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Loose Networks and the Community of Engineering Education Research: A Definition by Bibliometric Standards

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Conference

2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Vancouver, BC

Publication Date

June 26, 2011

Start Date

June 26, 2011

End Date

June 29, 2011

ISSN

2153-5965

Conference Session

Knowing Ourselves: Research on Engineering Education Researchers

Tagged Division

Educational Research and Methods

Page Count

23

Page Numbers

22.1026.1 - 22.1026.23

DOI

10.18260/1-2--18302

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/18302

Download Count

443

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Paper Authors

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Johannes Strobel Purdue University, West Lafayette

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Johannes Strobel is Director of INSPIRE, Institute for P-12 Engineering Research and Learning and Assistant Professor of Engineering Education & Educational Technology at Purdue University. After studying philosophy, religious studies and information science at three universities in Germany, he received his M.Ed. and Ph.D. (2004) in Learning Technologies from the University of Missouri-Columbia, USA. NSF, SSHRC, FQRSC, and several private foundations fund his research. His research and teaching focuses on the intersection between learning, engineering, the social sciences, and technology, particularly sustainability, designing open-ended problem/project-based learning environments, social computing/gaming applications for education, and problem solving in ill-structured/complex domains.

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David F. Radcliffe Purdue University, West Lafayette

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Dr. David Radcliffe is the Kamyar Haghighi head and Epistemology Professor of Engineering Education in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue. His research focuses on the nature of engineering; engineering habits of mind, how engineering knowledge is created and shared and how it is learned especially outside the classroom. Over the past 20 years, he has conducted field research on the practice of engineering design, new product development and innovation in variety of industries, in large and small firms with an emphasis on design thinking, most recently in relation to sustainability. He also studies engineering education as a complex system, and the design and evaluation of next generation learning environments. This research is intrinsically multidisciplinary and draws on methodologies from the humanities, social and behavioral sciences and involves collaboration with anthropologists, learning scientists, librarians, designers, and architects.

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Prashant Rajan Purdue University, West Lafayette

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Prashant Rajan is a graduate student in the Department of Communication at Purdue University. He is interested in the emergence and sustainability of organizational forms based on the informal networks of collaboration among researchers. Presently, he is working under the guidance of Drs. Johannes Strobel and David Radcliffe.

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Sadia Nawaz Purdue University, West Lafayette

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Sadia Nawaz is a graduate student in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University. She is working with Prof. Strobel and Prof. Radcliffe on data-mining and database management. Her interests also include citation analysis and social networks analysis.
Prior to this, she completed her B.Sc. (honors) and M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from University of Engineering & Technology, Lahore Pakistan.

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Yi Luo Purdue University

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Doctoral Student in Learning Design and Technology in Purdue University.

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Jea H. Choi Purdue University

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Doctoral student in Learning Design and Technology program in Purdue University.

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Ji Hyun Yu Purdue University, West Lafayette

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Abstract

Loose Networks and the Community of Engineering Education Research: A Definition by Bibliometric StandardsIntroductionCyber-based collaborations in the form of virtual organizations (VOs) are transforming theengineering education research landscape. They bring together researchers in industry,government and university by offering investigative and educational tools unique to their specificfield (Bue-tow, 2005). VOs come in different forms. Often VOs also serve as an informationaland collaboration resource by hosting document-sharing tools, virtual meeting spaces, onlinetutorials, and courses, and so enabling access and participation to resources for diversepopulations and remotely located communities. While some VOs are very successful, thefundamental reasons for this success or failure and the factors, which contributed to the evolutionand emergence of VOs, are not well understood. Hence the design of these critical pieces ofcyber-infrastructure is currently a hit-or-miss process. This paper is part of a larger projectaddressing this gap by researching the transition of loose networks (LN) of researchers into morepurposeful virtual organizations. The goal of this project is to investigate empirically theevolution and emergence of VOs to identify those factors, which contributed to the growth andevolution of loose networks and factors, which contributed to the emergence and evolution ofVOs.The research team in this paper adopts an inherently interdisciplinary (socio-cultural-cognitive-technological or SCT) perspective about the workings of VOs, to discover those critical factorsthat lead from loose networks to VOs.Theoretical and Methodological FrameworksThe project employs two theoretical lenses: (1) Stewardship of engineering education research:who is involved, invested and shapes the community? and (2) Ancestry to determine historicityof the field and historical developments. As methodological framework, the project employs oralhistory (historical accounts of living people), social network analysis, symbolic interactionism(discerning the role of technologies to facilitate community) and content analysis of essentialdocuments.ResultsThis paper will describe the results of the first phase of this project: the systematic and extensivesearch for the full body of literature in engineering education literature. 1100 keywords werecollected and developed from existing literature searching in databases such as Web of Scienceby ISI, Compendex, EbscoHost etc. Keywords were then separated into engineering and non-engineering phrases and searched with cross references. While this method resulted in a largedatabase of engineering education research papers, the team deliberately collected at first paperswhich might have been on the fringe of being included, which necessitates a second project ofinclusion and exclusion criteria.The paper will share in depth the process of the interdisciplinary research team to describeengineering education research in terms and operation of bibliometric searches and presentdetails of the inclusion and exclusion criteria for papers and ultimately for members in loosenetworks, communities and organizations.References and implications for the field of engineering education research will be provided inthe full paper.

Strobel, J., & Radcliffe, D. F., & Rajan, P., & Nawaz, S., & Luo, Y., & Choi, J. H., & Yu, J. H. (2011, June), Loose Networks and the Community of Engineering Education Research: A Definition by Bibliometric Standards Paper presented at 2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Vancouver, BC. 10.18260/1-2--18302

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2011 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015