ASEE @ Vancouver

American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference and Exposition at Vancouver, Canada--This is the first real official academic conference I attended where I have to do a presentation in the prestigious ERM (Educational Research and Methods) division about our paper.  

I made a plan to blog about the conference during my stay at Vancouver, but got too busy about cleaning some data, preparing for the presentation, and too lazy while enjoying the delicious food, beautiful scenery, hanging out with friends, and wondering around the exhibition hall. Also, I didn't have free internet at the conference center. Although I didn't attend too many sessions besides our own, the main plenary, and the best of computer in education division (which we feel are not the best), I still learned something and realize something:

1. Probably 80% of people don't know or don't want to know how to make a good presentation, and I am very lucky to be with an adviser who has extremely high standard about presentation skills. First, I have to be clear about what I am going to tell the audience and confident about why this is important. Second, make the slides in a clear and nice looking way that could guide the audience through the process, and impress them by the beautiful graphs and effect. Third, be polite, enthusiastic, confident, professional, don't be offensive, and remember to smile.  Last, and most important for me now, I have to improve my oral English, learn to choose the appropriate wording and tone while speaking, and find a more natural way of smiling and gesturing. 

2. There are lots of topics in engineering education, but most of the presentation topics are not attractive to me at all. I decided to direct more effort towards social media and collective intelligence. We met a director from Pearson, and he has a very cool personality. He takes a different photo everyday and posts the photo online. He is definitely a fan of social media, like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. I saw a project started by some Standford students called Piazza at the exhibition hall, and I got to know about Amazon Mechanical Turk. Then I saw some news about Google +, and today I saw an IEEE spectrum titled Super Socialize Me: Google, Facebook, and the Struggle for the future of the web. I feel I am at the entrance of a promising and interesting field, and I have to figure how to get in.

3. If I want to be a professor in the future, I have to teach, being an engineering education major, I have to teach engineering, in order to teach engineering in a higher education institute, I at least have to have an master degree in engineering. So I have to stick to this plan, and start to do something starting from the NCN summer school.

These are the three major things, and there are lots of other things about Vancouver to say--among them--I definitely miss the food and fresh taro bubble tea there ~