I experienced a major crash of my computer and my backup system recently. Consequently, I've not been able to post messages for several days. Also, I've not been able to fully recover past messages. Hope to fully recover the system today or tomorrow.
JH
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The Rev. Al Sharpton and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich don't agree on much, but a meeting with a group of inner-city charter school students on Tuesday left them with the same impression: There is hope for improving the U.S. education system.
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In an effort to reduce waste and do their part to save the planet, college dining halls have begun to go trayless. Plates are still available (they’re not barbarians), as are eating utensils.
It turns out that the trayless policy has reduced water and energy use, and because the students can only gracefully carry so many plates and bowls in their arms, they’ve been wasting 30% less food due to the decrease in my-eyes-were-bigger-than-my-stomach syndrome.
The traditional using of the dining tray as a sled during Winter Term will be much reduced as well, about which the schools are stoked and the students are understandably pi**ed. Times change, people.
You’ll have to stick with surfing down the dorm hallway on bathmats (rubber side up, yarn side down) and baby powder. My dorm had carpeting, which sucked until we invented Flame Ball (it involves a fuzzy tennis ball, hairspray, lights off, and no one getting their deposit back).
Posted by Alexa Harrington
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I experienced a major crash of my computer and my backup system recently. Consequently, I've not been able to post messages for several days. Also, I've not been able to fully recover past messages. Hope to fully recover the system today or tomorrow.
JH
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Whether you're a full-time student or learning on your own, the challenge of actually retaining what you've studied and putting it to use can be formidable.
Private and parochial schools in the region are still managing to attract students despite a slumping economy and what some educators call a shrinking pool of students.
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Results from Australia's largest study of young drivers have shown that they are at significant risk of crash on rural roads.
The O'Reilly Radar blog reports that ccLearn, Google, and the Hewlett Foundation are working together to build a search portal focused on open educational resources. Everyone interested in the OER field will certainly be following this new OE Search project closely. ____JH
"ccLearn is working with the Hewlett Foundation and Google to build an 'open education web-scale search,' part of a larger effort to offer web users simple, overarching mechanisms for discovering OERs. This tool aims to direct search engine traffic to the incredible diversity of OER repositories and communities. While such a tool would not replace the more specialized and sophisticated search sites and portals that the community already uses, we believe it would expose a much wider public to our community’s materials. This is also an opportunity to encourage OER adoption and specify legal and technical conditions for making educational resources openly available. We see this project as an important step for achieving large-scale access to and use of open educational resources. "
Open Education Search [del.icio.us/tag/oer]
These four sites collect video lectures on scientific, humanities, government, and business topics by prominent thinkers. I've sampled a number of the talks and found them to be extremely valuable. These sites could be very useful to instructors who want to supply supplementary materials for their courses. _____JH
This is a ponderable piece on the current financial situation colleges and universities have found themselves in. Who benefits from the money coming into a school? Hint: It’s probably not the faculty or the students.
Here’s an excerpt:
An interesting point to consider comes from the U.S. Department of Education, which surveyed nearly 3,000 colleges and reported, “Colleges have added managers and support personnel at a steady, vigorous clip over the past 20 years, new research shows, far outpacing the growth in student enrollment and instructors.”
Not only are the numbers of administrative personnel growing rapidly, the salaries and benefits they command are taking a large amount out of the universities’ revenues. The same cannot be said of faculty members. As an example, at Eastern Michigan University, our faculty salaries and benefits are less than 25% of the total expenses. The school has experienced a decline in instruction expenses in recent years, meaning that the core academic operations – teaching and research – are now a smaller piece of the pie. More…
Posted by Alexa Harrington
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A Florida high school student was killed Tuesday by another student during an altercation at the school, officials said.
The Tulsa and Oklahoma City Public School districts are counting on millions in stimulus dollars to turn their schools around.
Most Ottawa-area school boards performed above the provincial average in reading and writing, according to results released Thursday by Ontario's testing authority.
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The LeMill Web Community site is available for sharing online learning resources. The site is viewable in nine languages; to orient to what is offered take the Tour and consult the FAQ. Thanks to the Development Gateway for information about this site. ___JH
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"LeMill is a web community for finding, authoring and sharing learning resources. First at all, you can find learning resources. You can use the resources you find in your own teaching or learning. You can also add your own learning content to LeMill. You may edit your content and combine larger chunks of learning resources from individual media pieces. If you wish you may also join some of the groups producing or editing learning resources. In LeMill the content is always easily found where and whenever you need them."
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A teacher's legal bid to get copies of the standardized tests for Cincinnati public school freshmen has flunked.
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This guideline information was cited in Open Access News. These tools will be useful to students and instructors in both science and technology. ____JH
"ResourceShelf has put together A Quick Look at a Few Free Science Search Tools. Among the tools and resources it covers are BioMed Central, CiteSeer, DOAJ, Global Science Gateway, Google Scholar, Highwire Press, Microsoft Live Search Academic, National Science Digital Library, OAIster, PubMed Central, Science.gov, Scirus, and Scitopia." [Open Access News]
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Big dreams and no money. Such is the situation colleges, universities, and the students who attend them are struggling with. The schools want to teach students to think outside the box, to be able to look ahead and improve the future of humanity. The students want to learn how to think wider and deeper and bigger and more. The President wants the schools to kick some researching butt and find ways to get us out of this mess (pick one).
Too bad there’s a global economic crisis, and the recession our country is experiencing is sucking the life and the funding out of everyone’s Big Dreams balloons. Now the schools and the students are walking around carrying sad little limp and deflated aspirations, jettisoning the deeper-thinking, big-picture courses and degrees for the more utilitarian/practical ones.
I won’t bore you with numbers, but there are an astonishing number of folks doing pre-professional undergrad work, and a ridiculous number of business degree holders in this country. I think we’re good on the ‘future of money’ front; someone learn something that’s helpful in a different way. Think outside the box, people. Don’t give up on the idea that knowing how to think in non-linear directions is conducive to the survival of mankind.
Read this piece in the NY Times:
The world economic crisis and the election of Barack Obama will change the future of higher education. Even as universities, both public and private, face unanticipated financial constraints, the president has called on them to assist in solving problems from health care delivery to climate change to economic recovery.
American universities have long struggled to meet almost irreconcilable demands: to be practical as well as transcendent; to assist immediate national needs and to pursue knowledge for its own sake; to both add value and question values. And in the past decade and a half, such conflicting and unbounded expectations have yielded a wave of criticism on issues ranging from the cost of college to universities’ intellectual quality to their supposed decline into unthinking political correctness. More…
Posted by Alexa Harrington
The University of Wisconsin Oshkosh received a second federal National Science Foundation grant to help prepare highly qualified and much-needed science and math teachers for the region.
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The State Board of Education September 16th approved enhancements to Florida's high school grading formula during a meeting in Miami.
This promising new weblog by Zaid Ali Alsagoff is devoted to open learning resources around the world; Zaid is located in Malaysia. His blog is especially valuable for its extensive listing of links to bloggers who write about eLearning and its multiple links to Learning Tools, eLearning sites, OpenCourseWare sites, University Podcasts, and Learning Repositories. Zaid is currently at work on a book about effective learning and teaching that is scheduled for release in June 2008. ____ JH
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Not surprisingly, budget cuts really piss people off. Mark Yudof, President of the University of California, is the current target for those protesting budget cuts in the UC system. He’s president of all ten UC schools, but lives in Berkeley as he also holds a faculty appointment at UC Berkeley’s School of Law.
I’m a California native, and I know two things to be true about UC Berkeley: (1) no one calls the school UC Berkeley or UCB, it’s Cal or it’s Berkeley; and (2) of all the UC schools, the one most likely to protest anything is and always has been, Berkeley.
I realize that Berkeley has the best intellectual reputation of the group, but if I were in Yudof’s position, I would have chosen to park my life near one of the more beautiful and less angry UC campuses. Los Angeles, San Diego and Santa Barbara are gorgeous, smart, and a lot less likely to yell at you or make your life a living hell.
Also, I would have thought twice about accepting the $824,000 annual salary, especially if my hiring date (March 2008) happened to be within a few months of the first wave of budget cuts hitting the fan. I’m sure that being in charge of an entire university system in the State of California right when the recession is sucking the State down the toilet is a hard damn job. But have a soul for crying out loud. Or at least pretend to be vaguely human on the inside and quit laying people off and forcing retirement while bringing home enough cash to pay the salaries of at least sixteen staff.
Exploding cars is a terrible plan, and I do not commend violent protesting in any way, shape or form. Everyone watching will just think that your cause is pointless and that your group consists of infantile ***holes, and you will only bring the wrath of the police force down upon your heads.
So, protestors, use your smart-ass, Berkeley-educated noggins to come up with a better way to tell Yudof he’s screwing up. As for President Yudof, stop being an inhuman schmuck and if you can’t figure out a way to avoid tightening UC’s belts so horrendously, then take a damn pay cut so people will stop focusing their anger on you and your wife.
Further Reading:
UC Regents Appoint a New President for the 10-Campus System
Mark Yudof—The First 100 Days
Higher Ed Budget Cuts in California and Washington
Car Torched Outside UC President’s Home
Posted by Alexa Harrington
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One in 10 school children are failing to meet minimum standards for reading, writing and numeracy, according to the 2009 National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy report.
Simplify the high-tech messaging portion of your super busy life. If you’ve got messages coming in and going out from several directions all at once, it’s likely you’ll end up scattered and cranky. Or you’ll chuck all messaging devices and end up living on the perfect island I’ve already set aside for my own future use.
Back off my island, chucklehead, and please try Sendible. Here’s what their site promises to deliver:
Schedule email, sms and social network messages ahead of time
Access all your email and social network contacts from one place
Remind yourself and others of upcoming tasks and events
Post status updates to your blogging and social network accounts
Posted by Alexa Harrington
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Science students and instructors will want to put this web address in their bookmarks because WWS provides a federated search of science sites around the world. By combining WWS with Scirus--plus a discipline-specific search and a general search in Google--a searcher will have made a serious first-pass at finding information. ____JH (Via the Development Gateway's E-Learning distribution.)
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"WorldWideScience.org is a global science gateway—accelerating scientific discovery and progress through a multilateral partnership to enable federated searching of national and international scientific databases. Subsequent versions of WorldWideScience.org will offer access to additional sources as well as enhanced features"
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The American Council for Education maintains a useful set of pages for academics who work with adult learners. Included at the ACE site is information about Military Evaluation Programs, Government Relations, and Public Policy. (Of course not very many years ago, most students involved in distance education were included in the "adult learner" category, but today distance education is appealing to more and more younger students.) ___JH
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"For more than 60 years, ACE has helped adults gain access to a postsecondary education. We invite you to find out more about our programs and services."
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Some of the state-mandated Regents tests have been dumbed down in the past eight years, experts say, and many students' SAT scores leave them unprepared for college.
Fourth graders raise their hands to answer a question posed by teacher Cheryl Mackie on March 26 while studying for the LEAP test at Westwego Elementary.
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Every August, right before the new freshman class shows up for Fall Term, Beloit College publishes the Mindset List for that year’s incoming class. This year, the incoming freshmen who make up the class of 2013 were all born in (or near) 1991.
In 1991 I was a junior in high school, and everything new thing that was occurring in the world and was blowing my little mind, they have never not known to be true. Computers were personal and were neither portable nor laptop sized, and the 1991 version of cell phones were transportable and were bigger than your head. Below please find the first portion of the Mindset List for the Class of 2013:
1. For these students, Martha Graham, Pan American Airways, Michael Landon, Dr. Seuss, Miles Davis, The Dallas Times Herald, Gene Roddenberry, and Freddie Mercury have always been dead.
2. Dan Rostenkowski, Jack Kevorkian, and Mike Tyson have always been felons.
3. The Green Giant has always been Shrek, not the big guy picking vegetables.
4. They have never used a card catalog to find a book.
5. Margaret Thatcher has always been a former prime minister.
6. Salsa has always outsold ketchup.
7. Earvin “Magic” Johnson has always been HIV-positive.
8. Tattoos have always been very chic and highly visible.
9. They have been preparing for the arrival of HDTV all their lives.
10. Rap music has always been main stream.
11. Chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream has always been a flavor choice.
12. Someone has always been building something taller than the Willis (née Sears) Tower in Chicago.
13. The KGB has never officially existed.
14. Text has always been hyper.
15. They never saw the “Scud Stud” (but there have always been electromagnetic stud finders.)
16. Babies have always had a Social Security Number.
17. They have never had to “shake down” an oral thermometer.
18. Bungee jumping has always been socially acceptable.
19. They have never understood the meaning of R.S.V.P.
20. American students have always lived anxiously with high-stakes educational testing.
21. Except for the present incumbent, the President has never inhaled.
22. State abbreviations in addresses have never had periods.
23. The European Union has always existed.
24. McDonald’s has always been serving Happy Meals in China.
25. Condoms have always been advertised on television.
26. Cable television systems have always offered telephone service and vice versa.
27. Christopher Columbus has always been getting a bad rap.
28. The American health care system has always been in critical condition.
29. Bobby Cox has always managed the Atlanta Braves.
30. Desperate smokers have always been able to turn to Nicoderm skin patches.
31. There has always been a Cartoon Network.
32. The nation’s key economic indicator has always been the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
33. Their folks could always reach for a Zoloft.
34. They have always been able to read books on an electronic screen.
35. Women have always outnumbered men in college. More…
Posted by Alexa Harrington
"Both companies appealed the parts of the case they'd lost to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which has nationwide jurisdiction over U.S. patent claims. Its highly technical decision upheld the lower court's conclusion that Blackboard's claims 1-35 were invalid. But the three-judge panel rejected the lower court's finding that Blackboard's patented learning system had originated the approach of giving a single user with a single log-in multiple roles, such as being a teacher in one course and a student in another."
"The appeals panel embraced Desire2Learn's argument that such technology existed in 'prior art,' in this case previously existing course management systems such as Serf and CourseInfo 1.5. The appeals court essentially ruled that the lower court judge had framed Blackboard's claim incorrectly for the jury, said Bruce T. Wieder, a lawyer for the Washington firm of Dow Lohnes who was not involved in the case. Having done so, the Federal Circuit court "could have said, 'This is how you should have interpreted it, you go look at it again,' " Wieder said. "But instead, the court said, 'Since we've seen what was argued, we now can say that the district court wouldn't have come to any conclusion,' and declared those claims invalid."
George Provine, 6 , brothers Lance, almost 4, and Miles, 17 months, and mother, Suzy, look at a salamander George caught in Patapsco State Park.
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After saving for 18 years, my parents had my college money saved up and ready to mete out for strictly education items only. And still, the first semester’s worth of tuition, dorm costs, and meal cards were a bit of a punch in the abdominal region for all three of us. Oof.
And then came the necessary accoutrements: computer, extra long sheets, phone, textbooks, school supplies, etc. That shopping expedition, which was the absolute bare-bones minimum, I assure you, gave us vomitous feelings. My entire childhood had been strictly budgeted just so my college education would be covered. None of us were used to just laying down thousands of dollars for anything that didn’t fall into the Life or Death category.
It’s easy to fall prey to the Everyone else has a pink furry lamp so I have to have one too! mantra, but try to avoid it.
Loft Bed: It Depends
If you’ve managed to keep the buying under control, then, no, you won’t need a gigantic wooden behemoth that you’ll have to disassemble and try to get rid of nine months from now.
If you brought along enough extra furniture and plastic crap to fill an apartment and are shocked to discover you will be calling upon your Tetris skills to cram it all into half of a tiny square room, then yes, you will be needing a loft bed. Since everyone regrets investing in a loft bed within a few months of buying and building one, you can probably find one cheap on Craigslist.
Dorm-Room Phone: No
Everyone under the age of sixty has a cell phone, so paying for a land line in your room is dumb. It’s also risky if your dorm has big loud parties with all doors open along the hall. There’s always some guy or girl who misses their ex (who is spending the year abroad in outer Mongolia), and feels it is absolutely imperative that they drunk-dial said ex, beg to get back together, and then pass out with the phone off the hook while outer-Mongolia ex is ranting and raving about what a jack-ass the drunk half of the ended relationship is. You will be paying for this
Desk Lamp: Yes
If a lamp doesn’t come standard with the room, get one. Otherwise you’ll be studying by fluorescent ceiling lighting, which will hum and flicker and will foster violent tendencies around two a.m.
Laptop: Yes
This does not require explaining.
Printer: No
It’ll take up too much space, and the ink cartridges suck to replace, and they will always[italics] run out ten minutes before a paper is due. Learn to use and love the campus computer labs and the people who work there (use the lab, love the people). You can print stuff out there, and if anything goes haywire (and it will), the Gods of the Computer Lab will be able to help you. This will not be the case if you are crying about a term-paper meltdown in your dorm room.
New Textbooks: It Depends
See previous post.
Linens: Yes
A towel (two if your school is near a beachy area), a washcloth, comforter, and one set of sheets. Make sure the sheets are the right size. For some reason, even though only a non-majority percentage of students at any given college are over six feet tall, they make all dorm beds extra long. Which means that for probably only one year, all American college freshmen have to buy (and then never ever use again) extra long twin bed sheets. Asinine.
Dorm Fridge: Maybe
Only if you or your roommate either can’t share or have a difficult time reading labels or remembering which shelf belongs to whom.
Microwave: No
99% of the other dormies will have one, and if you’re wanting to “cook” anything stinky and offensive, most dorms have a kitchen. Even the lamest and grungiest versions will come equipped with a microwave.
Shower Shoes: Yes
Because dorm hook-ups are way less hot when all involved parties have foot fungus.
Bucket-Thingy to Carry Bathroom Paraphernalia: Yes
It will cost you less than five bucks, and if you don’t bring one, I can guarantee that (a) your room will be the farthest one away from the bathroom, and (b) you will drop your towel in front of a hallway full of people while trying desperately to juggle slippery bottles of shampoo, wet toothbrushes, squishy toothpaste tubes and sharp razors. I don’t care how hot you are, it’s still hard to be sexy while standing there naked, wondering whether squatting or bending over to retrieve the towel and the bathroom items is your best bet.
Running Shoes: Yes
Even if you’d rather walk, forward motion at any speed is the cheapest and best way to get away from your fellow dorm residents for a while and have some time to think and release some stress.
Posted by Alexa Harrington
Last week’s post got me thinking about the kid/achievement/parent dynamic. I may have mentioned, once or twice, my absolute fury toward and lack of goodwill for parents who place volumes of pressure the size of planets onto their kids’ shoulders and tell them repeatedly that only the achievements which can be recorded on paper are worthwhile, and that being anything but the top 5% is as good as failing utterly. I escaped having a mother and a father who put that kind of pressure to out-perform my peers on me, but I did have a few grandparents who made sure I was aware that success was all they were interested in.
As an older and wiser thirty-five-year-old, I’ve had some time to ponder the raising I had, and to figure out which bits made me a better person, and which bits made me wish I’d come from an uneducated, low-pressure family that would have been ecstatic if I’d achieved a high school education and a lifetime of honest work days.
Also, now I’m a parent, and since it’s really better to figure out what your parenting philosophy is prior to raising one’s offspring, I’ve been doing some research. You have a little leeway to screw up, because there’s some time to patch it up later. Plus, it’s difficult to impart much wisdom to a tiny person who crawls everywhere, can’t hold up their end of a conversation, and keeps shoving everything smaller than a tennis ball into their mouth. Keep in mind, though, that the more you mess up when they’re little, the more you’ll be scraping off and re-plastering when they’re older, more angry, and a lot less convincible.
Parents reading this should pay attention, and any kids reading this should make their asinine parentals (whether borderline or solidly inside the dumbass box) read it all the way through. Watch them to be sure they’ve really absorbed it.
As I mentioned in the previous post, I was so ready to escape small-town life and be my own person at college, I practically ran across the graduation stage. Sadly, I was excited for college because not only would I be free, I had also convinced myself that college would be similar to high school in that I would be able to skate by on my (slightly) above-average intelligence and my ability to charm every adult in the room. Studying was never something I had had to do very much of, and since I test well (college teaches you your social security number, and public school teaches you how to kick ass on standardized tests), I figured I’d do just as well in college as I had done for the past thirteen years.
It was not to be. Which sucked while it was happening to me, but is really effing funny to look back on and watch cocky little good-grades, non-student me get taken down a notch or three. Academic probation is a painful life lesson to report to your parents over the winter holidays. Even more painful is your very own parents nodding their heads and telling you, their supposed wonder child, that they had known the first semester would end like this. And down I went, five more notches. Ouch.
To be fair, my parents have really good bull**it detectors, and they probably knew the whole time (my entire pre-college career) that I was getting lots of praise for just being me: a slightly charming, well-read kid with a good vocabulary who tests well. Which is to say that my parents knew good and GD well that I was riding my little wave of glory without doing much to actually earn all that praise. They weren’t even all that impressed with my pile of swim team medals and ribbons until I actually started working my ass off trying to be a better swimmer than I’d started out (which I did for me, not for anyone else, and that also made them proud).
When I grew up a smidge and was able to get a little distance on high school and those early college years, it became clear that my parental units were not the types to slobber all over themselves with praise for anything that I hadn’t actually worked hard at achieving. They didn’t even seem to be impressed by place, names, numbers, or ranking; all it ever took was their witnessing of my literal or figurative sweat, and I’d get the look and the hug and the “You did good, kid.”
And that, people, is good and decent parenting. Loving your kids unconditionally for who they are, not for their scores and grades; seeing through their bull**it; and praising them not for their high placement or numbers, but for the work they did to get from point A to point B; and, most importantly, being content and satisfied with them when they are happy, not when they’re doing triple back-jumps through hoops on no sleep because they’re killing themselves to achieve awesomely high paper numbers so they can be ranked in the top 5% of some ridiculous and cruelly scored game of life.
Here comes the I’m a parent so I know of what I speak and I practice what I preach so listen up pal part: My daughter is seven, and is currently into gymnastics. At the end of the ten-week term, they have a Show Day and the parents come and watch the kids perform the skills they’ve learned, and at the end the kids all receive an identical pretend gold medal (which 99% of the kids believe is real gold).
After all of the parental applauding, my kid ran up to me, eyes shining with fake-gold-medal joy, hugged me violently and said, “Mommy! Aren’t you so proud of me for getting a medal?!” I said, “Nope.” I told her I was super happy for her that she had a medal because it was obvious that having something that cool and shiny was making her euphoric, but that I was proud of her because she had shown up to every class, had always tried her hardest, had worked to get better at her gymnastics skills, and had tried new things, even the stuff that scared the crap out of her.
I could see the little wheels turning in her head, trying to work out what her weird Mom meant. On the one hand it makes things easier on her: all she has to do is try and actually work at stuff. On the other hand, it makes things tougher on her: she’ll actually have to work because I, like my own parents, have a magnificent BS detector, and will know it when she’s riding the wave of charm and innate abilities.
Posted by Alexa Harrington
The LeMill Web Community site is available for sharing online learning resources. The site is viewable in nine languages; to orient to what is offered take the Tour and consult the FAQ. Thanks to the Development Gateway for information about this site. ___JH
_____
"LeMill is a web community for finding, authoring and sharing learning resources. First at all, you can find learning resources. You can use the resources you find in your own teaching or learning. You can also add your own learning content to LeMill. You may edit your content and combine larger chunks of learning resources from individual media pieces. If you wish you may also join some of the groups producing or editing learning resources. In LeMill the content is always easily found where and whenever you need them."
Read more ...
Science students and instructors will want to put this web address in their bookmarks because WWS provides a federated search of science sites around the world. By combining WWS with Scirus--plus a discipline-specific search and a general search in Google--a searcher will have made a serious first-pass at finding information. ____JH (Via the Development Gateway's E-Learning distribution.)
____
"WorldWideScience.org is a global science gateway—accelerating scientific discovery and progress through a multilateral partnership to enable federated searching of national and international scientific databases. Subsequent versions of WorldWideScience.org will offer access to additional sources as well as enhanced features"
Read the rest ...
The EduResources Portal was closed this month. The Portal, which was formerly at http://sage.eou.edu/SPT was shut down by Eastern Oregon University (EOU) when the server could no longer be maintained. Because of financial pressures, the University must focus on "supporting hardware and software that directly contribute to the central mission of the institution."
I began the EduResources Portal in 2003 while completing a sabbatical research project; the Portal was established to provide a starting point for instructors who sought to locate online instructional repositories. When I retired from EOU in June 2004, I continued to maintain the Portal from a distance with the assistance of the Computer Center at EOU. The Portal operated in conjunction with this EduResources Weblog; the Portal provided organized links to sites that contain instructional resources for higher education and the Weblog provided commentary about news related to online instructional resources.
I intend to continue the EduResources Weblog for at least another year. I recommend that users who relied on the EduResources Portal make use of the TLT Group's Collection of Collections to guide their searches for online resources: "Exploration Guide: Collections, Repositories, Referatories of Instructional Resources on the Web."
These four sites collect video lectures on scientific, humanities, government, and business topics by prominent thinkers. I've sampled a number of the talks and found them to be extremely valuable. These sites could be very useful to instructors who want to supply supplementary materials for their courses. _____JH
Read the rest ...
Dr. Yong Zhao, a distinguished professor at the College of Education at Michigan State University and an education expert, says there long has been a misconception nationally that America's educational system competitiveness has fallen behind other countries.
Education is just like any other challenge in life: You get out of it exactly what you put into it.
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Spartanburg Youth Theatre announces fall class schedule for Theatre Education Program SPARTANBURG, S.C. The Spartanburg Youth Theatre will begin the fall session of its Theatre Education Program with an array of classes starting the week of September 14.
Should be interesting to see what emerges from this new funding direction by the MacArthur Foundation. ____JH
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"Awards will be made in the two categories of Innovation and Knowledge-Networking. Innovation Awards ($100,000 and $250,000) will support learning pioneers, entrepreneurs, and builders of new digital learning environments for formal and informal learning. Knowledge-Networking Awards ($30,000 base award, to a total of $75,000 if budget warrants) will support communicators in connecting, mobilizing, circulating, or translating new ideas around digital media and learning. Entries to the Competition are due October 15, 2007.
Details and application requirements can be found at www.dmlcompetition.net. If you have comments or questions about the Competition that you would like to share publicly, we would love to hear from you via this Spotlight Blog."
Fall term will be starting soon, whether you’re prepared for the deluge or not. Summer vacation is good for earning money and bonding with peers, but it’s getting toward the portion of summer that would be well spent on getting a few of your higher-education ducks in a row.
Getting one’s organization system planned out and ready to go before the second week of the fall term hits and you’re already in too deep to breathe, let alone dig yourself out, is a prudent move. I’m a sick and twisted little girl, and will sometimes let a deliciously unorganized disaster pile up just so that I can dive in and organize it to perfection later.
I did notice, however, that at the beginning of my college career I tended to hold off on the organizational system streamlining until the term was over. Winter, spring and summer breaks were spent cleaning up the previous term’s mess while muttering to myself that next term I would grow the hell up and keep my academic life in order from day one.
By the time I graduated, I was overly super at keeping schoolwork and papers in line and perfect. It turned out, weirdly enough, that dealing with a chunk of information as it came along was a thousand times faster than shoving it into my “Deal With” folder and having to dig through said folder after the term was over, and wonder (a) what the eff it was, and (b) figure out whether to keep it or toss it, and (c) if it was a keeper, then where would I be keeping it?
Arjun Muralidharan over at The Productive Student has a three-post series about organization systems for students. If you don’t have your own personal system designed and perfected as of yet, I recommend checking them out (before classes start).
How to Defeat Your Digital Mess Forever
Creating a Simple 26-Piece Filing System
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Posted by Alexa Harrington
After surveying dozens of Homeschooling websites, the majority from a list of the top Homeschooling sites were presented by people who appeared to be notably lacking in credentials pertaining to the field of education.
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I come from a family of intense readers and researchers who are constantly looking crap up in books. They love and worship the printed word and have a difficult time fathoming why anyone would want to part with a book. When my grandfather retired and was breaking down his lab, he parked in a clearly marked No Parking zone (he lived by his own set of rules), stole a lab cart labeled in large letters with the angry phrasing: Lab Use Only! Do Not Remove!
He took me to his office, commanded me to climb up on his desk and read out to him the titles of every one of his reference texts. Some he had had since the 1930s, when he was a student, and some he had acquired over years of teaching and research. He’d kept everything he deemed useful and “not full of sh*t.” He left the less than brilliant volumes for other researchers, and gifted me with a few dozen gorgeous reference texts and old textbooks. I still have them, and they have their own beautiful book shelf (I do not allow them to mingle with novels, no matter how high the literature content).
I have an abundance of higher education under my belt, and the stacks of textbooks to go along with all that learning. If I kept every book, we’d all be killed under piles of books the next time Seattle has an earthquake. I’m perhaps a little more reasonable than my family, and can be fairly harsh when weeding out unnecessary objects from my home. Any book I have never opened as a reference past the term I read it as a required text gets donated to the nearest college or university.
I bought all new textbooks as a freshman because it was all so new and I felt that every moment had to be crisp and perfect in the fall light. After the first year of school, I only bought new books if they were fully related to my major, and I was certain I would be using them as references later on down the line. Everything else I bought used and then sold back or donated. You don’t need new textbooks unless you plan on keeping them as part of your permanent library.
If it will help you to decide, you can stand there in the bookstore and hold the pile of this term’s books straight out in front of you. It will weigh a lot and it will start to hurt pretty quickly. Think about how many times you will move between the ages of eighteen, when you’re a freshman, and thirty, when you’re ready to buy a house and settle down. Between my freshman year and when I moved into my current house at the age of 26, I moved 14 times. Only rocks and weights are heavier than books, people.
If a required book is something you feel sure you won’t ever need to crack again once this term is over, then you might want to consider renting your books or going with the digital textbook wave of the future.
Posted by Alexa Harrington
