editor's page: Frontiers in education, The

Journal of Engineering Education, Oct 1998 by Prados, John W

In this issue, we are pleased to present thirteen papers from the 199 7 Frontiers in Education Conference, selected by the reviewers for their quality and significance, along with the keynote address by Nobel Laureate Dr. Herbert Simon. Comments on these papers and the conference itself are presented below by the conference co-chairs, Cindy,Atman and Larry Shuman, along with their Program Committee members, who coordinated the review and selection of these papers.

-John W Prados

FIE '97:1997 FRONTIERS IN EDUCATION CONFERENCE

The first fourteen articles in this issue of the Journal of Engineering Education represent the rich and varied nature of the 1997 Frontiers in Education (FIE) conference. Jointly sponsored by the Education and Computer Societies of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Educational Research and Methods Division of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), FIE has become a leading conference for engineering and computer science educators. This 27th annual conference, held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, November 5-8, 1997, and hosted by the University of Pittsburgh's School of Engineering, attracted 670 attendees, a record number. A conference highlight was the keynote address by Herbert A. Simon. Dr. Simon, a Nobel Laureate, has made major contributions to the fields of cognitive psychology, computer science and economics. His address, "What We Know about Learning" challenged the attendees to use what we know about learning to improve university education. The presentation is reprinted here as the lead paper in this special FIE section of the Journal, and provides a "raison d'etre" for further research into how our students learn and how we, as engineering and computer science educators, teach.

The other thirteen papers in this issue represent our selection of the best of the over 300 peer-reviewed papers that were presented at the conference. All have been revised for publication in this special issue and focus on:

assessment of teaching

diversity among engineering students and practitioners

pedagogy

use of technology in engineering classrooms

freshman programs and instruction

distance learning

outreach to pre-college students.

A special feature of this FIE Conference was a series of sessions sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation that addressed asynchronous learning networks (ALN) and diversity, two Sloan priority areas. Four of the papers from these sessions are included in this issue: those by Kashy, Thoennessen, Tsai, Davis and Wolfe; Trick and Graham; Ambrose, Lazarus and Nair and Brainard and Carlin. The Sloan Foundation also sponsored thirteen Sloan New Faculty Fellows who attended the conference in recognition of their commitment to and enthusiasm for engineering and computer science education. FIE provided an important intellectual stimulation to these young educators and we anticipate seeing their work in future issues of this journal.

The National Science Foundation sponsored a "Project Showcase" which featured 12 NSF-funded engineering and computer science education projects; in addition, NSF sponsored presentations by four of its most successful Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) programs. The Hewlett-Packard Corporation presented its prestigious Terman Award to Edward A. Lee, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, whose talk provided a provocative look into the future of electrical and computer engineering education.

The Conference stimulated a considerable amount of discussion and excitement among attendees. Additional information about the Conference can be obtained from our website: http://www.engrng. pitt.edu/~fie97/. The complete set of papers maybe purchased from the IEEE (Catalog No. 97CH36099). Perhaps the single best indication of FIE's success is provided by this comment by Jill Nagel, then a University of Pittsburgh senior industrial engineering student who helped with the conference. Jill attended the final session that featured a lively discussion among the Sloan New Faculty Fellows and a number of engineering educators. When we asked Jill her impressions of that program, she responded:

'I was very enlightened upon leaving the last FIE Session [Sloan New Faculty]. It was inspiring to hear the professors talk about their excitement in teaching. As a student, it is often easy to feel like a second priority at a university, and that research comes first. I was comforted to hear that most professors try to be as good a teacher as they are a researcher. I now know what effect tenure can have on a professor's activities and I also realize what a difference the school can make.

Overall, I left the session with a satisfied feeling that academia does still know what its goal is: to teach. And I was glad to help out at a conference that believes in educating and motivating the teachers to keep that goal in mind. When everything is said and done, we students base our liking of a class not on content, but on the way the material is presented to us. And a class that you like is a class that you learn from. Who else but the professor can create that environment?"