Twitter Chat 2013-12-18 8pm: Engineers Without Borders Canada

The Big Beacon is a Movement to Transform Engineering Education, and was organized to catalyze a global social movement around this goal. The Big Beacon connects dots among individuals and organizations to collaboratively disrupt the status quo, thereby bringing about change to align engineering education with the creativity imperative of our times.

Join us for the weekly #BigBeacon Twitter Chat on 12/18/2013 at 8PM EST, our final chat for 2013! Our topic is “The Impact of STEM and Engineering Education on Global Development” with Guest Host @RethinkEWB. (Learn more about them below!)

We welcome students, educators, engineers, business owners, community organizers, and ANYONE interested in transforming engineering education to join us in the movement, and that can simply begin with a chat! See you Wednesday.

Guest Post written by Laura Kavanagh

This chat will be hosted on behalf of the Engineers Without Borders Canada upcoming national conference RETHINK 2014. You can find more information on RETHINK 2014 at http://conference2014.ewb.ca/en/

STEM education has paved the way for maximizing human potential and developing ground-breaking innovations that have altered the way we work and live. The work we do enhances North America’s stature as a hub for innovation, but how can this be applied to assist in developing countries? As we know, there are many factors that play into a nations well being including economic, political and environmental. The ability to be able to use the resources and skills our country has to improve the lives of others presents great opportunity but it poses a challenge of building not just a short-term fix but long-term sustainability for our neighbors.

Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB) has been working to overcome these challenges since 2001. With joint-venture projects in African countries including Ghana, Malawi, and Kenya, EWB has been assisting in building sustainability through systemic innovation. EWB offers its members and volunteers the opportunity to develop their critical thinking and technical skills, gain valuable leadership experience and take active roles in systemic change initiatives at both the local and international level. It’s about people working with people to create lasting, measureable change that unlocks human potential. This #BigBeacon Twitter chat aims to explore the different ways we can educate and apply STEM education to global development.

About Engineers Without Borders Canada

Engineers Without Borders Canada is a social incubator of over 50,000 professional engineers, students, overseas volunteer staff, and supporters across Canada and Africa. We believe that poverty is the product of broken systems that prevent people from realizing their full potential. Beating poverty means making those systems work. EWB is working to do exactly that. http://ewb.ca.

How to Twitter Chat

If you’ve

never Twitter chatted before, don’t worry; it’s very easy. First, get a Twitter account if you don’t already have one, and log in. At 8 PM ET on Wednesday go to twitter.com and type #BigBeacon into the search box on Twitter. Thereafter all the tweets with the hashtag #BigBeacon will show up on your Twitter page. To participate, simply express your opinion

by sending a tweet, and be sure to append the hashtag #BigBeacon so other members of the Twitter Chat see you are posting. Alternatively, automate the hashtag search and append feature by using the free service Tchat at http://www.tchat.io. For more information, read a longer post about #BigBeacon Twitter Chats here.