Feature image: UN, Wikipedia.
Category Archives: Teaching
Student of Today, Skills of Tomorrow
Struggles and Methods of Teaching Web Building to the Contemporary College Undergraduate
As the senior educators in this country, university professors have an obligation to respond to data such as the findings in this report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Educational Testing Service on the current state of millennials’ understanding, skill level, and ability to apply these important technologies to real-world problem solving.
“Despite having a higher rate of educational attainment than any previous generation, U.S. students 16-34 years of age ranked lower than most of their international peers in literacy, mathematics and technology problem solving. Those born in the U.S. after 1980 tied for last among the 22 participating countries in numeracy and technology skills, and 16th in literacy. Top scoring Americans in this cohort ranked lower than their peers in most other countries, and bottom-scoring Americans ranked among the lowest in the whole study.” 1
I am currently working on an article that describes my methods and struggles of teaching basic, intermediate, and advanced topics in Web design and development to college students. The intent with this article is to contribute to the ongoing discussion on how to improve U.S. students’ skills and understanding of these fundamental technologies in today’s global world.
Feature image: Old Main at Penn State. Photo by: Greg O’Toole.
MEAN stack, Drupal 8, Reactjs, PHP
Feature image: College of IST at Penn State.
Teaching & Research @ Penn State University
As a faculty member in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University, I teach many courses related to building with web technology. I focus on leading languages, software and methods that scale up to the demands of the assembled web that users expect across any number of mobile devices and platforms. In the contemporary world, every environment is a web environment and users expect a beautiful and personal experience.
I also use these technologies in National Science Foundation funded research projects across different Penn Sate institutes and colleges working to discover and implement new ways to augment scientific collaboration, development, and teaching across the planet.
Feature image: Old Main, UP by Greg O’Toole.
Web Advising To The Moon
I am proud to have been asked to participate in the Penn State project called LunarLion, the first university-driven mission to the moon in history. LunarLion is based in the Applied Research Lab. My role in this project is to mentor the student web team who are using web technology for project management, scientific collaboration, and communication with the public across multiple digital environments.
Feature image: NASA.gov.