Richard Henneman talks to iFoundry about the transformational experiences he had at the University of Illinois and after he graduated. Stay tuned for more interviews.

iFoundry would like to thank Dick Henneman for the interview and for the help during the IESE alumni board meeting.

Alumni are excited about the iFoundry vision and eager to help shape engineering education at Illinois. On Monday, May 4, college alumnus Gerry Labedz will be here, dawn to dusk, to meet with iFoundry student participants and leadership to share his insights from 33 years of work and design experience at Motorola. He’ll talk with students on the real-world challenges of engineering practice, and how the iFoundry vision, and programs, might help meet those challenges. Gerry’s biography is here. A detailed agenda for his visit will be posted soon. Contact Karen Hyman for more information.

The Department of Physics at the University of Illinois has a long tradition of innovation in undergraduate education, from PLATO to Tycho to i>clickers. The tradition continues with their most recent innovation: prelectures — short Flash(r) animations designed to introduce students to the fundamental concepts before they attend a lecture. Watch the seminar by Tim Stelzer in the embedded player bellow or here.

On Wednesday, 6 May 2009, iFoundry held a year-end event to mark its first eight months in business.  The event was introduced by Associate Dean Chuck Tucker, and iFoundry co-director David E. Goldberg made remarks entitled “iFoundry as Connecting Dots, Changing Minds,  and Teaching the Missing Basics.”  Those remarks can be downloaded as a pdf file here.

iFoundry has been using Google video to store videos over ten minutes in length, but now all iFoundry long videos are on vimeo here.

Many of Jim Leake’s engineering graphics videos are there (here). So are videos from the Workshop on the First Year in Engineering (here) as well as Inquiries in Engineering Education vidoes (here).

Vimeo’s social media features will make it an easier place to browse iFoundry’s longer video collection.

IESE alum Tim Phillis talks to iFoundry about his UIUC education and what he likes about iFoundry in the viewer below

or on the iFoundry YouTube channel (here).

SMU engineering dean Geoffrey Orsak has written an interesting piece in Design News, Top 5 Reasons to Stop Whining (here).  The article is a reaction to another article Top 5 Reasons Studying Engineering Sucks.  Dean Orsak’s list is as follows:

With the successful release of the new Star Trek movie, iFoundry is proud to re-release an earlier iFoundry video, Mr. Spock, Star Trek & the Engineering Mind in the viewer below

or on the iFoundry YouTube channel (here).  In the video, iFoundry co-director David E. Goldberg explores Mr. Spock’s Vulcan lack of emotion in connection with normal stereotypes of engineering demeanor.  The conclusions go against type, suggesting the need for a kind of emotional energy in engineering life, arguing that without such energy, normal engineering judgment and decisions are more difficult if not impossible.

If you want to feel good about being an engineer, watch the video from SMU in the viewer below

or watch it on YouTube here.  Part of the job of transforming engineering education is to communicate the excitement of engineering life, as this video does so well.

Pairwork, teamwork performed by teams of two, has been an important ingredient to iFoundry and its precursors.  A preprint of a paper by iFoundry co-director David E. Goldberg accepted for publication at the 2009 IEEE Frontiers in Education (FIE) Conference to be held in San Antonio, The importance of pairwork in educational and interdisciplinary initiatives, is available at PhilSci archives here.