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Creating an Infrastructure Education Community of Practice

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Conference

2014 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Indianapolis, Indiana

Publication Date

June 15, 2014

Start Date

June 15, 2014

End Date

June 18, 2014

ISSN

2153-5965

Conference Session

NSF Grantees’ Poster Session

Tagged Division

Division Experimentation & Lab-Oriented Studies

Tagged Topic

NSF Grantees Poster Session

Page Count

7

Page Numbers

24.330.1 - 24.330.7

DOI

10.18260/1-2--20221

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/20221

Download Count

425

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Paper Authors

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Philip J. Parker P.E. University of Wisconsin, Platteville

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Carol Haden Magnolia Consulting, LLC

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Carol Haden is s Senior Evaluator with Magnolia Consulting, LLC. She holds a doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction with an emphasis on program evaluation from Northern Arizona University. Dr. Haden has extensive experience in the evaluation of formal STEM education projects across the K-20 spectrum and the evaluation of informal STEM Education and Public Outreach (E/PO) programs. She has designed and implemented evaluations of programs funded by the National Science Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Arizona Board of Regents, Goddard Space Flight Center, Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Arizona Department of Education, among others. She has a special interest in supporting exemplary and equitable science education for traditionally underserved populations.

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Steven D. Hart U.S. Military Academy

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LTC Steve Hart is currently assigned as the ERDC Engineering Fellow and Director of Infrastructure Studies at West Point. He has taught numerous civil engineering courses including innovative courses on Infrastructure Engineering and Critical Infrastructure Protection and has authored numerous articles and a book chapter on these subjects. He is the developer and lead proponent of The Critical Infrastructure Symposium, now in its fifth year. He is active in The Infrastructure Security Partnership and the American Society of Civil Engineers including services on the Committee on Critical Infrastructure as well as the American Society of Engineering Education.

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Michael Keith Thompson University of Wisconsin, Platteville

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Dr. M. Keith Thompson is currently an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin - Platteville in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering. He earned his BS degree in Civil Engineering from North Carolina State University and his MS and PhD degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. His technical speciality is structural engineering with a focus on structural concrete. He has taught a variety of structural engineering courses, freshman level introduction to engineering courses, and infrastructure education courses. His research interests include curriculum reform, enhanced teaching and advising practices, improving retention of undergraduate students, and using learning analytics to improve institutional practice.

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Matthew W. Roberts University of Wisconsin, Platteville

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Matthew Roberts has been teaching at UW-Platteville since 2002. He is originally from Denver, Colorado and attended Brigham Young University for his B.S. in Civil Engineering. He then spent four years as a civil engineering officer in the U.S. Air Force. After his military service, he completed graduate work at Texas A&M University. He teaches classes on reinforced concrete design, structural steel design, and other structural engineering topics.

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Abstract

Creating an Infrastructure Education Community of PracticeThe University of X and Y Military Academy are partnering to share their successful andtransformative introductory infrastructure courses. Course materials are to be shared with sixother universities. Rather than simply provide the materials, we intend to build a community ofpractice (CoP). A CoP is a “group of people who share a concern of a passion for somethingthey do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly” (Wenger, 2006). As such, thereare three aspects to this definition reflected in our CoP:  We have collected a group of faculty who share a passion for infrastructure education and share a need to create a new course for their curriculum.  CoP members will continuously improve the content and delivery of the course by sharing updates and improvements to each lecture topic.  Regular interactions will take place via a workshop in 2014, regular pre-workshop internet meetings, regular post-workshop internet meetings, and visits to the collaborating institutions by the PIs.Thus, the CoP will provide two-way conversation between the creators of the material and theinitial adaptors at the partner universities, with the intent that eventually the line between thesetwo groups is blurred.This proposed poster and paper are the result of a recent (September 1, 2013) funding awardfrom NSF (TUES Type 2; "Collaborative Research: Training Next Generation Faculty andStudents to Address the Infrastructure Crisis"; award number 1323279). As such, the poster andpaper will: focus on the preparation of the course materials for dissemination to other users;provide preliminary assessment of the effectiveness of the pre-workshop meetings; and serve torecruit additional members to the CoP, which is an objective of the project.Reference citedWenger, E. “Communities of practice: A brief introduction.” June, 2006. Accessed from http://wenger-trayner.com/theory/ on October 10, 2013

Parker, P. J., & Haden, C., & Hart, S. D., & Thompson, M. K., & Roberts, M. W. (2014, June), Creating an Infrastructure Education Community of Practice Paper presented at 2014 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Indianapolis, Indiana. 10.18260/1-2--20221

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