Notes from IEEE IPCC99 Conference
New Orleans, Louisiana, September 7-10, 1999

Crossing Faculty, Student, and Disciplinary Boundaries
for International Gain: Panel

Intertech: An Engineering, Technology, and Education Exchange
Across the Western Hemisphere

Muathar Al-Ubaidi
University of Cincinnati

Dr. Ubaidi is an associate professor of mechanical engineering technology in the College of Applied Science at the University of Cincinnati. He is one of the founders and the chair of the Interamerican Council on Engineering and Technology Education and is the general chair for the Sixth Interamerican Conference (Intertech 2000), which will be held in Cincinnati June 14-16, 2000.

Session Description: The University of Cincinnati's College of Applied Science offers a degree program that stresses interdisciplinary and intercultural aspects of engineering and manufacturing. The presenter was instrumental in the genesis of Intertech, the Interamerican Council on Engineering and Technology Education, which held its first meeting in 1990 and has continued biannually throughout the decade.

• Ubaidi has been a leader in the development of Intertech, an organization of engineers across the Western hemisphere.
• Intertech = Inter-American Council on Engineering Technology and Education.
• Steering committee: Brazil, Canada, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, U.S.
• The future will bring increasing multicultural content in all aspects of life, both in industry and in academe.
• Main objectives of Intertech:
   
• Focus on issues of teaching
• Share best practices (which do not necessarily always come from the most technologically advanced country)
• Build associations between professors and institutions throughout the Western Hemisphere
• Foster greater cooperation and collaboration between academe and professional societies
• Activities sponsored by Intertech
   
• Conferences... a successful tradition has been established; conferences have been held biannually since 1990, rotating among venues: Mexico, US, Brazil, Venezuela, Brazil. In 2000, the conference will be held in Cincinnati. India is a possibility for 2002, depending on members' willingness/desire to make the eastward trek. Some 365 abstracts were received for the last conference, reflecting unusually high interest in participating and necessitating a very competitive downselect.
• Journal... still in infancy due to prohibitive costs associated with trilingual publication (English, Spanish, Portuguese). One edition was published in the early 1990s; another is about to go to press this year.
• Challenges
   
• Organizational
   
• Reaching consensus
• Leadership
• Structure
• Membership
• Secretariat (where located?)
• Communication
   
• Commitment
• Technology
• Resources
   
• People
• Technology
• Conclusions/future goals
   
• Need to increase participation in future conferences
• Definitize infrastructure and establish constitution
• Recruit individuals for committees, etc.
• Secure resources
• Secure sites for future conferences
• "There can be no adequate technical education which is not global. There is no world harmony, understanding, and prosperity without technical cooperation." -- Alfred Lord Whitehead, 1940s

The Road from Freshman Composition to International Manufacturing:
A Student's Story

Thomas Case
University of Cincinnati

The presenter entered the US Army in 1987, where he had a distinguished service record including the Army Air Medal for service in the Gulf War. Now a civilian studying engineering technology at the University of Cincinnati, Case is also vice president of operations at UK Industries, an international manufacturing marketing company headquartered in Cincinnati.

Session Description: With domestic assembly and manufacturing on the endangered species list, engineering students and faculty must strive to bridge the gaps in education to include internationally oriented communication curricula. Increasingly, communications ability, especially multilingual capability, will be a strong discriminator in manufacturing engineers' career paths. The presenter tells how industrialization is being implemented in Honduras.

• Presenter has a bilingual background from Honduras. His degree program was focused on manufacturing engineering, with the career goal of increasing US manufacturing enterprises in Honduras.
• There is an increasing trend toward globalization in industry. Most large US firms are subcontracting at least part of their fabrication and assembly processes to overseas locations to take advantage of cheaper labor and tax-exempt status.
• To date, most Honduran industry has been limited to sewing and the garment sector, but there is growing potential for "piece-part" component processing within the computer technology and automobile industries. The best deep-water port in Central America and tax-exempt status for component processing are good incentives for US industry.
• Hurricane Mitch set back Honduras industry substantially. Not a single Honduran banana has been exported in the year following the hurricane.
• Presenter researched Honduras' industrial capabilities and developed a Web site (see link to UK Industries site above).
• Key topic areas on the main menu were:
   
• FAQs: what are the capabilities, advantages, and risks of Honduras industry?
• Free trade zones and export processing zones
• Overhead
• Shipping
• Facilities
• More information
• Contacts

Communication Boundaries are Meant to be Crossed

Maria Kreppel
University of Cincinnati

Dr. Kreppel is a professor of English and communication at the University of Cincinnati's College of Applied Science. Her Ph.D. is in organizational communication, and her administrative experience includes a visiting deanship at Chatfield College and eight years as vice provost for faculty at the University of Cincinnati.

Session Description: The presenter discusses how technical communication in engineering environments may be improved by teaching strategies such as collaborative and experiential classroom learning.

• Presenter said that her close ties to industry have given her an appreciation of the practical aspects of the craft of technical communication, particularly the criticality of user orientation.
• Boyer Commission defines the baccalaureate graduate:
   
• "...equipped with a spirit of inquiry and a zest for problem-solving"
• "...possessed of the skill in communication that is the hallmark of clear thinking as well as mastery of language"
• "...informed by a rich and diverse experience"
• College wants students to graduate as "educated and reflective practitioners."
• Capstone project is an integrative, intercultural, interdisciplinary research project.
• The challenge is how to make the intercultural element an integral part of the curriculum.
• Teaching assignments establish boundary conditions and constraints to define a particular course of study and to specify what must be mastered.
• Learning assignments extend these borders to envision where teaching and learning may lead.
• Experiential learning communities are "risk-full" yet "safe-fail" places where teaching and learning may intersect to create new vistas.
• Diverse learning communities foster rich collaboration and unforeseen possibilities for new learning experience.
• Three student perspectives:
   
• "[The professor's] challenging my logic made me look deeper and really analyze what I was trying to say."
• "I have felt the frustration that comes with research. I have benefited by it because I overcame it."
• "I learned that I am a very good researcher but have trouble evaluating my information... Although technical writing is not known for being creative, I enjoyed the creativity involved in the writing done during the quarter."
• A key challenge for the instructor was to give up traditional control of the flow of information in the classroom in favor of experiential learning. Letting students choose their paths offers a richer educational experience, but only if clear performance parameters are imposed up front and adhered to in the implementation and evaluation of research projects.
• What new vistas may we foresee?
   
• John Seely Brown, director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, identifies qualitative shifts in the ways that we identify and solve problems.
• Authority-driven, syllogistic reasoning yields to lateral thinking, to experiential linking, and to intelligence within a social matrix.
• Professional methodologies should not readjust to current technologies. They may transform the technologies to shape a new "learning ecology."
• The territory of the new learning ecology is characterized by "diverse, overlapping, open, interdependent, constantly evolving, largely self-regulating boundaries among producers and consumers."