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Thursday, February 10, 2011

Searchable Data File From FEMA: Collection of Photos From Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Rita, and Other Storms


February 7, 2011 23:10

From a NARAtions Blog Post (National Archives and Records Administration

The photographs [are] from the Public Affairs Division of the Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] are now available online.

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall along the Gulf Coast of the United States, displacing thousands of residents and causing billions of dollars in damage. Less than a month later Hurricane Rita.

Pictures from these storms and others are captured in over 8,000 photographs from the series “Photographs Relating to Disasters and Emergency Management Programs, Activities, and Officials, 1998-9/30/2008.”

To Search Photographs Use the Following URL to Access the Collection via NARA’s Online Public Access:
http://research.archives.gov/search?v%3Aproject=opa&query=626166

You may browse the photographs by clicking the link that reads “View all Online Holdings” in the top right corner of the search results. To refine your search, add key words to the search box at the top of the page.
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Jossey-Bass Series One: The Essentials: For Department Chairs in Their First Term (One to Three Years)


Series One: The Essentials: For Department Chairs in Their First Term (One to Three Years) is the most practical event you’ll attend all year! In addition to networking and learning online with colleagues from around the globe, you will also receive:
•Access to all live online sessions of The Essentials: For Department Chairs in Their First Term (One to Three Years)
•On-demand access to recordings of all sessions for six months after the conference
•Bonus recording: "Higher Education Law and Difficult Faculty Members,” a podcast by Barbara Lee, Professor of Human Resource Management at Rutgers University, Legal Counsel for Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge, LLP, and co-author of The Law of Higher Education, 4th edition (Jossey-Bass, 2006)
•Valuable resource: A copy of Don Chu’s The Department Chair Primer: Leading and Managing Academic Departments (a $29 value–free shipping included, too!)

Dates

March 10, 2011: The Most Important Things You Need to Know (and Do) as a Department Chair

March 24, 2011: A Quick and Practical Guide to Managing Your Time and Stress?

April 7, 2011: Best Practices in Effective Communication and Conflict Management

April 21, 2011: What Department Chairs Can Do to Foster Excellent Teaching

May 5, 2011: Best Practices in Budgeting, Resource Management, and Planning for Results

All sessions last 90 minutes and begin at 10:30 am (Central Time) in the DLC Room 2nd Floor of the DU Library. Reminders will be sent at least 2 days before each session.
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Online Classroom: How to Engage Students with Interactive Online Lectures


Originally Broadcast: 01/20/11
Program Length: 75 minutes
CD Price: $259

Featured Higher Education Presenter: John Orlando, Ph.D.


At its best, the discussion board can be the heart and soul of the online classroom. But it’s not always easy getting students to make the type of contributions you expect. The comments can be rather flat, not very insightful, and more often than not, it feels like some students just fill the minimum number of posts stipulated in your syllabus.
But a funny thing happened in John Orlando’s courses when he started using VoiceThread–students began posting more than what was required, and they were far more engaged. In addition, he says, students reported that they enjoyed sharing their thoughts on what they were learning.

A VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos. It allows users to navigate slides and leave comments in five ways - using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video. Typically, the instructor loads his or her narrative slides and students can then add their comments at any point within the lecture.

In the recent online seminar How to Engage Students with Interactive Online Lectures, Orlando, instructional resource manager at the Norwich University School of Graduate Studies, provided examples of VoiceThreads, and explained how to create one for your course.

According to Orlando, the advantages of using VoiceThread for your online discussions include:
•Student driven discussion: Discussion originates from the students themselves, and thus students tend to bring more of themselves into the conversation. Discussion is freer and more open, touching on a wider variety of issues.
•A growing lecture: Discussion in a traditional online forum never leaves the classroom. The class is archived and discussion forums are wiped clean for the next group, meaning that the insights are lost. But because discussion in VoiceThread is attached to the lecture itself, which can then be used for the next class, students are adding to the lecture, which grows from class to class. Students contribute to an ongoing conversation with future classes.
•Improved social presence: Students find that the ability to see and hear their instructor and classmates improves the sense of social presence of others in the classroom.
•Better understanding of nuance: Students are better able to understand the nuances of discussion when they can hear the tone in someone’s voice.
•Student projects: VoiceThread is a great way for students to deliver projects and solicit feedback from others.
The seminar also included a demonstration of VideoAnt, which allows users to make text-based annotations to online videos, and advice on how to use digital storytelling to help personalize the learning experience.

Excellent value
The price for this CD is a modest $259–good news for tight budgets. And here’s even better news: You can invite colleagues from throughout your department or across campus to view the seminar, and it won’t cost a penny more; just project the CD in a facility large enough to accommodate your group. It’s a remarkably affordable professional development opportunity.

Who will benefit from this seminar
•Faculty members
•Department chairs
•Instructional technologists
•Adjunct instructors
•Distance learning staff
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Campus Technology: Location Aware: University of Kentucky Mobilizes Social Recruiting


The University of Kentucky is ditching some of its traditional media and turning instead to social networking tools like Facebook Places and online outlets like Pandora to build awareness among prospective students.

By Bridget McCrea02/09/11
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Dillard University Center for Teaching, Learning, and Academic Technology: Faculty Learning Communities Workshop


When: Thursday, February 17, 2011
Where: Kearny West
Time: 11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

Coordinators:
Dr. Phyllis W. Dawkins
Dr. Bernard Singleton

Lunch will be provided through the line.
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The Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration: The Context of Distance Learning Programs in Higher Education: Five Enabling Assumptions


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Dillard University Center for Teaching, Learning, and Academic Technology Presents: Active Learning Strategies Across the Disciplines


Classroom strategies that will get you engaged for all students in all majors!

Coordinators: Drs. Eartha Johnson and Eric Buckles

When: Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Where: Kearny West
Time: 11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

Lunch will be provided through the line
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Inside Higher Ed: Questioning the 'Citation Advantage'


February 10, 2011

What if everything you knew about the incentives for publishing in an open-access journal was wrong?

That is the provocative idea put forward in a new working paper by two scholars of scholarly publishing: Mark McCabe, an adjunct professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, and Christopher Snyder, an economics professor at Dartmouth College.

The pair contend that, contrary to many previous studies, articles published in open-access journals may not be any more likely to be cited than those published in journals that limit access to subscribers. “The current lack of evidence that free online access performs better, implies that the citation benefits of open-access publishing have been exaggerated by its proponents,” they write.

At least one academic blogger has pointed to McCabe and Snyder's work as legitimate cause to doubt previous findings about the "citation advantage" of open-access publishing. Others claim that the study presents no evidence against those findings, and that the authors are being unduly cavalier.

And around we go. Certainly, disagreements among scholars are nothing new. But the stakes in this case are potentially high for the open-access publishing movement, since the paper calls into question the main incentive for scholars to publish their research in open-access journals. If scholars buy McCabe and Snyder’s logic, advocates of open-access publishing could face an even greater challenge in changing the habits of academic researchers.

Their task is already daunting. In a report released last spring, the research nonprofit Ithaka S+R found that among faculty deciding where to publish their research, relatively few put a high priority on making their articles freely available -- fewer, even, than in 2003. In addition, a high percentage of faculty authors said they did not like paying high fees in exchange for a journal publishing their research, whereas many open-access journals charge authors relatively steep publication fees to support themselves in lieu of selling access to readers.

To combat these deterrents, open-access advocates tend to play up the perennial No. 1 priority for scholars shopping their papers: visibility among their peers in their field. Publish in an open-access venue, they say, and more people will read -- and cite -- your article.

This argument has benefited from a preponderance of studies suggesting that openly accessible articles get cited more frequently than do articles that are published behind a pay wall. Most studies have suggested that open articles increased the likelihood of citation by several hundred percent -- a phenomenon known as the “citation advantage.” In a profession where job security often depends on churning out influential papers, scholars might think it worthwhile to pony up (or persuade their benefactors to pony up) for higher publication fees if it means doubling or tripling one’s citation count.

McCabe and Snyder say their research implies that the citation advantage is, in fact, much weaker than the current literature would have scholars believe.

Their study focused on 260,000 articles published in 100 top business and economics journals between 1956 and 2005. McCabe and Snyder conclude that when the proper controls are put in place to isolate the online-versus-offline variable from others that have confounded past studies, the “citation advantage” created by an article’s presence on the Web is essentially zero. (Articles that are archived online in the popular subscription-based journal aggregator JSTOR registered a modest boost in citations of 10 percent.)

While McCabe and Snyder actually studied the effect of economics and business articles being available online as opposed to just in print -- not the effect of articles being online and free -- they nevertheless believe that their findings cast doubt on the supposed citation advantage of open-access articles, because, they contend, their study measures whether ease of access affects citation volume.

Stevan Harnad, a cognitive scientist at the Université du Québec à Montréal and a scholar of open-access publishing, isn’t buying the connection. Ease of access and open access are related too tangentially to justify transposing conclusions about one onto the other, he says.

McCabe and Snyder’s study addresses the citation advantage in the context of print versus online within the subscription-based journal model; contrary to its provocative assertion about “the lack of evidence that free online access performs better,” their paper does not address the citation advantage of free versus not free, Harnad says, and therefore cannot convincingly refute studies that do.

In an interview with Inside Higher Ed, Snyder defended the extrapolation, arguing that since most scholars who produce significant research work at universities that provide them with free journal access, conflating the effect of online publishing and free online publishing is not unreasonable. But Harnad begged to differ, noting that many university libraries have had to cancel subscriptions even to relatively high-profile journals due to shrinking budgets.

For the latest technology news and opinion from Inside Higher Ed, follow @IHEtech on Twitter.

— Steve Kolowich

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Magna Publications New White Paper: 10 Definitive First-Day Strategies to Engage Students


Like it or not, your students are going to form opinions about you and your course in the first moments of the first day of class.

Do you want your students to perceive you as a competent, efficient expert in the field? Do you also want them to feel adequately prepared for your course and ready to learn the material you plan to present? Do you want to spend the vast majority of class time on instruction and not on taking roll, handing out materials, or collecting assignments? Do you want students to participate respectfully and appropriately? Do you want them to come back every day and arrive on time?

It is entirely possible.

You just have to remember that what you do on the first day determines how much students will learn over the course of the semester (or trimester or quarter) and how they will evaluate you at the end of the term.

To get every course off to its best possible start, Ten Ways to Engage Your Students on the First Day of Class: A Magna Publications White Paper is the place to begin. This report will give you the simple tools and strategies that create and maintain an optimal classroom environment.

Readers will learn about several simple steps and procedures that minimize time spent on classroom management and increase instructional minutes. For example, using an entrance table for disseminating materials and collecting assignments saves time and protects student confidentiality. Strategic introductions provide the information instructors need to take attendance without calling roll. They also help develop a respectful and appropriate classroom culture. Daily routines and exercises encourage students to arrive on time and also generate exam questions and review materials.

This latest addition to our growing white paper library is based on an online seminar presented by Dr. Mary C. Clement. Dr. Clement is a professor of teacher education at Berry College, northwest of Atlanta, Georgia. She teaches graduate courses in curriculum theory, instructional management, and supervision, as well as undergraduate courses in foreign language methods. She is also the director of the college’s Center for Teaching Excellence. Dr. Clement earned her doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is the author of six books.

In Ten Ways to Engage Your Students on the First Day of Class, you will learn strategies that allow Dr. Clement to manage the classroom, increase student success, and improve course evaluations.

This 40-page white paper provides detailed information on:

Preparation for the first day
Classroom management procedures that get students in the door and straight to work
Classroom arrangement and use of entrance tables to facilitate learning
Importance of land tactics for earning names
Focus activities
“Today We Will” roadmaps for each day of class
Introductions to facility civility among students
Interest inventories to gauge class preparedness and individual student goals
Student folders for assignment dissemination and collection
First-day lecture strategies
Beyond-the-first-day lecture approaches
This important resource equips new and experienced instructors with the classroom management tools that they probably did not learn in graduate school but that have a measurable impact on instructional success.

Cost
Price per white paper for quantities up to: 1 2-10 11+
Print $169 $135 $84
PDF Download $149 $119 $74

The Magna Publications White Paper Series is dedicated to helping college professionals confront the most challenging issues at the forefront of higher education practice. We strive to bring readers essential, valuable content on the topics of greatest interest and value to colleges and universities.

Ten Ways to Engage Your Students on the First Day of Class: A Magna Publications White Paper is an essential, informative resource for faculty members, adjunct professors, and other course instructors.

Take control of your classroom, your students’ success, and your course evaluations by setting the tone on the first day of class. Learn how by investing in this solution-filled Magna Publications White Paper today.
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