and other professional development on tenure-related outcomes. To guide survey development, we are conducting interviews of tenure-track faculty. Specifically, we are looking for engineering faculty who are approximately one year away from a tenure decision (putting packages in this fall). We seek a wide range of respondents. If you know of a potential candidate, will you please forward this message (with a cc to me) or kindly provide contact information so we can follow up? Of course, this research is covered by an IRB which was just approved.
We are recruiting now and plan to conclude this phase by the end of July (2020). If you are interested in participating in our study, please click the following link: https://clemson.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_a2ILAyZywKKUkG9
For more information, please contact Karen High, Professor of Engineering and Science Education at Clemson University, at khigh@clemson.edu.
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: Engineering faculty, staff and administrators experiences and perceptions of undergraduate student mental health
Sarah Wilson (Chemical and Materials Engineering), Joseph Hammer (Counseling Psychology) and Ellen Usher (Educational Psychology) from the University of Kentucky have developed a research study aimed at understanding the experiences and perceptions of engineering faculty, staff and administrators related to undergraduate student mental health. If you are interested in participating, you must be at least 18 years old and hold a faculty or staff position in engineering. The participation time will be approximately 10 minutes. This survey is anonymous which means that investigators will neither know which responses belong to you, nor even that you participated. If you would like to participate, please click this link: https://bit.ly/2NKjms6 (Please note: you may need to copy and paste the link into your web browser). Feel free to pass this study on to other colleagues in engineering. If you have any questions, please contact Sarah Wilson at s.wilson@uky.edu.
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: CHEER UP – Cambridge Handbook of Engineering Education Research – Updated Perspectives
Usually summer is a time when we meet and engage with fellow members of the engineering education community face-to-face, but things are different this year. Still, we can do with some intellectually stimulating conversations and with that in mind starting on July 2, 2002, I will be hosting twice weekly talks with authors of the Cambridge Handbook of Engineering Education Research (CHEER). The format is simple. I’ll initiate the conversation and lead it for about 30 minutes. Participants will have the opportunity to post comments and questions via chat and participate in the conversation. To facilitate engagement, registrants will be able to get a link to CHEER chapters.
See you online!
~Aditya
Register here: https://gmu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_oezut3eTTwmK8qvOQw4-cg
Contact information: Aditya Johri – johri@gmu.edu
CALL FOR PAPERS: Machine-based plagiarism: The death of originality in the digital age?
Call for Papers – Machine-based plagiarism: The death of originality in the digital age?
International Journal for Educational Integrity
https://edintegrity.biomedcentral.com/ (published by BMC Springer Nature) calls for submissions for a special issue on machine-based plagiarism.
Overview: Paraphrasing tools, translation software and ‘article spinners’ are text-processing applications easily found and accessed via the Internet. Text, ranging from phrases through to longer documents such as essays, can be entered in one field and then ‘spun’, reprocessed or translated. The output from paraphrasing tools, article spinners and translation software can mislead people into thinking that these tools create a new form of original writing.
While the revised text may look different to the original, the tools usually produce poor quality outputs. Submitting the output for academic credit can be considered a form of plagiarism, and where researchers use the tools to reprocess their existing work, outputs can be considered to be a form of self-plagiarism.
Topics of particular interest are:
Machine-based plagiarism
Article spinners
Machine-based paraphrasing tools
Machine learning as it relates to academic integrity
Artificial intelligence as it relates to academic integrity
Translation software and automated text processing as an emerging threat to academic integrity
Edited by: Tracey Bretag, University of South Australia Business School, Adelaide – Co-Editor-in-Chief; Ann Rogerson, University of Wollongong, Australia – Special Guest Editor;
Sarah Elaine Eaton, University of Calgary, Canada – Co-Editor-in-Chief
Deadline for submissions: April 31, 2021
See the full call for papers here: https://edintegrity.biomedcentral.com/mbp
We welcome queries from prospective contributors. Send queries to: Sarah Elaine Eaton, PhD – seaton@ucalgary.ca
Position Announcements
POSITION ANNOUNCEMENT: Lecturer in Technical Communication at the University of Michigan College of Engineering
The Program in Technical Communication at the University of Michigan College of Engineering seeks skilled and enthusiastic applicants for the position of Lecturer I. The College of Engineering is committed to the academic excellence of its student body, with special emphasis on the ability of graduates to express themselves and their ideas in a professional and highly successful manner. As such, the Program in Technical Communication plays a significant role in the delivery of a communication curriculum across the college, with special focus in the first year courses, laboratories and capstone designs. Technical Communication faculty deliver communication instruction in the context of engineering content and engineering project work and integrate technical communication, teamwork, and ethics within the engineering curricula.
For more information and to apply, go to https://careers.umich.edu/job_detail/187219/leo_lecturer_i_in_technical_communication?fbclid=IwAR3UoYy6lWNHMhfe2WQ_IR_um-bBOE8rRjOSUynSYBLjqIJg2pmAkBTwWG8
POSITION ANNOUNCEMENT: Post-Doctoral Fellow Position at New Jersey Institute of Technology
We are seeking a post‐doctoral fellow for a NSF‐funded collaborative research project examining STEM faculty’s participation in entrepreneurship programs, particularly with an emphasis on women and the intersectionality of gender and race. The project team includes Prateek Shekhar (New Jersey Institute of Technology), Aileen Huang-Saad (University of Michigan), and Joi Mondisa (University of Michigan).
The primary responsibilities of the post‐doctoral fellow include: contribute to development of interview protocol; conduct semi-structured interviews; analyze qualitative data; mentor graduate and undergraduate students; participate in collaborative project meetings of the team members; present research at conferences; and draft manuscripts for peer‐reviewed publication.
Required: Ph.D. from an accredited institution in engineering education, higher education, STEM education or other related fields. A demonstrated ability to work/collaborate with others and work independently.
Desired: Demonstrated experience with one or more of the following: conducting discipline-based education or higher education research using qualitative research methods; analyzing qualitative data; strong oral and written communication skills.
Applicants should submit 1) CV, 2) cover letter, 3) a writing sample (published or unpublished work) and 4) contact information for three references via https://njit.csod.com/ats/careersite/JobDetails.aspx?site=1&id=1698. Curriculum vitae should include publications and presentations. Review of applications will be and continue until position is filled. The start date is negotiable between September 2020 and December 2020.
For any questions, feel free to contact Prateek Shekhar at pshekhar@njit.edu
To send an announcement to the ERM listserv, please prepare a 2-3 paragraph description including any relevant URLs and contact info as well as a subject line. Do not include any attachments. Be sure that the announcement includes the person to contact with questions. Email all of this information to Sarah Zappe at ser163@psu.edu with [ERM Announcement] in the subject line to facilitate email sorting. Announcements will be sent out on the 1st and 15th of each month. Each set of announcements will be included in the announcements email twice. Announcements will also be recorded on the ERM website: http://erm.asee.org/
For more resources and position announcements, please see the Engineering Education Community Resource Wiki available at http://bit.ly/engredu. A direct link to job postings at https://bitly.com/eecr-jobs.
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