While leading a tour of Irvine Valley College's labs on February 10, Microbiology Professor Emalee Mackenzie tells c3bc Project Director Russ H. Read about her plans to add medical device manufacturing courses to the biotech offerings in Orange County, California.

As Microbiology Professor Emalee Mackenzie took in the scene of 36 medical device industry representatives and bioscience academicians in Irvine Valley College's conference space, she could not help smiling. She was happy that the professional connections she made through MentorLinks led to her hosting the Fifth Medical Device Skill Standards Meeting on February 10.

"It's all those connections, and meeting them at ATE ... that have been tremendous. Vivian opened doors and made all this possible," Mackenzie said, referring to the introductions Vivian Ngan-Winward, her MentorLinks mentor, provided at the 2015 ATE Principal Investigators Conference.

MentorLinks is a technician education program improvement initiative that the American Association of Community College offers with support from the National Science Foundation's Advanced Technological Education program. MentorLinks pairs a college team that is working on a new or revamped STEM program with a community college educator who has expertise in the target discipline for a two-year period.

All of us at ATE Central are avid readers of the reports, surveys, and publications created by the Pew Research Center; not only is the research timely and varied, but the reports are a pleasure to read and chock full of graphics and tables that highlight research results in smart and applicable ways. We’ve showcased other Pew reports here in the ATE@20 blog and today we’re pointing you to two reports that came out last year. Not only do we hope they will be of interest and useful to the whole ATE community, but we hope they’ll be of interest to your colleagues, administrators, friends and students, too. Please feel free to share this blog post with others who you think might find them useful!

Students at the 2015 Sustainable Energy Practicum with the devices they made with readily available materials.

The Sustainable Energy Technology Program Enhancement at Missoula College offers a unique opportunity to learn about renewable energy technologies in Montana.

The two-week practicum combines high-level technical instruction with practical approaches to energy challenges. For instance, one of the class activities last summer used soda cans to build photovoltaic cells for residential solar energy systems.

Several $1,500 stipends are available for two-year college faculty and high school teachers to attend the program. Applications will be accepted from February 15 to May 15. The program will be offered from June 13 to 24 at Missoula College in Missoula, Montana, and from June 27 to July 8 at Blackfeet Community College in Browning, Montana. The Blackfeet Nation, which the college serves, is located at the gateway to Glacier National Park.

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At ATE Central, part of our goal is to help community members stay current with educational news, facts, and figures. Below are brief overviews of nine such resources, ranging from national research centers, such as the Brookings Institute, to ATE specific news and information resources, like the Evalu-ATE Annual Survey. Whether you are looking for material to help as you write up a report, create an informative presentation, or if you just want to stay up-to-date about news, events, and opportunities central to community and technical college education, we hope you find this list helpful. 

The Brookings Institute and the Pew Research Center are perhaps the most well-known and visited sites covered on this list. Nevertheless, they are worth mentioning and future exploration. The Brookings Institute is a nonprofit organization devoted to independent research and innovative policy solutions; the Pew Research Center identifies as a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about important issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world. Together, they are both engaged in social science research that is informative and helpful for members of the ATE community. Readers need look no further to find everything from articles on the economic situation across the nation to infographics on changing student demographics.

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As a student in the Advancing Inclusive Manufacturing program, Joshua Kimmel helped create a truly revolutionary device.

He and a staff machinist at the Human Engineering Research Laboratories (HERL) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,  worked together to design a bicycle-style hand brake that is level with Kimmel's lap as he sits in his wheelchair. With this innovation Kimmel and other manufacturing technicians with limited mobility do not have to stretch from their wheelchair seats past moving spindles and blades to shut off the milling equipment. Dalton Relich, the machinist and technical assistant at HERL, said brakes on mills have been above the shoulders of standing operators for hundreds of years.

"That is actually why I jumped into the program so wholeheartedly—is because the difficulties I encountered while I was going through the program, working in the machine shop, I was able to sit down behind the computer and draw up and design different technologies to assist myself and maybe even future participants," Kimmel said.

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ATE project and center PIs and staff understand first hand the reach and impact of community colleges and a recent report from the American Association of Community Colleges helps provide compelling evidence of the breadth and depth of community college’s positive effects on both the US economy and individual students.  

The eighty-eight page report (Where Value Meets Values) is chock full of useful data and analysis and provides an overview of public community colleges’ impact on the national economy and the return on investment for students, society at large, and individual taxpayers.

Community colleges contributed $809 billion to the United States economy in 2012. This number is equal to 5.4 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Or the entire GDP of the Netherlands. Or more than twice the net worth of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The authors also estimate that for every dollar community college students spend on tuition, they stand to gain $4.80 in increased future wages. This translates into a rate of return of 17.8% - a far cry from bank account interest rates.

Kevin L. Hulett hires graduates of the ATE-funded cybersecurity program because it blends cybersecurity with information technology instruction.

In 2006 Kevin L. Hulett graduated from Oklahoma State University Institute of Technology with three degrees: an associate of science degree in information technology (IT), an associate in applied science in IT-networking; and a bachelor of technology in information assurance and forensics. The day after graduation he went to work as a systems administrator at the college in Okmulgee, Oklahoma.

Now as associate vice president of Technology Services there, he supports "home-growing" the IT staff. Nine of the 11-member technology services employees are graduates of the OSU Institute of Technology.

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Understanding how to engage with social media and make it a useful tool that increases the reach and impact of your ATE project or center work is an ongoing process.  Integrating social media tools into daily routines and practices takes time. So whether it’s using Facebook to connect with partners and colleagues, tweeting to support recruitment, or working with students to create their own LinkedIn pages, you want to know that your efforts will bear fruit. 

Here at ATE Central we use social media primarily for outreach, and we’re always interested in understanding the best practices of these tools, particularly in educational environments.  In 2012 ATE Central, in consultation with EvaluATE and the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), conducted a survey of the ATE community to better understand how social media are being used and identify ways to use these technologies more effectively. The 2012 Social Media Survey (you can check out the full report here) built upon social media research done in 2010 by the ICTStudy.

Mary Batch, assistant manager of Human Resource Development, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Texas Inc., St. Philips College students Selena Flores and Samantha Vera, and Danine Tomlin, executive director of the Automotive Manufacturing Technical Education Collaborative (AMTEC), presented information about the Advanced Manufacturing Technology curriculum that AMTEC developed with Toyota at the 2015 ATE Principal Investigators Conference in Washington, D.C.

One of Samantha Vera's favorite stories about her friend and classmate Selena Flores is how she helped an engineer build and operate a piece of equipment in their first semester of the Advanced Manufacturing Technology Program (AMT) at St. Philips College.

"He went to a university, and we went to a community college, and she put it all together," Vera said.

At this point in the story, Flores nods her head matter-of-factly explaining that she and Vera learned basic manufacturing skills in the Alamo Area (Dual-Credit) Academies while in high school. In just one course they learned to operate a CNC machine, a milling machine, a drill press, a chop saw, and a band saw.

"It's not, what skills do we have? It's how many skills we have!" Flores said during a showcase session at the 2015 Advanced Technological Education Principal Investigators Conference.

In the lab at Flathead Valley Community College student Kim Lantrip prepares a fur sample for tests to determine if it has Canada lynx DNA.

For biotechnology student Kim Lantrip the thrill of participating in scientific discovery happened during the second semester of her biotech program at Flathead Valley Community College.

The molecular procedure for identifying wildlife species that she and classmate Brad Dixon devised and tested during spring 2015 semester is helping to determine whether Canada lynx and wolverine, two threatened species, are living in the Lost Trail National Wildlife Refuge in Montana. The animals have been seen, but a wildlife biologist needs physical evidence to seek "critical habitat" designation of the 7,885-acre refuge.    

"It's incredibly motivating, because I'm doing something that has obvious implications. I can assist this range in becoming a critical habitat, which would then help the animals," Lantrip explained last week in Washington, D.C. She was among the 60 students from across the U.S. and Guam who shared their learning experiences at the 2015 Advanced Technological Education Principal Investigators Conference in Washington, D.C., October 21 to 23.