Browsing by Author "Dwyer, John L."

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Adult Education in Civil War Richmond January 1861- April 1865
    Dwyer, John L. (Virginia Tech, 1997-03-19)
    This study examines adult education in Civil War Richmond from January 1861 to April 1865. Drawing on a range of sources (including newspapers, magazines, letters and diaries, reports, school catalogs, and published and unpublished personal narratives), it explores the types and availability of adult education activities and the impact that these activities had on influencing the mind, emotions, and attitudes of the residents. The analysis reveals that for four years, Richmond, the Capital of the Confederacy, endured severe hardships and tragedies of war: overcrowdedness, disease, wounded and sick soldiers, food shortages, high inflationary rates, crime, sanitation deficiencies, and weakened socio-educational institutions. Despite these deplorable conditions, the examination reveals that educative systems of organizations, groups, and individuals offered the opportunity and means for personal development and growth. The study presents and tracks the educational activities of organizations like churches, amusement centers, colleges, evening schools, military, and voluntary groups to determine the type and theme of their activities for educational purposes, such as personal development, leisure, and recreation. The study examines and tracks such activities as higher education, industrial training, religious education, college-preparatory education, military training, informal education, and educational leisure and recreation, such as reading and listening to and singing music. The study concludes that wartime conditions had minimal affect on the type and availability of adult education. Based on the number and types of educational activities and participants engaged in such activities, the study concludes that adult education had influenced and contributed to the lives of the majority of Richmonders, including the thousands of soldiers convalescing in the city's hospitals. Whatever the educative system, the study finds that the people of Richmond, under tremendous stress and despondency improved themselves individually and collectively. Thus, Civil War Richmond's adult education experience is about educative systems that gave people knowledge, comfort, and hope under extreme deprivation and deplorable conditions.
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    A History of the Outplacement Industry 1960-1997 from Job Search Counseling to Career Management: A New Curriculum of Adult Learning
    Redstrom-Plourd, Martha A. (Virginia Tech, 1998-04-20)
    This study traced the history of the outplacement industry from 1960 to 1997 through the stories of seven outplacement firms, the three organizations that emerged from the industry and the changes that occurred in the design and delivery of outplacement services. The history was studied in the context of the changes that occurred in the social and economic environment that formed the American workplace between 1960 and 1997 and the subsequent impact those changes had on corporations, their employees and the outplacement industry. Outplacement has its roots in the job search counseling service designed and delivered by Bernard Haldane following WW II to assist veterans with their reentry into the post war workplace. In the 1960s, entrepreneurs expanded Haldane's service to include consulting with corporate managers on how to terminate employees, remove them from corporate payrolls and support their job search efforts until they found new positions. They called this service outplacement. The primary data for this study came from personal interviews with industry founders, leaders and practitioners, the archives of the AOCFI, industry newsletters and published materials. The study traced the changes that occurred in the reasons corporations purchased outplacement services and the affect those changes had on the way corporations bought and distributed outplacement services for their terminated employees. The study traced modifications outplacement firms made to their services in response to corporate demands and the affect those changes had on the future of the industry. The study traced the evolution of outplacement services from a personal consulting service to a new curriculum of learning resources from which corporate buyers of outplacement services selected services to meet the diverse learning needs of terminated employees. The study traced the growth and decline of the industry, the subsequent impact on the industry's trade, professional member and certification organizations and the difficulties those organizations experienced as they attempted to respond to their members changing needs. This study traces a history of the industry from the collected stories of industry founders, leaders, practitioners and industry archives and relates those stories to the rise and decline of the outplacement industry.
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    Stages of Concern of Defense Systems Management College Faculty about Technology-Based Education and Training
    Alfieri, Paul Allen III (Virginia Tech, 1998-05-22)
    The Defense Systems Management College (DSMC) is beginning a major transition from its traditional classroom training methods to technology-based education and training. Conventional classroom courses will be rewritten and restructured to a computer-based format and be delivered on-line. According to the Concerns-Based Adoption Model, the faculty will experience concerns during the process of adopting this innovation. Identification of these concerns can assist in selecting appropriate interventions to minimize problems and to ease the adoption process. This study had two purposes. The first was to identify the Stages of Concern of the DSMC faculty toward the use of technology-based education and training by measuring faculty responses to the Stages of Concern (SoC) Questionnaire. The second was to determine appropriate interventions to assist the faculty through the change process. The study accomplished both purposes. All teaching faculty (N=135) received the questionnaire about their concerns and issues with this innovation, and 126 responses were returned (93% response rate). A total of eighty-one respondents (64%) reported no experience with technology-based courses, and the composite faculty SoC profile correspondingly reflected the "nonuser" category. No significant differences in Stages of Concern were found between groups of faculty when divided by common demographic criteria such as years of teaching experience, civilian or military status, and experience with educational technology. Quantitative methods of analysis included SoC profile comparison, High Stage Score and Second High Stage Score analysis, analysis-of variance (ANOVA), and multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). Qualitative methods were also used to analyze responses to an open-ended question on the survey instrument. Results reflected a general lack of knowledge and awareness about the innovation from the faculty and strong personal concerns about what impact it will have on them. The faculty clearly displayed a negative attitude toward this innovation and seemed unconvinced that it was the optimal solution. Written responses to the open-ended question provided key insight into faculty attitudes. The majority of concerns identified were educational issues, particularly dealing with the effectiveness of a computer-based format when teaching highly-interactive management courses. Based on these results, recommended intervention strategies for DSMC were generated. These strategies focus on the need for better information dissemination about educational technology and for a realistic implementation plan. More importantly, interventions were recommended to provide incentives for faculty to increase proficiency with educational technology and the use of technology in their courses.
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    Structural Health Monitoring Using Multiple Piezoelectric Sensors and Actuators
    Kabeya, Kazuhisa III (Virginia Tech, 1998-04-30)
    A piezoelectric impedance-based structural health monitoring technique was developed at the Center for Intelligent Material Systems and Structures. It has been successfully implemented on several complex structures to detect incipient-type damage such as small cracks or loose connections. However, there are still some problems to be solved before full scale development and commercialization can take place. These include: i) the damage assessment is influenced by ambient temperature change; ii) the sensing area is small; and iii) the ability to identify the damage location is poor. The objective of this research is to solve these problems in order to apply the impedance-based structural health monitoring technique to real structures. First, an empirical compensation technique to minimize the temperature effect on the damage assessment has been developed. The compensation technique utilizes the fact that the temperature change causes vertical and horizontal shifts of the signature pattern in the impedance versus frequency plot, while damage causes somewhat irregular changes. Second, a new impedance-based technique that uses multiple piezoelectric sensor-actuators has been developed which extends the sensing area. The new technique relies on the measurement of electrical transfer admittance, which gives us mutual information between multiple piezoelectric sensor-actuators. We found that this technique increases the sensing region by at least an order of magnitude. Third, a time domain technique to identify the damage location has been proposed. This technique also uses multiple piezoelectric sensors and actuators. The basic idea utilizes the pulse-echo method often used in ultrasonic testing, together with wavelet decomposition to extract traveling pulses from a noisy signal. The results for a one-dimensional structure show that we can determine the damage location to within a spatial resolution determined by the temporal resolution of the data acquisition. The validity of all these techniques has been verified by proof-of-concept experiments. These techniques help bring conventional impedance-based structural health monitoring closer to full scale development and commercialization.