Open House Spotlights Center for Advanced Engineering Environments' Vision for Education in the Future

Old Dominion University's Center for Advanced Engineering Environments (CAEE) will host an open house Tuesday, May 12, to highlight its revolutionary vision for the transformative change that technology is making in learning and workforce development.

The open house will run from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the CAEE, which is located at the Peninsula Higher Education Center, 600 Butler Farm Road, Hampton.

Ahmed Noor, an ODU aerospace engineering professor and eminent scholar, is the CAEE director. Noor believes technology is changing at such a rapid rate that we need to keep up by changing the way we learn.

"Young people can get very bored with the way we are providing education for them today," Noor said. "The open house will present a vision for what I call a transformative change in learning and accelerated workforce development."

Demonstrations presented during the day will feature an interactive, immersive learning environment, with real-world applications to virtual tools.

Among the presentations and demonstrations on display will be:

• IPresence - a "tele-immersion" facility that combines eye-to-eye contact with "telepresence," immersing participants in a three-dimensional, living environment.

• The Collaborative, Human-Centered Simulation, Modeling and Design for Complex Aerospace Systems - which incorporates state-of-the-art computational and synthetic environment facilities and tools in a highly interactive mapping of information into visual, auditory or motion-based representations.

• The Advanced Learning Environment/Learning Network - the vision of an expanded, collaborative university network, linking virtual classrooms through advanced instructional, computing, communication, course evaluation and management facilities.

Noor said if the United States does not embrace technology to its fullest capacity, it risks getting passed by many other countries eager to explore such innovations.

"I think it's important to know we are going to have very strong competition from other countries. The Internet is a democratizing force now. People everywhere are smart and talented," Noor said.

"Last week was not like this week. The pace of change is accelerating, and definitely not stopping. Even our homes will be smart homes in the future. Adding to that global interdependence and globalization, innovation will be the most important asset for any nation's success."

The open house is free and open to the public. For information call Suzy Davis at 757-766-5213.

For more information about the CAEE, which is an enterprise center of ODU's Frank Batten College of Engineering and Technology, visit www.aee.odu.edu.