"Online Learning, Teaching, and Research in the New Media Ecology"
November 9-11, 2011
Walt Disney World Swan & Dolphin Resort
Lake Buena Vista, FL
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Friday, October 14, 2011
CHEA 2012 Annual Conference
Council for Higher
Education Accreditation
One Dupont Circle NW
Suite 510
Washington, DC 20036
(tel) 202-955-6126
(fax) 202-955-6129
chea@chea.org
The early-bird registration deadline for the CHEA 2012 Annual Conference and the International Seminar is fast approaching. Register by November 1 to take advantage of this special rate.
Newly confirmed speakers at the conference and seminar include:
• Carolyn Campbell, Head of International Affairs, The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (UK)
• Mark Darby, Education Counselor, The Embassy of Australia
• Barbara Brittingham, President/Director of the Commission on Institutions of Higher Education, New England Association of Schools and Colleges
• Ralph Wolff, President and Executive Director, Western Association of Schools and Colleges, Accrediting Commission for Senior Colleges and Universities
• Penny Lee, Managing Director, Coalition for Educational Success
• Joseph Vibert, Executive Director, Association of Specialized and Professional Accreditors
• Paidraig Walsh, Chief Executive Officer, Irish Universities Quality Board
The Preliminary Program found on the CHEA Website includes session times and descriptions, as well as a conference registration form and hotel reservation information.
Register now and receive the early-bird registration rate. We look forward to seeing you in Washington in January!
A national advocate and institutional voice for self-regulation of academic quality through accreditation, CHEA is an association of 3,000 degree-granting colleges and universities and recognizes 60 institutional and programmatic accrediting organizations.
University Business: National Group To Scrutinize University of Louisiana System's Policies For Eliminating Courses And Sacking Tenured Faculty
In a letter Friday to system President Randy Moffett, Jordan Kurland, the organization's associate general secretary, said the association is worried about dozens of programs scheduled for elimination and policy changes that, he said, would allow dismissal of tenured faculty members with only a month's notice.
In Moffett's reply, he said the association's concerns "are based on misinformed assumptions about UL System policies and practices."
Moffett said the programs Kurland cited had been ordered shut down or consolidated because enrollments were too low to justify continuing them.
The Times-Picayune
20 Ways Colleges Should Be Using Quora
MORE
Inside Spelman: Getting Experience Through Internships
It is no secret; the nation faces a staggering unemployment rate – 9.1 percent in general and 16.7 percent specifically for Blacks according to the Department of Labor. That is not good news for the job-seeking college graduate. But, while the job market is tough, there are plenty of opportunities for the well-prepared and educated who enter the market.
Whether a student decides to pursue a career or an advanced degree after undergraduate studies, she must understand that college is a twofold journey. Those who simply get the education miss out on connections that move them from scholar to selected professional. For students who capitalize on internships, co-ops or speak a foreign language, the harvest is plentiful.
“I would encourage students to find meaningful internships during the school year and the summer,” said J. Veronica Biggins, C’68, managing director of Diversified Search, one of the nation’s top 10 executive search firms. “Internships expose people immediately to what you can do. If you do a great job as an intern, and do a lot more than is required of you as an intern, it will really set you apart.”
Setting yourself apart
Shevika Mitchell, C’2013, saw that Spelman College’s Office of Career Planning and Development sent out a lot of internships, but none of them seem to be for first-year students and sophomores. “I was enrolled in the FRESH program and when I told Ms. Toni Ireland, C’77, there were not a lot of opportunities for freshmen, she advised me to attend one of their career fairs to make my face known,” said Mitchell, a psychology major who was born in Guyana and raised in the Virgin Islands. “A few weeks after the career fair, I got an e-mail from the U.S. Department of Interior for their Career Discovery Internship Program.”
Mitchell spent her summer working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge on Assateague Island in Virginia. The internship included all expenses plus a salary. Calling it her “most amazing summer ever,” Mitchell’s responsibilities involved public speaking about the environment and endangered species; and creating brochures and newsletters.
Touted as the best public speaker who ever interned at the department, Mitchell was hired after her internship to become a U.S. Department of Interior ambassador. Her job is to inform her classmates and Atlanta University Center students in general about the opportunities the department has to offer to all majors.
Get in the game
“These are the premier internship opportunities that are offered through our services,” said Harold Bell, Spelman’s director of Career Planning and Development. “It is important that our students get in the game to get these offers. We can get them on the interview schedule.”
Bell said students should begin their preparation for a career as early as their first year, so they can be train in the mock interviews and get their faces known to recruiters. At the Sept. 28 AUC Career Fair, there were more than 140 companies recruiting interns of all majors. “Whether they seek a career or go to graduate school, these are premier opportunities that add value to the resume at the end of matriculation.”
With the market in its tumultuous state, it is to the advantage of every student to capitalize on the resources available to make her a top candidate for a profession or graduate school. “Life is not a dress rehearsal; every minute counts,” said Biggins, who ran her own executive and board search firm, Hodge Partners, before it merge with Diversified Search in June. “So, in this tough market, students should stay focused; do well in the courses they are taking; think carefully about those courses; and get an internship to show on your resume you’ve had meaningful experience.” – Renita Mathis is director of Interactive Communications for the Office of Communications.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Academic Impressions Webinar: USING SOCIAL MEDIA FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING
Social media tools, such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, are changing the way students and faculty communicate, share ideas, and build networks. The interest in social media is increasing, and the educational community is looking to harness the potential of these resources to improve teaching and learning while also being mindful of privacy concerns. The Center for Teaching and Learning will host a group viewing of this live web conference produced by Academic Impressions, which will showcase effective uses of social media in student learning. The session will describe ways to use social media to create experiential learning activities, improve student interactivity and engagement, and develop community and professional networks.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
USA Today: Digital library aims to expand kids' media literacy
By Greg Toppo
CHICAGO - On the ground floor of the city's main library, an odd experiment is taking place, one that could determine what your neighborhood library looks like in 10 years.
It goes like this: Take a very large room and fill it with the latest digital media - laptop computers, music keyboards, recording equipment, video cameras and gaming consoles. Invite teenagers. Apply a little pressure, pushing them both to consume and produce media. Watch what happens.
Once a storage room at the Harold Washington Library Center, the high-ceiling, 5,500-square-foot space, dubbed "YOUmedia - a Digital Library Space for Teens," has become a magnet for young people citywide, so popular and influential that the library plans to replicate it citywide.
The original space, sitting in the shadow of the downtown Loop, sees a steady stream of visiting librarians, educators and scholars.
"When people see it they're completely gobsmacked," says Mary Dempsey, library commissioner.
Funded in part by the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the project sprang from research on how digital media affect kids' literacy. Simply put, it's changing the requirements.
"We are in one of these rare moments in time where what it means to be literate today, what it meant for us, is going to be different from what it means to be literate for our kids," says DePaul University's Nichole Pinkard, who first envisioned the space. Just as schools have always pushed teens to read critically and pick apart authors' arguments, she says, educators must now teach kids how to consume media critically and, ideally, to produce it.
"It's really a shift from thinking of a library as a repository to a community center, a place where things actually happen," says Taylor Bayless, 27, a librarian and one of the center's mentors.
YOUmedia owes much of its basic ideology to Mizuko Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California-Irvine who in 2006 studied how teens use "new media." After three years, her team concluded that most kids shift between three stages of consumption and creation, informally dubbed "hanging out," "messing around" and "geeking out."
In the first stage, teens are mostly text-messaging or instant-messaging friends and haunting sites such as Facebook - what the researchers call a "lightweight means" of maintaining friendships. "Messing around" begins when teens take an interest in media itself: composing music, editing photos or shooting video, driven more by interests than a desire to be with friends.
"Geeking out" involves using new media in an "intense, autonomous and interest-driven way" that often leaves friends in the dust as teens seek out experts for help.
YOUmedia is laid out to accommodate all three stages. Drew Davidson of Carnegie Mellon University notes that he and colleagues designed it with the "hanging out" space by the front door. But even kids who stay put there absorb what's happening in the other two.
"If you're just 'hanging out,' your awareness of the possibilities of the things you could do just gets raised," he says.
On a recent afternoon, most patrons were comfortably "hanging out." Two girls in a beanbag chair shared a MacBook they had checked out at the front desk, tweaking their Facebook statuses; a dozen boys egged each other on as two button-mashers played the video game Infamous.
Nearby, Bayless sat with a group of boys, helping them plan a taping of their weekly podcast about video games. They were somewhere on the border of stages two and three, "messing around" but approaching geek stage. One of the three was trying to get Bayless to think about how the game Bioshock owed its philosophy to the novels of Ayn Rand. Clearly geeking out.
A few feet away, another boy repeatedly played a fragment of percussive digital music, shaving off microseconds as he struggled to fit it into a larger composition.
One thing you quickly notice: It's loud. Gone are the students studying quietly among the stacks. While bookshelves occupy a large central space, the sounds of music, video games and conversation are everywhere.
Poet and lead mentor Mike Hawkins says, "It's a constructive loud."
Raymond Abercrombie, 17, stumbled upon YOUmedia two years ago while looking for "some random book" for a college-prep class.
Ten minutes into his first visit, he met Hawkins, widely known as "Brother Mike" - the name comes from his days on the city's poetry scene - who introduced him to performance poetry. Soon Abercrombie was geeking out in what he calls "the nerd space," discussing poetry.
Then he was performing his own poetry and music. He now shows up seven days a week, and you'll find him most afternoons "either making music or discussing music."
Ito, the anthropologist, considers the project "amazing on a lot of levels."
Ito says the secret of YOUmedia's success is that it's based not on what adults think students should be doing, but on "what kids actually do and how they engage" with media and one another.
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