A Fulbright Update

Several of you have asked about the nature of Ronnie’s work here. Rather than trying to explain it myself, I asked him to write a brief description of his work as a Fulbright Scholar in West Java. I am happy to report that his experience here has been very rewarding and he feels as if he has already accomplished all he has set out to do. However, he is obligated to do it again with a different group of students in the spring semester.

Ronnie

engineering conference room at ITB

I’m a Fulbright Scholar at Institut Teknologi Bandung teaching and doing research in the Informatics Department. Teaching wise, I have a class of 19 senior Informatics majors that I am teaching the mechanics and soft-skills of global software development and international teaming. I lecture once a week and then have the students speak about research papers which I assign them to read. 

Research wise, as part of the course I’m teaching, I team the ITB students with honors students back in Computer Science at TAMU in College Station to work jointly on software development projects (3 projects so far). They put into practice what they’ve learned in the classroom. They love the opportunity to work with someone from a different country. As they do their projects, I’m collecting research data from the students regarding their work preferences and I hope to relate overall team performance to individual preference. There are also 19 students at TAMU this fall, and we are using another class of 100+ students as a control group (all doing the same projects except without international team members). I’ll file an interim report in January and a final report next summer. Hopefully, we’ll publish a paper or two on the research.

Ronnie speaking to Engineering faculty and graduating seniors

graduating seniors, Informatics Department, ITB

Engineering Day - ITB

 

Given all that, Jan and I also cultural ambassadors. We are representative of America to the Indonesians. They want to know what we think of Indonesia. They like the fact that we are studying their language. They are a friendly people in general. Jan can say a lot more about where we are and she does through her blog.

Jan:

Overall, it has been a mutually positive experience for both Ronnie and the students at ITB alike. Last night, I was entering student comments into a program on his computer. I thought you might enjoy hearing the names of his students: Nikolaus, Bobby, Darwin, Gregorius, Raka, Muhammad, Rifky, William, Zain, Archie, Ecky, Timotius, Hendra, Shirley, Marvello, Fransiska, Rizky, Thoriq and Dimas. You can read some of their comments about the class on AMINEF's Facebook page.