This month’s SIGNAL Connections survey asks readers to weigh in with the main reason they joined AFCEA. Feel free to discuss the value of your AFCEA membership here, whether your affiliation is as an individual member or a corporate associate. And if you have suggestions on benefits you’d like to see, share them here as well.

Educational Foundation Launches BIG IDEA to Support STEM Teachers

AFCEA International and the AFCEA Educational Foundation have an integrated plan to deliver on the recruitment, retention and renewal of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) teachers. (See Rita Boland’s recent post on the need for these teachers here.)

AFCEA will focus on those preparing to become classroom STEM teachers, offering scholarships, and supplying AFCEA STEM teachers with powerful AFCEA Science Teaching Tools grants (STTools) for use in their classrooms and activities.

AFCEA International will grant the AFCEA Educational Foundation $200,000 per year over the next three years, FY 2010-2012.  The grant will enable the Foundation to award 35 scholarships of $5,000 each per year, for a total of $175,000.  (Click here for more information.)

The program will focus on one AFCEA Chapter community each of the 3 years, awarding 5 scholarships and allocating $25,000 in Science Teaching Tools.  In 2010, it will be the Hawaii Chapter.

In addition to the STEM Teacher Scholarship, each graduating STEM Scholarship Teacher will receive a $1,000- AFCEA STTools grant for 3 years, providing they remain teaching a STEM subject.

The AFCEA Education Summit will take place on Monday, May 10, 2010, from 2 to 3:15 p.m. at the 2010 Joint Warfighting Conference, taking place at the Virginia Beach Convention Center. The summit will feature discussions on educational issues and best practices to benefit AFCEA Chapters, and will be broadcast over the internet for those not attending. Click here for topics and details.

AFCEA National Middle School Science Fair
New this year! In 2010, the AFCEA Educational Foundation will sponsor the best Middle School science project related to the communications, intelligence or information systems fields selected from science fairs nationwide. The Grand Prize winner and the First Honorable Mention winner both are eligible to attend Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama, during summer 2010.

• Click here for more information, guidelines and a nomination form

AFCEA National High School Science Fair
In 2010 , the National High School Science Fair Grand Prize Winner AND the First Honorable Mention Winner again will be eligible to attend and display their projects at AFCEA’s LandWarNet Conference in Tampa, Florida, August 3-5, 2010.

• Click here for more information, guidelines and a nomination form

Deadline for ALL nominations:  May 7, 2010

For more news from the AFCEA Education Foundation, click here to read the current newsletter.

Data center networking presents many challenges in terms of supporting cost-effective, reliable and high-performance services for business-critical applications. A coherent overall networking strategy leading to the deployment of a powerful and flexible network creates more long-term value than a series of tactical, project-oriented steps.

In this virtual seminar, Ciena’s Jim Morin and Jeff Verrant discuss bandwidth options and other ideas for taking a more strategic approach to data center networking that addresses the heart of the problem:  The need for a high-performance, deterministic, manageable and cost-efficient network.

To register, click here.

No, I’m not talking about the classic Marilyn Monroe film; I’m talking about AFCEA’s Homeland Security Conference, going on this Wednesday and Thursday. The theme is “DHS: The 7-Year Itch—Renewing the Commitment.” The event will cover such topics as cybersecurity, securing social media, transparency, identity management, information and intelligence sharing, and more. Speakers include Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy Lanier, Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez and W. Ralph Basham.

For more information and to register, visit the Web site. SIGNAL’s Henry S. Kenyon will be blogging from the conference here on SIGNAL Scape. Monitor the discussions using the Homeland 2010 tag, and follow @signalmag on Twitter as well with the #afcea hash tag.

The next SIGNAL webinar will be held on Thursday, February 25, at 12:00 PM Eastern Time. The topic will focus on service portfolio management, which is new to the world of service management in ITIL V3. It provides the critical guidance to ensure that “the complete set of services that are being managed by a service provider” in terms of the value to the mission and the organizational value that they provide.

For more information and to register, visit the Web site.

Next week is the West 2010 Conference in San Diego. For those of you who will be attending the conference, we look forward to seeing you there. (Look for the SIGNAL editors to say hello–we’ll be the ones running around to all of the events, frantically taking notes and muttering to ourselves.) If you’re unable to attend but want to keep up with the conversations and discussions, there are plenty of ways to tune in:

Follow @signalmag on Twitter and use the hashtag #west10.

Read our editors’ blog coverage here on SIGNAL Scape.

Become a SIGNAL fan on Facebook. From there, you can join the West 2010 event page on Facebook.

Catch up on each day’s events with SIGNAL’s Online Show Daily.

A new year brings changes afoot, including a new columnist for “Incoming.” Robert K. Ackerman, SIGNAL’s editor in chief, notes:

We say goodbye to Christopher Dorobek, who offered timely commentary in the Incoming column during the major period of change that accompanied the arrival of the Barack Obama administration. Our new contributing columnist is Dr. Linton Wells II, the transformation chair at National Defense University. Many may remember Lin as the former principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for networks and information integration, but he comes to SIGNAL with other far-ranging experience in many areas. He is still on top of information, and he hits the ground running with his debut column.

Next up: Wells’ first column!

AFCEA’s Small Business Committee is hosting “Federal Legislative Overview” as part of its Small Business Toolkit Series. The guest speaker for the event is Gregory Willis, counsel for the U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship. He’ll share his first-hand insight on the current legislative climate for small businesses.

The event will be held at AFCEA International headquarters on Tuesday, January 12, at 10 a.m. EST. For more information, visit the Web site or contact Dawn Falsinotti, (703) 631-6190.