University of Illinois graduates were encouraged to become entrepreneurs during Carl Schramm’s 2009 commencement address. Schramm is president and CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman foundation, an organization dedicated to advancing entrepreneurship and improving education to cultivate the next generation of entrepreneurs.

“America needs entrepreneurs right now. We need an army of the smartest, most passionate young people to try their hand at building a business—people who will take their heads and their hearts into the market, founding companies that will bring forth new products and services that will help humankind.”

You can read the full transcript or watch the video below:

The 2009 Symposium on Engineering and Liberal Education starts tonight at Union College in Schenectady, NY, and iFoundry co-director David E. Goldberg will be giving a poster presentation entitled The Missing Basics and an Academic NIMBY Problem: Conceptual and Organizational Obstacles to an Engineering Education Aligned with a Creative Era (here).

The Missing Basics and an Academic NIMBY Problem

A 2007 paper (download here) Preparing for Substantial Change: The iFoundry Initiative and Collective Learning discusses the founding and early days of the iFoundry initiative.  In particular, the paper outlines the organizational change theories used in designing iFoundry, its initial design, and some of the first steps toward collective learning in 2007 and 2008.

iFoundry co-director, David E. Goldberg, is live twittering the 2009 ELE symposium at www.twitter.com/deg511.  First up, Lewis Duncan, former Dean of Engineering at Dartmouth and currently, President of Rollins College.

iFoundry co-director David E. Goldberg presented the lecture, Playing Well with Others in a Creative Era at the University of Algarve in Faro, Portugal.  It was picked up in the local press here.

Incoming iFoundry student, Abi Noda, has shared a great post from Bruce Eckel which makes the case that career success, in software and all engineering fields, is not simply a matter of technical expertise, but depends on being open to lifelong learning, taking risks, learning from experiences outside the classroom, and broad learning outside your specialty.

The post sounds the themes of what kind of education is needed for the Creative Engineers of the Future.

A companion to the presentation “What is Creativity” by iFoundry co-director David E. Goldberg (original post here) appears below

or on his slideshare website (here).

Ken Stanton, Engineering Ed PhD student at VATech says Learning is a commitment in this short, useful article (here).

Illinois’s Technology Entrepreneur Center announces a Startup Bootcamp 8-11 September (here). For more information email Stephanie Larson (here).

iFoundry fellow Jim Leake gave a talk at Autodesk’s Global Colloquium at the ASEE Conference in Austin, TX last week.  The presentation is available in the viewer below

or on the iFoundry Slideshare page here.  Autodesk is sponsoring an iFoundry project that brings industrial design and engineering students and faculty together in and outside the classroom.

UPDATE:

See examples of student work from the above presentation in the video below:

or on the iFoundry Youtube channel here.