Wednesday, June 23, 2010
U.S. News and World Report: 4 Reasons Why the Library Should Affect Your College Choice
The library is a home away from home for a lot of students, so get to know what it can do for you.
By Jeff Greer - Posted June 17, 2010
11 Helpful Cheat Sheets for Popular Google Products!
Henry Jones at Web Design Ledger provides 11 Helpful Cheat Sheets for Popular Google Products. Each one of these useful graphics maps out keyboard shortcuts for Google applications including:
• Gmail
• Google Reader
• Google Calculator
• Google Presentations
• Google Chrome
• Google Spreadsheets
• Google Reader
• Google Maps
• Google Documents
• Google Search Advanced Operators
IDEALS: Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
IDEALS collects, disseminates, and provides persistent and reliable access to the research and scholarship of faculty, staff, and students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Faculty, staff, and graduate students can deposit their research and scholarship - unpublished and, in many cases, published - directly into IDEALS. Departments can use IDEALS to distribute their working papers, technical reports, or other research material. Contact Sarah Shreeves, IDEALS Coordinator, for more information.
LIS Research: Library and Information Science Research Coalition Website
The LIS Research Coalition was established on 2 March 2009 by its founding members.
The broad mission of the LIS Research Coalition is to facilitate a co-ordinated and strategic approach to LIS research across the UK. The Coalition aims to bring together information about LIS research opportunities and results; encourage dialogue between research funders; promote LIS practitioner research and the translation of research outcomes into practice; articulate a strategic approach to LIS research; and promote the development of research capacity in LIS. The Coalition will provide a formal structure to improve access to LIS research, and maximise its relevance and impact in the UK.
AIR: Association of Institutional Research Website
About AIR
MISSION: The mission of the Association for Institutional Research is to support quality data and decisions for higher education.
LEADERSHIP: AIR is governed by an 11-member volunteer Board of Directors elected by the membership. Terms are staggered for three years except for the Association Forum Chair whose term is two years.
INCORPORATION: Incorporated in Michigan in 1966 and doing business in Florida since 1974 as a 501(c)(3) Non-profit organization, Federal ID 36-6149972.
MEMBERSHIP: 4,200 members
FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT: $3.8 million
ANNUAL FORUM: AIR sponsors an annual four-day Forum each spring. The Forum brings together approximately 1,500 institutional research professionals to learn the newest methods of institutional research, exchange information and ideas about postsecondary educational institutions, and network with colleagues. The variety and depth of programming for the Forum are wide-ranging covering six tracks. Session formats include individual presentations, panels, and demonstrations. In addition, there are Pre-Forum Workshops offering the opportunity for professionals to acquire skills or develop an area of interest.
OTHER PROFESSIONAL PROGRAMS: AIR, with support from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), offers a National Summer Data Policy Institute as part of the Improving Institutional Research in Postsecondary Educational Institutions Grant Program. Attendance is based upon proposals submitted annually. There are also half- and full-day Pre-Forum Workshops and two to three Professional Development Institutes held during the summer around the country. In addition, AIR, through a grant from NCES, assists groups in coordinating data collecting methods for the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS).
AIR/NCES Postdoctoral Policy Fellows in Washington - A project funded by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Postdoctoral Fellow positions will be responsible for undertaking analysis that results in improvements to the quality, comparability, and usefulness of the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS).
Fellows will be introduced to the Washington higher education policy community through meetings, seminars and conversations. It is expected that Fellows will be advanced graduate students completing dissertations, postdoctoral students, or institutional research professionals.
AIR/NCES Fellowships for Graduate Study: AIR, as part of its contract to improve the quality of institutional research in U.S. postsecondary education systems and hence, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), offers a national graduate fellowship program funded by the NCES.
Specific program goals are to have more people better trained in IR and completing advanced degrees thereby increasing the national level of expertise of institutional research officers and the data that they produce. Fellowships for up to $10,000 annually for up to three years will be competitively awarded for full- or part-time graduate study advancing or leading to careers in institutional research at accredited U.S. universities at the certificate, masters, or doctorate levels.
The proposal deadline is in the spring of each year. Awards will be announced in April.
ELECTRONIC SERVICES:
The Electronic AIR is a free online newsletter distributed monthly to anyone interested in institutional research. E-AIR includes topics of interest, changes in jobs and locations of members, IR employment opportunities, and calls for professional help.
AIR Alerts are Web-based briefings on emerging issues in higher education. Each AIR Alert has a summary of the issue, the status (and potential future developments), implications for IR, a timeline summarizing key historical developments and future deadlines, and resources related to the topic. AIR Alerts are distributed using the Electronic AIR list.
AIR Jobs page: A free Web-based listing of IR jobs across the United States and other countries.
Affiliated Groups: A comprehensive list of state, regional, international, and unified focus groups affiliated with AIR. AIR offers meeting space during the Forum and Web hosting services at no charge to Affiliated Groups.
Randy Swing, Ph.D.
Executive Director
1435 E. Piedmont Drive, Suite 211
Tallahassee, FL 32308
Phone: 850-385-4155 850-385-4155
Fax: 850-385-5180
E-Mail: rswing@airweb.org
Online Classroom: Online Group Work: Making It Meaningful and Manageable
Featured Higher Education Presenter:
Jean Mandernach, Ph.D.
Date: Thursday, 8/12/10
Time: 12:00-1:00 PM Central Daylight Time
Cost: $219($244 after 8/5/10)
Three easy ways to register!
Phone: 800-433-0499 / 608-246-3590
Academically their value is unmatched and employers demand the skills they develop, but many students continue to view group projects as an unnecessary chore. The power to change that attitude is now in your hands.
Online Group Work: Making It Meaningful and Manageable is designed to help instructors navigate the new and exciting world of online group assignments. Group projects of all types require a change in student perception. But unique to online group assignments is a need for customized projects, strong guidance and tools to encourage success.
Teaching students how to collaborate and showing them the best way to expend cognitive energy in a group setting is a key element, and the stakes are high. The work world demands the teamwork and Web 2.0 ability developed through group projects.
You'll learn how to:
• Create dynamic assignments that align with your existing online framework
• Attack and change negative student perception of group projects
• Structure assignments for maximum efficiency
• Increase student satisfaction and engagement
• Take advantage of new Web 2.0 tools
• Implement instructor and peer support systems
• Teach students how to work in groups through more efficient use of cognitive energy
The seminar includes handouts and other supporting materials to guide the implementation process.
Q&A session
Presenter Dr. Jean Mandernach will take questions and facilitate an open dialogue with attendees, including case study and Web 2.0 tool presentations and student centered project discussion.
Learn from the expert
Dr. Jean Madernach is a true innovator in online instruction. Her research and published work focuses on enhancing student learning through new assessment techniques and teaching frameworks. She currently serves as professor of Psychology and Online Learning at Park University.
A key seminar for…
• Faculty
• Course designers
• Instructional technologists
• Online administrators
• And others involved in the online course experience.
Faculty Focus: Helping Faculty to be Engaged and Productive
Academic leaders can have a tremendous effect on faculty satisfaction and productivity. Part of the responsibility of being an academic leader is to provide appropriate guidelines and support to foster faculty productivity throughout their careers, says Susan Robison, a psychology professor at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland.
In an interview with Academic Leader, she offered the following advice on how to support faculty:
• Clearly articulate what it means to be a productive faculty member. Administrators have to solve the “productivity paradox,” embracing the need for clear guidelines without being too rigid. “Rigid criteria can get an institution into trouble because it’s hard to apply the same criteria across the curriculum. What operates in the field of English may not work very well in bioengineering, for example,” Robison says.
• Remind faculty that they are the institution’s most valuable resource. “Emphasize in whatever kind of PR materials they put out regarding faculty that the faculty are the greatest resource for the educational goals of the institution. … Faculty need to be honored and respected for being that resource. Sometimes administrators might presume that and not say it. It needs to be said, and the behaviors need to be matched to the words,” she says.
• Match faculty to the institution. “Job candidates are evaluated based on publications and letters of recommendation. Of course, these are worthy devices to evaluate them, but no one ever asks the candidate, ‘Do you match our culture?’ I think this is an important question in getting new faculty on board who are satisfied and engaged, and to prevent pre-tenured faculty from being denied tenure, prevent midcareer faculty from burning out, and prevent late-career faculty from becoming stale,” Robison says.
• Talk to faculty members about their shifting interests/career priorities. “As we grow in our positions, sometimes our interests change. I would put the responsibility on the chair to create an atmosphere where those kinds of conversations might be comfortable. Usually there’s some sort of annual performance evaluation at most places, either leading up to tenure or to a contract renewal at institutions that don’t have the tenure system. Oftentimes it’s the chair’s responsibility to have those conversations, and I think a good question would be, ‘To what degree are your strengths being utilized by our department, and is there any way we can make better use of your strengths?’ That might be an open-ended way to begin that conversation. It’s going to depend on the communication skills of the chair to be able to field that sort of conversation,” she says.
• Support professional and faculty development. “Depending on the mission and goals of the institution, [professional development] is going to be interpreted differently. A four-year college that emphasizes teaching may fund and support, emotionally as well as fiscally, faculty development to improve teaching, whereas a research institution might support grant-writing workshops and things like that, that fit those institutional priorities,” Robison says.
Excerpted from Helping Faculty to Be Engaged and Productive, Academic Leader, May 2009
Magna Campus Legal Briefing Online Seminar: Are You Setting Distance Ed Expectations in Faculty Contracts Yet?
Video Online Seminar • Wednesday, August 11, 2010 • 1:00 - 2:00 PM CDT
$279 - Register today and save! (Price increases to $304 after 8/04/10)
Nearly all colleges and universities now offer at least some courses in a distance education format. While these delivery methods have expanded rapidly, faculty attitudes towards teaching online have not always kept pace. Older faculty members may be resistant to eLearning, but even newer faculty members may be surprised when they are asked to teach an online course. If your faculty contracts and negotiated agreements do not yet include language covering distance education expectations, here is your opportunity to correct this oversight.To provide clarity for all parties, institutions need to incorporate distance education-specific terms in their collective bargaining agreements and in their institutional policies. In Setting Distance Ed Expectations in Faculty Contracts, experienced educator and attorney Dr. Stephanie Delaney will show participants how to review existing contracts and policies against a detailed checklist and make recommended improvements. This workshop will explain how to avoid misunderstandings, faculty disputes, and hard feelings and ensure that all major distance education issues are covered.
In this Video Online Seminar, you will learn:
• How to identify gaps in contracts and policies
• Where to find common ground between faculty and administration on key issues
• The language other institutions use in actual contracts
• Results of a nationwide study of collective bargaining agreements
• Suggested wording on compensation, intellectual property rights, definitions of distance education, and faculty load
• How to improve clarity by using Policy Analysis Frameworks
• Ways to adapt policies and contracts to your unique institutional culture
• How to prepare for upcoming contract negotiations
• Collective bargaining implications of distance education
Attendees will also have the opportunity to respond to survey questions regarding their college policies and contract terms.
Who should attend:
This seminar is important viewing for distance education administrators and campus legal representatives, including:
• Presidents
• Deans
• Provosts
• Academic Administrators
• Department Chairs
• Campus Legal Affairs
• Vice Presidents of Instruction
• Faculty Union Representatives
• Distance and Online Learning Directors
This seminar is particularly important for institutions facing upcoming contract negotiations.
Cost
The cost to attend this live, 60-minute video online seminar is $279. You may include multiple participants at a single log-in site for no additional charge. When you consider the incidental costs associated with traveling to an off-campus location for similar training (lodging, meals, transportation), this is a considerable value!
Your presenter
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stephaniedelaney
Dr. Stephanie Delaney is an experienced community college educator, an attorney and an author. She is currently the Director of eLearning at Cascadia Community College, where she supports faculty in distance education pedagogy. She has taught law and environment courses for over ten years. She earned her PhD in Educational Leadership in Higher Education/Distance Education at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and she also holds a law degree from the University of San Diego School of Law.
Bring questions
Have a specific question about contract language and distance education expectations at your school? Bring it to this live session for the opportunity to pose it to our expert presenter. If you are concerned about faculty “buy in” regarding distance education programming at your institution, then this Video Online Seminar is for you. Reserve your seat today.
Inside Higher Ed: The Librarian's Crystal Ball - June 23, 2010
Welcome to the future -- or, rather, to a series of many of possible “futures” posted in a new study released this month by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).
The association culled journal articles, blogs, newspapers, conference talks, and the expertise of its staff to develop 26 (not necessarily mutually exclusive) scenarios based on possible developments in higher education over the next 15 years. The association then surveyed 404 of its members to determine which scenarios library specialists thought would have the most impact, were most likely to happen, and were likely to happen most quickly.
The idea was to get some sort of consensus on how the higher education landscape is likely to change in the next decade and a half so that libraries could start figuring out now how to adjust.
The full report, called Futures Thinking For Academic Librarians: Higher Education in 2025, can be found online, but here is a sampling of what its members consider some of the more plausible scenarios:
•Breaking the textbook monopoly: Most states have passed legislation that requires textbook publishers to make textbooks affordable. Faculty members, sympathetic to their students, have embraced online open educational resources (OERs). More faculty create and share openly their course materials, modules, streaming videos, tests, software, and other tools. Although widely accepted seminal OERs exist for introductory courses, faculty create materials for advanced courses based on their own knowledge and interests, inviting student contributions.
•Bridging the scholar/practitioner divide: Open peer review becomes the norm for many fields, speeding application of discoveries. Online publications, by scholarly societies in partnership with trade organizations and professional associations, are open access. They support robust community-based dialogue on articles as soon as they are accepted via traditional editorial procedures. Scholars and practitioners alike discuss the findings, how the theory would apply in practice, and suggest additional research needed.
•Everyone is a "nontraditional" student: The interwoven nature of work/life/school is accepted in higher education as life spans increase and students are unable to fund tuition in one lump. Co-op education is widely embraced and faculty increasingly value students' life experience. Knowing what the work force wants, students are active in designing their own learning outcomes, and the personalized curriculum becomes the norm. Faculty members evaluate students on demonstrations of learning -- such as policy documents, marketing plans, or online tutorials -- rather than old measures based on “seat time” and “credit hours.”
•Meet the new freshman class: With laptops in their hands since the age of 18 months old, students who are privileged socially and economically are completely fluent in digital media. For many others, the digital divide, parental unemployment, and the disruption of moving about during the foreclosure crisis of their formative years means they never became tech savvy. “Remedial” computer and information literacy classes are now de rigueur.
•Right here with me: Students “talk” through homework with their handheld devices, which issue alerts when passing a bookstore with material they need to cite. Scanning the title page, this information is instantly embedded in proper citation style with an added endnote. Checking in on location-based services, students locate study team members and hold impromptu meetings without the need for study rooms. Their devices have whiteboards and can share notes with absent members.
David W. Lewis, dean of the library at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, who has also done extensive research into the future of libraries, has a prediction of his own: the report will not be very useful to libraries planning for the future.“All in all, the report is an interesting effort that I suspect will not be widely used because the scenarios are too abstract and beyond what most academic libraries can control or influence,” Lewis told Inside Higher Ed. A more useful report would have focused more narrowly on the shift from print to electronic collections, and how libraries might consider modifying how they purchase, manage and deliver electronic content, Lewis says, rather than on “broad future trends in the academy.”
The ACRL did recently release another future-oriented document that falls along those lines: the 2010 edition of its perennial list of top ten trends in academic libraries. The items on that list are a tad less sensational, although it did highlight certain themes -- such as the disaggregation of library resources, the rise of mobile technology, and growing pressure on libraries to demonstrate their value in the face of shrinking budgets -- that the “futures” report followed to logical extremes.
— Steve Kolowich
Inside Higher Ed: Coppin Plays Catchup On Retention - June 23, 2010
Embarrassed by poor graduation rate, university plans intensive summer academy for students who need remediation -- and ultimately for all freshmen
Administrators at Coppin State University were hardly surprised when a report published last year showed that the public university in Baltimore had among the lowest graduation rates in the country, with just 19 percent of freshmen who entered in 2002 having earned a bachelor's degree by 2008. "We knew we had a persistence problem," says Reginald G. Ross, the vice president for enrollment management who had been brought to Coppin State in November 2008 in large part to help fix that problem.
But the national visibility in the American Enterprise Institute's "Diplomas and Dropouts" report -- and the local news reports that followed -- stung nonetheless, and gave Coppin State officials additional motivation to address the problem -- and quickly.
This week, Coppin unveiled a fundamental part of its response: a required six-week summer immersion program for 200 of its nearly 600 incoming freshmen, with a focus on those who placement tests showed that they needed remedial work in two or more subjects. In the summer program, which will be expanded next year to include all incoming freshmen, students will not only take a first shot at their remedial course work and college survival classes, but will be engaged from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. in recreational, social and other activities.
Coppin's approach is far from unique; in fact, its officials acknowledge that they are playing catchup in instituting an idea that many of their peer institutions (including other Maryland historically black colleges, such as Morgan State University and the University of Maryland-Eastern Shore) already use.
What's perhaps most noteworthy about Coppin's plan, though, is that it shows an institution acknowledging its shortcomings in a fundamental area of its operation and taking aggressive (and expensive) steps to improve the situation -- in contrast to the easy stereotype of a complacent higher education enterprise.
New Regime at Coppin
Ross and his boss at Coppin State, President Reginald S. Avery, appear to be anything but self-satisfied. Avery came to Coppin in 2008 and, as is common, promptly replaced most of the university's leadership team.
Ross knew he and his colleagues had their work cut out for them in trying to improve student persistence at Coppin. The university's students come disproportionately from West Baltimore's troubled public schools, and many of them enter both financially needy (a full two-thirds are eligible for federal Pell Grants) and academically underprepared (with a median combined score of about 800-900 on the SAT).
Institutional data show that the first-to-second-year retention rate for students at Coppin had steadily fallen to 58 percent in 2007 from 71 percent in 2000.
"When I came on board, I started asking the question, why?" says Ross. But he soon realized, he said, that Coppin "didn't have a lot of time to dwell on the why, because we wanted to move fast to start addressing the problem. We wanted to know what we could put in place for the next cycle of students."
At a meeting with officials from Maryland's other historically black colleges last summer, Coppin administrators learned that the university was alone among them -- and alone in the 11-member University System of Maryland -- in not having any kind of large-scale summer program for students. "Immersion programs have become a 'best practice,' and we weren't doing it," Ross says.
Coppin officials envisioned a program for all first-year students, but given budget constraints, redirected enough money (about $550,000) to enroll about 200 incoming freshmen who place into more than one remedial subject in the first ever Summer Academic Success Academy. (Assuming the money comes through, the program will be expanded to include all freshmen next summer.)
Under the program, which began this month, even students who will not live on campus as full-time students are spending six weeks in full-time immersion at Coppin. In addition to their remedial courses, the students are participating in a mix of study skills classes, social events, physical education and other experiences, to prepare them not only for the rigors of higher education but also "to keep them fully engaged in the learning process," says Ross.
"They need to understand that college requires hard work, so that when they come in [to start classes] at the end of August, they're not stunned by anything that happens to them. But we don't want it to be a boring, horrible experience for them, either."
Mark Schneider, the American Institutes for Research scholar who co-wrote (with Andrew Kelly of the American Enterprise Institute) the "Diplomas and Dropouts" report, says that Coppin "deserves kudos" for responding aggressively to the report's distressing numbers (and the underlying situation the data reflect). "They're clearly trying to rise to the challenge, and I give them credit for that."
Coppin's chosen approach of the summer academy is in line with the "current wisdom" of research on persistence, but the underdeveloped state of that research is such that it's hard to be confident that Coppin's strategy will work, Schneider says. "You're talking about a group of students -- with two courses of developmental ed -- whose chances of finishing [college] are really low," he says.
Ross understands that skepticism -- and recognizes that he and others at Coppin have a lot of work to do. "We're playing catchup to some extent," he says, of the range of measures that the university has put in place in addition to the summer program, including a new advising system. A forthcoming report will show that the year-to-year persistence rate for freshmen rose 4 percentage points in 2008-9 from the year before, and when that report is released this fall, "people might applaud, but I'll be the one standing back in very reserved fashion saying, 'Let's see what it is next year.' "
— Doug Lederman
Washington Monthly's College Rankings - HBCUs fare well
Black Colleges and Universities Fare Well in Washington Monthly’s College Rankings
The magazine Washington Monthly has released its new rankings of liberal arts colleges and universities. The magazine’s rankings are markedly different from those compiled by other ratings organizations, most notably U.S. News & World Report. The editors say that their rankings are “a measure of not just what colleges can do for you, but what colleges are doing for the country.” The editors go on to say that “in our eyes, America’s best colleges are those that work hardest to help economically disadvantaged students, contribute new scientific discoveries, and emphasize the obligations students have to serve their communities.” Thus, factors in the Washington Monthly rankings include the percentage of students who receive Pell Grants, the number of students who go on to serve in the Peace Corps and ROTC programs, and the percentage of their budgets dedicated to research.
The Washington Monthly rankings for the best liberal arts colleges include schools such as Amherst, Williams, Haverford, and Swarthmore that are also included in the lists compiled by U.S. News and other services. However, unlike U.S. News, several black colleges rank very high in the Washington Monthly ratings. Morehouse College in Atlanta sits in the 14th position, ahead of such schools as Middlebury, Vassar, Oberlin, and Pomona. Spelman College ranks in 21st place in the Washington Monthly list. Also in the top 50 liberal arts colleges, according to Washington Monthly, are Dillard University, Fisk University, and Tougaloo College.
In the university rankings, three campuses of the University of California occupy the top three positions. In what may be a surprise to readers, historically black South Carolina State University ranks sixth in the Washington Monthly tabulations, ahead of Harvard and the other Ivies, MIT, and the University of Michigan.
Jackson State University comes in at 21st in the Washington Monthly ratings, just ahead of Yale. Howard University, Florida A&M University, and Clark Atlanta University all rank in the top 75.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/rankings/liberal_arts_rank.php
Yolanda Gilmore Bivins - Information Literacy Librarian
Robert W. Woodruff Library - Atlanta University Center
111 James P. Brawley Drive, SW, Atlanta, Georgia 30314
Phone: 404.978.2132 ygbivins@auctr.edu
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