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2016

Assessment: The silent killer of learning, at 1st Annual STEAM Sym​posium​​, Santa Clara County Office of Education (Santa Clara, CA), Saturday, April 23, 2016:
talk_2583.pdf
Why is it that stellar students sometimes fail in the workplace while dropouts succeed? One reason is that most, if not all, of our current assessment practices are inauthentic. Just as the lecture focuses on the delivery of information to students, so does assessment often focus on having students regurgitate that same information back to the instructor. Consequently, assessment fails to focus on the skills that are relevant in life in the 21st century. Assessment has been called the "hidden curriculum" as it is an important driver of students' study habits. Unless we rethink our approach to... Read more about Assessment: The silent killer of learning
Educating 21st Century Innovators, at 1st Annual STEAM Sym​posium​​, Santa Clara County Office of Education (Santa Clara, CA), Saturday, April 23, 2016:
talk_2585.pdf
The teaching of physics to engineering students has remained stagnant for close to a century. In this novel team-based, project-based approach, we break the mold by giving students ownership of their learning. This new course has no standard lectures or exams, yet students’ conceptual gains are significantly greater than those obtained in traditional courses. The course blends six best practices to deliver a learning experience that helps students develop important skills, including communication, estimation, problem solving, and team skills, in addition to a solid conceptual understanding... Read more about Educating 21st Century Innovators
Creating the Ultimate Flipped Classroom, at Leadership Program for the Brazil STHEM Consortium, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University (Cambridge, MA), Friday, April 22, 2016:
talk_2628.pdf
I thought I was a good teacher until I discovered my students were just memorizing information rather than learning to understand the material. Who was to blame? The students? The material? I will explain how I came to the agonizing conclusion that the culprit was neither of these. It was my teaching that caused students to fail! I will show how I have adjusted my approach to teaching and how it has improved my students' performance significantly
Nonequilibrium materials: using ultrafast laser pulses to change band structures, at SPIE Conference on Ultrafast Bandgap Photonics (Baltimore, MD), Sunday, April 17, 2016:
talk_2540.pdf
Soon after it was discovered that intense laser pulses of nanosecond duration from a ruby laser could anneal the lattice of silicon, it was established that this so-called pulsed laser annealing is a thermal process. The past two decades have show that ultrashort laser pulses in the femtosecond regime can induce athermal, nonequilibrium processes that lead to either transient phase changes in semiconductors through ultrafast ionization or permanent phase changes through nonequilibrium doping. In this talk we will review work in both of these regimes and show how ultrafast lasers can be used... Read more about Nonequilibrium materials: using ultrafast laser pulses to change band structures
Getting every student ready for every class, at Webinar (Cambridge, MA), Tuesday, April 12, 2016:
talk_2632.pdf
Over the past decades there has been a concerted push away from passive lecturing to active engagement in the classroom. A successful implementation of the so-called flipped classroom requires students to come to class prepared, either by reading the textbook or watching a pre-recorded video. A variety approaches have been devised to get students to take responsibility for this information transfer, but none manage to get all students to participate, compromising the in-class activities. I will present a new approach to get every student to prepare for every class using a new social learning... Read more about Getting every student ready for every class
Wrapping light around a hair, at Irish Science Teacher's Associations Annual Conference (Limerick, Ireland), Saturday, April 9, 2016:
talk_2600.pdf
Can light be guided by a fiber whose diameter is much smaller than the wavelength of the light? Can we mold the flow of light on the micrometer scale so it wraps, say, around a hair? Until recently the answer to these questions was "no". We developed a technique for drawing long, free-standing silica wires with diameters down to 50 nm that have a surface smoothness at the atomic level and a high uniformity of diameter. Light can be launched into these silica nanowires by optical evanescent coupling and the wires allow low-loss single-mode operation. They can be bent sharply, making it... Read more about Wrapping light around a hair
Innovating Education to Educate Innovators, at Irish Science Teacher's Associations Annual Conference (Limerick, Ireland), Saturday, April 9, 2016:
talk_2631.pdf
Can we teach innovation? Innovation requires whole-brain thinking — right-brain thinking for creativity and imagination, and left-brain thinking for planning and execution. Our current approach to education in science and technology, focuses on the transfer of information, developing mostly right-brain thinking by stressing copying and reproducing existing ideas rather than generating new ones. I will show how shifting the focus in lectures from delivering information to team work and creative thinking greatly improves the learning that takes place in the classroom and promotes independent... Read more about Innovating Education to Educate Innovators
Educating the Innovators of the 21st Century, at Dell Solution Center (Limerick, Ireland), Friday, April 8, 2016:
talk_2599.pdf
Can we teach innovation? Innovation requires whole-brain thinking — right-brain thinking for creativity and imagination, and left-brain thinking for planning and execution. Our current approach to education in science and technology, focuses on the transfer of information, developing mostly right-brain thinking by stressing copying and reproducing existing ideas rather than generating new ones. I will show how shifting the focus in lectures from delivering information to team work and creative thinking greatly improves the learning that takes place in the classroom and promotes independent... Read more about Educating the Innovators of the 21st Century
Less is More: Extreme Optics with Zero Refractive Index, at Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland), Thursday, April 7, 2016:
talk_2625.pdf
Nanotechnology has enabled the development of nanostructured composite materials (metamaterials) with exotic optical properties not found in nature. In the most extreme case, we can create materials which support propagating light waves that have infinite phase velocity, corresponding to a refractive index of zero. This zero index can only be achieved by simultaneously controlling the electric and magnetic resonances of the nanostructure. We present an in-plane metamaterial design consisting of silicon pillar arrays, embedded within a polymer matrix and sandwiched between gold layers. Using... Read more about Less is More: Extreme Optics with Zero Refractive Index
Creating the Ultimate Flipped Classroom: A Step-by-step Guide to Peer Instruction, at Word Educational Leadership Summit (Singapore), Wednesday, April 6, 2016:
talk_2533.pdf
This short-course introduces participants to the ideas of Peer Instruction (PI) and Just- in-Time-Teaching (JiTT), two research-based methods for engaging students, improving conceptual understanding, increasing retention in courses and programs, and enhancing academic performance. Participants will also learn about a new approach to instructional design. Finally, participants will apply the knowledge gained to a specific course module they are (or will be) teaching, by re-designing (or designing) the syllabus for this course module and developing a plan for implementing PI and JiTT.

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