ICT and reporting skills in Chemical Engineering Education

1
ICT and reporting skills in Chemical Engineering
Education Jetse Reijenga and Monika
Roeling Eindhoven University of Technology, the
Netherlands
Summary Our curriculum pays special attention to
cooperation and communication skills, especially
presentation. We are also convinced that future
engineers have the responsibility to communicate
their research and technology efforts to a wider
audience. During past decades, the tools
available for these skills have developed
drastically. A recent development is reporting in
the form of a website. This website is part of
compulsory project work 1 for all Master
students and a separate point in the grading
system. Our students are thus enabled to broaden
the spectrum of communication tools. The
resulting websites 2 form part of the students
professional portfolio and they serve to
illustrate new formats of cooperation between
academia and industry. Introduction Using the
appropriate ICT tools, the need to communicate
science and technology to a wider, more general
audience has increased. Important improvements in
the corresponding skills are required but one
should realize that there is a trade-off between
three priorities in the triangle of level of
detail, interactivity and general audience, as
depicted in Figure 1.
Popularity of a website, as determined by hit
count is just one aspect. Naturally, students are
not graded proportional to the hit count of their
website. There are many more-or-less obvious
criteria, some of them subjective though, for a
good website. Guidelines, tips and tricks are
offered in excessive abundance, especially on
internet. A general starting point is recently
given in the 10 Principles of Effective Web
Design by Smashing Magazine 3.

• Recommendations
• On implementation attention should be paid to
  following points
• Websites should be in English, targeted towards
  an audience interested in implications of recent
  technological innovations.
• Some groups assign the task of making the
  website to the group member most capable of such
  a task, with the results that the others did not
  learn from the experience. We try to solve this
  by having the students include it explicitly in
  the individual learning objectives at the start
  of the project.
• The website should be graded separately from the
  report, the presentation and the overall group
  performance. If not the students tend to make a
  sloppy job of the whole thing, just copy/pasting
  the report contents. A (non-zero) weighing factor
  of the website in the final grade is determined
  in collaboration with the students.
• Even more so than in the case of written
  reports, students nowadays seem to have a
  tendency to forget to mention explicitly the
  sources of their information, especially with
  information from internet. For this reason, we
  warn the students that we use anti-plagiarism
  software 4 to check the material they submit.
  Naturally, we do this after having instructed
  them how to deal with literature sources,
  citations and references in a professional manner
  5.
• The importance of finding the right balance
  between quality of the form and of the content
  cannot be stressed enough. We all realize
  however, that this equally applies to reports,
  posters and oral presentation.

We are convinced that poster presentation and
especially web-presentation should deserve more
attention in science education. The latter is the
subject of the present contribution. Methodology
At present, a 1-hour introduction in web design
is given on request for those students not
familiar with making a website. We use Microsoft
FrontPage (included in some editions of Microsoft
Office, used on our campus). Frontpage is very
user-friendly, especially for those familiar with
other MS Office applications. Resulting student
project websites are embedded in the educational
goals of a compulsory course in the curriculum
and highlight the results of a particular
activity. The student web pages server of our
Department at http//students.chem.tue.nl now
contains 89 websites, and new sub-webs are added
each semester. Results and Discussion The
website 2 has a substantial hit-count, and
provides a popular reference for both general
audience and secondary school students, as seen
from e-mail response to the general contact
address. Some of the popular sites are mentioned
below. The website of Wondrous World of Carbon
Nanotubes, a project initiated by prof. Peter
Notten of Philips Research Laboratories is cited
most.

• In general, the reasons for popularity of any
  website in general are threefold
• The site has an effective, attractive layout and
  intuitive and fast navigation
• The content of the site is interesting from a
  scientific and societal point of view and
  contains relevant cross-references
• The site is easily found by search engines, by
  way of proper meta tag keywords in the html code.

• References
• http//edu.chem.tue.nl/6z020/
• http//students.chem.tue.nl/
• http//www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/01/31/10-pri
  nciples-of-effective-web-design
• http//ephorus.com/
• http//students.chem.tue.nl/guidelinescitation.pd
  f

j.c.reijenga_at_tue.nl - 20th ICCE Mauritius 2008