AAEE - Message from the President

It has been a great honour for me to be elected President of the Australasian Association for Engineering Education (AaeE) this year and I am looking forward to the challenge. I feel an enormous confidence in the great team that forms the executive committee this year, and thank Prof. David Radcliffe for his support as President-elect. It has been the first year for some time that there has been such an electoral competition for positions on the Executive Committee, which indicates the growing recognition and importance of the organisation. There are many people that I would also like to mention; however, I will leave that until later in the year. At this stage, I think that AaeE owes a significant debt to the leadership of Prof Brian Stone who has led the committee over the last few years and leaves the President’s position with the organisation looking very healthy. Thank you, Brian.    A big thank you also to the organising committee of this year’s conference. Margaret Jollands and her team have excelled themselves with a vibrant, professionally interactive conference. I thought the parallel sessions during the conference were particularly effective and pedagogically sound. These sessions required the speakers to team up to lead the discussion and debates on topic areas by drawing on their own papers for inspiration and ideas, and I participated in many interesting debates. I look forward to the summary of these sessions.  Since attending the conference I have been able to reflect on the papers presented. The quality of the papers presented was very high, with a significant number dealing with fundamental topics in the area of education. I felt that this complemented the ‘show and tell’ papers very well. Congratulations also to Margaret who on the day after the conference gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. That is consideration for you!  As I have said, there are many exciting challenges that face both AaeE and the area of engineering education. Many of these challenges are likely to affect us all for many years to come. For the AaeE, we are challenged at home with developing better ways to communicate with our members and responding to issues in the wider community and then globally to build closer working relationships with equivalent international organisations. We, the engineering education community, are also challenged by the dawning of a new era following the Nelson Report. Pressures on academics and the academic environment continue to grow, as increasingly scarce resources are stretched further and further. I hope that AaeE is a place that you will turn to for discussion, debate and solutions. Next year’s conference – “Creating Flexible Learning Environments” is shaping up to be an important opportunity to review the events of a challenging year, and to plan for future years.  The Conference will be hosted by the University of Southern Queensland at its Toowoomba Campus from the 27th – 29th September, 2004, which just happens to follow Toowoomba’s Carnival of Flowers celebrations. Contact details are included later in this Newsletter. The Toowoomba Conference will be the Association’s 15th annual conference, and also the 10th Women in Engineering Forum – important milestones for both groups. I look forward to seeing you there.

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