Events
- Annual Convention
- Great Teaching Round-up
- Leading from the middle
- fall conference for faculty leaders
- Webinars
"I think there is something more important than believing: Action! The world is full of dreamers, there aren't enough who will move ahead and begin to take concrete steps to actualize their vision."
Events: 2008 General Session & Banquet
Thursday, February 21st, 6:30 p.m.
Positive Pressure in the Pipeline:
Reaching students where they live (virtually)
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Jim Bower
The age-old complaint of 4 year college professors is that primary and secondary education is not preparing students for college. The age-old complaint of primary and secondary teachers is that the 4 year colleges and universities don’t understand the constraints of the real world. The community colleges are caught somewhere in the middle. But the one thing everyone can agree on is that too many kids fall out of the system, and that the future robustness in the American economy will absolutely require that we stop the bleeding and fill the pipeline.
8 years ago, Dr. Bower and several of his colleagues at the Californian Institute of Technology decided to stop playing the blame game and use the world wide web to reach directly to kids. To do so, they launched one of the first 3-D virtual worlds, Whyville.net, which is still the only virtual world primarily focused on education. Now 8 years later, Whyville has more than 3 million registered users, average age 12 1/2 and 2/3rds female. Whyville is also one of the stickiest sites on the Internet and has been recognized by parental and governmental agencies as one of the safest sites for kids.
With partners including the John Paul Getty Trust, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Toyota Inc, The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, The National Science Foundation, the Vice Chancellor for Health of the University of Texas System and BankInter, the 5th largest bank in Spain, support for Whyville is diverse and expanding. Whyville has also been the recipient of several grants by the Texas Workforce Commission to specifically introduce middle school aged students to careers deemed to be important for Texas, including biotechnology, advanced manufacturing, aeronautics and robotics. These grants require the involvement of at least 20,000 Texas middle school students within the next year.
In his presentation, Dr. Bower will first describe the origins, motivations, and pedigological structure of Whyville. He will then dig deeper into the Texas-based workforce activities, and describe how they are engaging middle school aged children in college level learning. He will close by discussing the implications of virtual worlds-based learning for post-secondary education. These kids are coming, time to prepare.
Biography: James Bower is Professor of Computational Neuroscience at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and at the University of Texas, San Antonio.
He is also Founder, Chairman and CEO of Numedeon Inc., producer of Whyville.net, one of the most popular educational web sites for children, with 2.2 million registered users. Whyville is the leading educational virtual world for children ages 8 - 15. It was launched in 1999 by Numedeon, Inc. to apply over 17 years of research in education and cooperative learning to develop an innovative environment for engaging children in constructive and engaging activities on the web.
Aside from Whyville, Numedeon’s proprietary software also powers a virtual campus for the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio (UTHSCSA). UTHSCSA-Virtual supports scientists and medical professionals in their collaborations both locally and at a distance.
Bower was a professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) for 17 years. His scientific research focuses on the cerebellum and the mammalian olfactory system and employs a variety of experimental and computational techniques. His laboratory invented the neural-simulation system GENESIS and pioneered techniques in multi-single-unit neuronal recording. He has a longstanding interest and involvement in science education at all levels, having founded several international courses in computational neuroscience and established annual computational neuroscience meetings.
Dr. Bower has also been involved in educational reform efforts since he was President of the Teen League of Rochester (NY) as a high school student from 1970 - 1971. While at Caltech, he founded and directed the Caltech Precollege Science Initiative (CAPSI). He has been a member of numerous national advisory groups on education, including within the National Research Council of the National Academy of Science, the National Science Foundation and the Society for Neuroscience.
He has published more than 100 scientific articles and has authored several books. Bower received a Ph.D. in neurophysiology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Banquet Tickets:
Your presence is requested
at the TCCTA Keynote Banquet
Speaker: Dr. Jim Bower
on Thursday, February 21, 2008
The Fairmont Dallas
$35.00 EachReserve your spot by February 15th!
Request for Banquet Ticket