Outreach 2.0

Engineering colleges are increasingly concerned about the low interest in engineering among high school graduates.  This might appear a selfish concern for an engineering college, but it is in fact a national concern.  The continued success of the US has been founded on the innovation of engineers since the time of the industrial revolution.  Government officials at all levels have consistently drawn attention to the disturbingly low numbers of US students going into engineering and related fields such as science and mathematics, and the risk that this poses for our future competitiveness as a nation (see, for example, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5, from the National Academies Press).

So in recent years colleges of engineering, including the UM CoE, have been increasingly engaged in K12 outreach programs.  At the UM we have especially focused these efforts on underserved schools, often in urban and rural areas, where the schools have been less effective at preparing their smartest students to pursue and succeed further education at selective schools like the UM.  However, our own outreach efforts have been moderately effective at best.  We interact with relatively few students, influence fewer yet, and succeed with even fewer.   Our most successful programs result in perhaps 30 students enrolling in the UM, and this is achieved at only very high cost.  We need a change of strategy.

One alternate strategy is to focus on teachers, and not on students.  Each teacher reaches a hundred students or more per year.  Another is to reach out to many students in a different and more effective way using social media.    Bill Hammack, a University of Illinois professor, has suggested this latter approach in his recent book, Why engineers need to grow a long tail  (Articulate Noise Books, 978-0615395555).    The concept is to create a social media site, perhaps on a Wikimedia platform, focused on engineering projects and curriculum that support learning in primary and secondary education.  This site can be salted with projects and content from college faculty and students, and from working engineers.  It can capture ideas from the “broader impacts” work of NSF supported grants. 

If this catalog of projects were the extent of it, the site would be like many others that provide engineering projects for K12 schools (such as http://teachengineering.com/ ).   But Hammack’s additional idea is key – because this is a social wiki, students and teachers can do more than read the site and pursue the projects: they can edit and improve them live, in the way that Wikipedia is edited, improved, and augmented by its readers.    Such a site, if well targeted and well branded, can reach many students.  But also, it engages students in a way that they expect and understand, with mashup capabilities and user generated content.  K12 students would own such a site through their editing, in the same way that users own youtube, digg, and similar social sites.  Such a site would need constant tending to ensure that the projects are correct and usable, in the same way that Wikipedia’s volunteer editors constantly review and comment on user edits.  University students could serve in this role, and could improve their own understanding through having to make their own fields accessible to others.