My wife and I are back from Austin and Education Open Source, now. I’m glad to be back, but I’m not looking forward to the backlog at the office. I have a lot of things to think about that will give me blog-fodder for some time to come (that would be “blog-fodder” and not the “Blogfather,” who I believe may be Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit).

The last session was a panel discussion including State Senator Florence Shapiro, State Representative Geanie Morrison, Texas State Technical College System Chancellor Dr. Bill Segura (my boss’ boss!), Birdville ISD Superintendent Stephen Waddell, Valero Energy Director of Maintenance and Engineering Jim Griffith, and Paula Thomas of the Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Organization and Leadership Development department.

There was plenty of fascinating discussion. Jim Griffith brought the house down when he suggested matter-of-factly that the solution to AAS degree transfer difficulties would be to have the presidents of the 4-year colleges summarily shot! (Note to Valero executives: This was a joke and everyone took it that way.) Dr. Segura pointed that those who question rigor at transfer time don’t hesitate to board a plane piloted by a technical college grad. They also receive treatment in hospitals 80% staffed by two-year allied health grads.

The most intriguing part of the conversation had to do with a state law in New Jersey requiring four-year public colleges and universities to accept public two-year degrees. Apparently I missed that news when it came out. That was a very popular idea with the secondary and higher ed CTE folks at EOS! I hope we can achieve something like that in Texas very soon.

What do you think?

Secondary/Post-Secondary Cooperation – Jan Brae (ACTE Executive Director) talked about it today at Education Open Source in Austin, TX. Then she reminded us that we all have different rules, agencies, laws, and missions. That makes cooperation very hard. So much of it seems to be out of our hands.

I think we make it harder than it needs to be, though. We talk a lot about seamless transitions, but we don’t really talk to each other much. I was involved in college technical organizations and meetings for some time before I even knew that CTAT (Texas secondary CTE) and ACTE (national secondary CTE) existed.

There is hope, though. There are a lot of post-secondary folks in attendance at this CTAT-sponsored conference (the Chancellor of the TSTC System, Dr. Bill Segura, is here). By the time we left today, there was talk about CTAT and TACTE (Texas Post-Secondary CTE) having their meetings together. Communication can lead to understanding, friendship, and cooperation. That should be a great benefit to our students. Maybe our transitions will really be seamless one day.

National Instruments (NI) is a company based in Austin with which many of you in engineering technologies will already be familiar. Their LabVIEW software is used in a lot of robotics, computerized control, and measurement scenarios and they are very involved in education. The LEGO MINDSTORMS robots use a version of LabVIEW (which is also used by Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Mars missions!). NI is a sponsor of the US FIRST robotics competition, which I have blogged about before. Ray Almgren, Vice President of Product Marketing and Research at NI spoke at the general session of Education Open Source today.

The presentation was too extensive to cover fully, but he was very upbeat on the future of tech jobs. NI intends to hire hundreds of technically trained new employees in the next year. He also had some thoughts on growth areas for CTE in secondary and post secondary to focus on - biotech and green technologies. He documented venture capital and other investment to show the business interest in those areas.

TSTC Waco has sent quite a few graduates to National Instruments in the past. Almgren’s presentation gave me a lot more to think about. There have been a lot of great learning experiences here. More to come.

Jan Brae, Executive Director of ACTE, spoke to the attendees at Education Open Source today. I was struck her by her comments on why CTE professionals aren’t having a bigger impact on the discussion about education reform.

She said:

1. We don’t talk about CTE using data - just anecdotes

2. We don’t talk about CTE using the language that is driving reform. We should talk about -

• Academic Achievement (how do your CTE students compare?)
• Dropout or graduation rate (how do we compare?)
• Transition to post-secondary (how do we compare?) Any post-secondary should count - certificate, two-year, or four-year

She had a lot more to say, but she made it clear that people need to know that CTE is the pathway to post-secondary success in the workplace or in college.

I’m here”live-blogging” at the CTAT Education Open Source training day for administrators and counselors in CTE programs. It is aimed at secondary schools and I am a post-secondary kind of a guy. It is helping me understand the issues faced by my secondary CTE brothers and sisters, though (more on that later).

Gary Yancey, who is an Educational Specialist for Education Service Center Region VI, gave a great talk on promoting your CTE program. I can’t deliver it with the wit and wisdom that comes from 30 years of secondary school CTE experience, but I can summarize:

Students/teachers for CTE programs need to get the word out to the administration about what they are doing. Administration & school board members need info about what is going on in CTE programs

Focus on the money you bring into the district

• Scholarships
• Livestock shows
• Dual credit/articulation
• Contact hours and weighted funding
• Donations from industry partners

Make a big deal about competition wins

Honor competition wins and CTE college scholarships like you do for football players

It all comes down to being a tireless and shameless promoter of your program!

If you have ideas on what has worked for you, leave a comment.

I’m in Austin this morning for the Education Open Source conference put on by CTAT (Career and Technology Association of Texas). More to come later.

Since I have been talking cars, I thought I would throw this into the mix. I’m not a fan of converting corn into ethanol, but I recognize that solving our oil problem will involve more than one strategy. Oblate Spheroid has a post on an efficient method for making ethanol from biomass.

It may not be the “holy grail” of portable power, but it certainly will change things. According to this article in CNET News, Stanford researchers have found that using silicon nanowires as the anode of a lithium ion battery can increase charge capacity by ten times (scientific details in this article in Nature Nanotechnology). To be more specific, they knew that silicon increased battery capacity, but it wasn’t durable enough. The nanowires solved that problem…

Continue Reading Nanotechnology and Batteries...

This article sums it up!

UPDATE: Sorry.  It looks like this link no longer works.

Over at M’powered, there is a post about restoring the middle class through manufacturing jobs (referencing an article in the San Francisco Post).

UC Irvine School of Business professor Peter Navarro, argues that the way to restore California’s middle-class is to focus on the manufacturing sector. Professor Navarro asks the question: “why is China booming as the U.S. stagnates?” His response is it’s “painfully obvious: America has lost millions of high-paying manufacturing jobs to China”

Unfortunately, people have heard so much about that loss of jobs that they think there are NO manufacturing jobs left in the country. Intelligent men and women can pass dozens of factories on the way to work and simultaneously hold the idea that all manufacturing is overseas.

Our ubiquitous manufacturing and utility infrastructure has become completely invisible to most everyone today. The good jobs in those sectors go unfilled because they don’t register in the conscious mind.

I ran across this cost comparison at the City Colleges of Chicago site. It shows the difference between their associate degree, Devry, a private college, and a prominent proprietary school. The proprietary schools are a pet peeve of mine.

I had the opportunity to examine an outlet of a well-known private tech school chain as a member of a site visit team. The facilities were OK and the teachers seemed fairly dedicated. After looking at the curriculum, I don’t think they were getting close to the education they could have gotten at our college. I am certain that at least some of the students were learning enough to get a job. What concerns me is this - The credits are not transferable and the cost is enormous.

Graduates come out owing well over $30,000 and with no way to take those credits and apply them to a BA or BS later. Our automotive instructors tell me that high school students committed to a proprietary auto tech school will refuse to reconsider because they have paid a $100 application fee. Saving that $100 will eventually cost them an extra $25,000 before interest. It will cost even more if the lack of a BA makes promotion impossible. (Insert your thoughts about the state of economics and financial education here.)

If you are a high school CTE teacher, please develop a relationship with good, solid, public college technical programs through articulation, dual credit, information sessions, visits, shadowing, industry contact, and scholarships. Don’t let your students wind up paying back $40,000 or $50,000 after interest for an inferior education.

Be sure your students understand where the proprietary school recruiter got the money for his tailored suit and BMW.

Sort of. Check out the latest at the TSTC Publishing Blog.

Today’s video is from the TSTC Waco Computer Science Game Programming folks:

This exciting and growing opportunity allows a specialization in either game programming or game graphics. They have to work together just like game producers do in the real world.

There are a lot of other great TSTC videos on YouTube.

Over at Ed Chipalowski’s ACTE Blog, he has a post on helping to set a national agenda for CTE with the politicians. I made a comment or two. Go and read the post and comments and then come back.

Go ahead. I’ll wait for you.

OK, obviously I knew that no one was going to take money from the universities and give it to us. That is why I called it “a modest proposal.” It was intended to be almost as shocking and sarcastic as Swift’s suggestion that the children of Ireland be sold as meat.

My second and real suggestion, however, Ed likes. We need a national ad campaign aimed at changing the perception that parents have of CTE. If the false impressions changed, the money would follow. If you have any thoughts about that, post a comment here or there.

BTW - I love Jonathan Swift. If you haven’t ever actually read Gulliver’s Travels, the full text is available here. See if the “grand academy of Lagado” doesn’t put you in mind of some academy with which you are familiar.

All across the country, there is a struggle for the legitimacy and importance of technical education. California has had a particularly rough time. This chart indicates a dramatic drop in CTE students and teachers along with an alarming rise in the drop-out rate (maybe there is something to relevancy after all?). The M’powered blog has a post about trying to turn the tide. As I noted earlier, Gov. Ah-nuld’s office has talked a good game about CTE, but apparently he hasn’t followed through.

The primary reason for the California decline in CTE?

Attorney General Jerry Brown stunned the hands-on education community and others by indicating that the University of California system is a “behemoth” that drives the State’s K-12 curriculum.

It can’t only be California, can it?

That is the question over at CACTEC Blog. The assertion is judged to be “silly”. I couldn’t possibly agree more!

The Census Bureau has just released numbers showing that 33% of women from age 25-29 have a four-year degree. Men of similar age - 26%. (via Dan Pink’s blog)

U.S. News contributing editor Marty Nemko, has an interesting post at the cleverly named “Marty Nemko’s Website.” It is another look at the problems boys are having in education. If a lack of “active learning” is really the problem, technical education is the cure.

One of the things that the State of Texas measures at universities and colleges is “space utilization.” There are standards set for office space, research space, libraries, and support areas. The instructional area is more appropriate for traditional four-year schools than technical colleges. The standard is based on full time student equivalents (FTSE) defined as 15-credit-hour students in the Fall. An FTSE for academic course is supposed to need 45 sq. ft. A computer, electronics, or computer student gets 60 sq. ft. Allied health gets 90 sq. ft. Transportation programs, machining, construction trades, and agriculture get 120 sq. ft.

No matter how much space you use to teach your students, your space support payment from the state is based on the formula. Why is this an annoyance? The state is just trying to encourage efficiency. The office space doesn’t bother me. The academic and computer teaching space isn’t too bad (although doing things like creating a REAL computer room or radiology room environment can put you over). What does bother me is the last category. Technical programs that teach mechanical engineering technology, diesel, automotive, aircraft mechanics and so on require a lot of lab space. The more lab space you have, the more realistic your training can be.

My favorite example is our Aviation Maintenance program. Since our campus is an old bomber base, they hold lab in a disused air force hangar. It is full of airplanes, engines, tools, and special equipment. It provides the students with the most true-to-life experience they could possibly have (L3 Communications, which uses space at our airport, works on aircraft in very similar hangars). We don’t cool the place and heating cost is very low in Texas. We’ve hardly spent a dime on it. It didn’t cost the state anything, but it is very big and they still rake us over the coals because we are over our limit in space.

I don’t have a solution to this problem. I just felt like griping.

Access to the productivity and information-sharing capabilities of connected computers has revolutionized education in developed countries. Despite a lot of discussion about the “digital divide” in the US, the greatest gulf is between “first world” countries and poor nations.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) OX project has been out there providing inexpensive and rugged computers with low power requirements at about $140 per copy. The computers run Linux and a stripped-down interface called Sugar specifically designed for education and collaboration. One of the coolest capabilities available for about $25 extra per student is a solar charging system for daytime and a hand-cranked generator for charging in the dark.

I wasn’t aware of that Intel had a similar project called Classmate PC (OLPC uses an AMD processor). Then I ran across an article on dbtechno.com about how OLPC is working on dual-booting with Windows to overcome a competitive advantage in the Classmate, which can use either Windows or a number of different Linux distributions. It seems that there are advantages and disadvantages to both machines (ars technica has a comparison here).

Regardless of which is best, I think that it is cool that a big company and a non-profit are fighting it out over selling low-cost laptops for use by school kids all over the world.

It is not exactly big news that the Internet has been changing education, commerce, and news delivery (among many other things). It isn’t shocking to anyone that online video is big. What some people may not know is that Star Wars parodies on YouTube aren’t the only videos people are watching.

Small independent organizations are setting up news and views sites specializing in video delivery. Improved recording/editing tools and increased bandwidth are bringing it within reach of “amatuers.”  Ed Driscoll points to the B-Cast from Breitbart.tv as an example. A recent B-Cast had 400,000 viewers. Driscoll makes the point:

As of 2005, CNN in primetime attracted less than 700,000 daily viewers, but with a budget of zillions of dollars and a ton of real estate, technicians and on-air talent. In contrast, the B-Cast is, I believe, run out of an office in Pittsburgh by two people with one set, a couple of cameras, laptops for the on-air talent (in other words, Liz and Scott) to cue those cameras and YouTube clips, and I guess another computer or two to record the sum of all those parts and upload the show to Andrew Breitbart’s news aggregation site. The hosting of the video itself is supplied by any one of numerous online video hosting sites, which helps to reduce what was once a significant expense: the high-bandwidth, and associated costs, of online video.

Will we see a decline in the television news business that mirrors the drop in newspaper circulation since people started to read websites instead? If so, what are the implications for our media, web, and related technology students?

TSTC Waco has a great little video on YouTube about the importance of technicians in daily life. Take a look at it and see if you don’t agree that the modern world would grind to a halt without them.

There are a lot of other great TSTC videos on YouTube.

Over at the TSTC Publishing Blog, Mark Long has a an interesting post on the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship convention in San Antonio. It includes a useful discussion starter on the relationship between technical college education and entrepreneurship education. Read the whole thing.

While you are at it - if you have any interest in the technical and other issues involved in publishing books - take a look at the rest of the posts.

TSTC implemented a program for Home Technology Integration (HTI) based on CompTIA’s HTI+ certification several years ago. Students in the Computer Maintenance Technology can learn how to integrate house systems to control security, climate, appliances, lighting, and all media including home theater. This is a big growth area as more home builders incorporate some of these abilities into new houses and older ones are retrofitted for the digital age. More technicians are sure to be needed.

There is an interesting “Next-Gen” home post on the Amazon Current’s blog that shows integration at amazing levels (controlling the angle of the bed when snoring is detected!). The house is on display at CES 2008 in Las Vegas. The YouTube video linked at the blog shows details. Be warned that the show actors are a little hard to take.

 UPDATE: I thought that the software in this demo house was cool, so I checked out the Life|ware company website.  It is very cool and highly polished stuff.  I was really interested in their media server until I saw the price.  I was hoping for a software price separate from the hardware.

The Association for Career and Technical Education is releasing state CTE profiles. They have completed and released six state profiles - California, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Virginia. Each profile contains information about the number of CTE students, school initiatives, career cluster implementation, administration, and so on. This is good information for introduction to what a state is doing and for comparison purposes. Even with (unfunded) federal mandates, each state is unique.

Check out your state when it is available.