William E. Cashin, professor emeritus • Kansas State University
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
A List Apart for People Who Make Websites: Modern Debugging Tips and Tricks
June 7, 2011
by Tiffany B. Brown
May 2011 - Invite to AHRC Web Workshop! Arts and Humanities Research Council
Invitation to AHRC web workshops
The Arts and Humanities Research Council is beginning the process of planning and redesigning a new website. As part of this process we would like to hear your ideas and views about the design, structure, and content of the new AHRC website.
We have organised three half-day workshops in June to identify and collect requirements for the site. The workshops will be a great opportunity to discuss your suggestions and areas for improvement for the website. You do not need any specialist knowledge, we just ask that you have recently visited the AHRC website.
The end result will be a site which meets your needs and the needs of our other valued stakeholders. We would very much appreciate your input and attendance at this crucial stage.
Each workshop will be for up to ten attendees including some AHRC staff, and will be facilitated by external web developers. In particular the workshops will cover:
• how we deliver content and information;
• the overall structure and appearance of the site; and
• how we use the site to communicate and interact.
The workshops will be held at the Medical Research Council's office in London from 09:30-12:30 on the following dates:
• 8th June 2011
• 9th June 2011
• 10th June 2011
Please email Tricia Brabham at t.brabham@ahrc.ac.uk if you are able to attend, and on which day. The places will be limited to 10 per workshop, but you will also have an opportunity to complete a survey even if you cannot attend a workshop.
P2PU
About P2PU
Mission
The Peer 2 Peer University is a grassroots open education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls and gives learners recognition for their achievements. P2PU creates a model for lifelong learning alongside traditional formal higher education. Leveraging the internet and educational materials openly available online, P2PU enables high-quality low-cost education opportunities. P2PU - learning for everyone, by everyone about almost anything.
Academic Impressions Webinar: Making the Shift from Classroom to Online Course Design Online Course
MAKING THE SHIFT FROM CLASSROOM TO ONLINE COURSE DESIGN
Session 1: (Re)Mapping Course Design
Wednesday, September 7, 2011 :: 1:00 – 2:45 p.m. EDT
Session 2: Course Organization
Monday, September 12, 2011 :: 1:00 – 2:45 p.m. EDT
Session 3: Web 2.0 Technology Design
Wednesday, September 21, 2011 :: 1:00 – 2:45 p.m. EDT
Session 4: Interactive Learning Design
Monday, September 26, 2011 :: 1:00 – 2:45 p.m. EDT
IN SERVICE TO THE COMMON GOOD: REBUILDING OF NEW ORLEANS INSTRUCTS, INSPIRES YOUNG LEADERS ON A VOCATIONAL JOURNEY
Students Seeking Direction for Life's Next Step - Find Support for Countercultural Calling in Stories of Post-Katrina Renewal
WHAT: A diverse cross-section of college and seminary students from 40 U.S. states and Canada convene to explore vocation through the stories of community leaders who revived New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. They gather at the 2011 Fund for Theological Education (FTE) Leaders in Ministry Conference, "In Service to the Common Good." FTE is an ecumenical organization; it provides fellowships and leadership development for young people exploring a call to ministry.
WHERE: Dillard University, New Orleans
WHO: Nearly 100 top college juniors, seniors and seminary students from more than 30 different Christian denominations. Recipients of 2011 FTE Fellowships, they come from widely diverse social, economic and racial/ethnic backgrounds.
Interviews available:
•2011 FTE Fellow college graduates and seminary students.
•Rev. Gail Bowman, Dillard University chaplain, religion professor and FTE Fellow. Bowman helped students and campus neighbors cope with Katrina's impact on their families, faith and future.
•Rev. Lois DeJean, community activist, Baptist minister and Gospel singer led rebuilding efforts and advocacy to help displaced Gert Town residents return home after Katrina. DeJean's family and finances were uprooted by the disaster.
•Kim Hearn, FTE director of Ministry Fellowships, counsels students discerning their vocation: "Students are connecting decisions about what to do with their lives to a larger story—rebuilding entire communities through the church."
•Erik Schwarz, board member, HandsOn New Orleans, for volunteers engaged in Gulf Coast recovery; managing partner, Interfaith Works and co-director of the Institute for Faith and Service in Washington, D.C.
•Cory Sparks, New Orleans director, Louisiana Association of Nonprofit Organizations. A nonprofit leader and FTE Fellow, Sparks worked for sustainable recovery of the Gulf Coast as pastor of congregations in Lafayette and New Orleans, including a church plant, Faith Community United Methodist Church.
WHEN: June 15-19 (9 a.m. to 7 p.m. EDT—schedules vary daily)
Interview/photo opportunities in Lower Ninth Ward and Church of All Souls (built on site of Walgreens destroyed by Katrina.) Thursday June 16 1:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.
STORY IDEAS:
•Youth Build Lives of Meaning by Rebuilding Social Focus of Church: While one-in-four Americans ages 18-29 say they are not affiliated with any religion (Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life study), a segment of Gen Y is 'opting in' to church as a pathway to meaning and social engagement. Their take on the church's role in renewing communities—inspired by rebuilding efforts on the streets of New Orleans—may rewrite their own stories and the future of Christian congregations in North America.
•When the Church Shows Up: Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005, destroying neighborhoods and lives. Since then, churches and faith communities have been at the center of rebuilding efforts. A new generation of socially engaged faith leaders is coming to the Crescent City to learn from those who are on the front lines of the city's renewal. Students considering a call to ministry see their own stories and futures linked with social justice and an imperative for action that they don't want the church to lose.
ABOUT FTE
FTE supports the next generation of leaders among pastors and scholars, providing more than $1.5 million annually in fellowships to young people from all denominations and racial/ethnic backgrounds (http://www.fteleaders.org/ ).
ABOUT DILLARD UNIVERSITY
Dillard University was selected by FTE as the event host site because of its leadership role in recovery in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. After the storm, which left much of the university under water, Dillard offered students and their families special support on multiple levels to cope with the disaster. The University also completely restored and refurbished 32 campus buildings and three off-campus residential complexes, and built two LEED-registered (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) buildings. Dillard is a fully accredited private, historically black university. In 2010, U.S. News & World Report ranked Dillard among the nation's Top 10 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). As part of its engagement in the revitalization of New Orleans, Dillard is creating a Gulf Coast Public Policy Center to address key social issues.
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SPSS Research Articles
SPSS for Research
http://www.abacpoll.au.edu/qa/data_qa/files/kpi2tal/Survey%20Methodology%20and%20Polling%20Programs/Courses%20and%20Pictures/training%20programs.pdf
View Seminar Paper: Introduction to using SPSS for qualitative and quantitative methods of research
http://repository.openpolytechnic.ac.nz/view.php?pid=openpoly:629
Entering Data into SPSS
http://bioinformatics.med.yale.edu/iryna/enteringDataSPSS.pdf
Quantitative Research - SPSS
http://www.fh-nordhausen.de/fileadmin/mediadaten_fhn/Daten_Internationales/ipw_2006/praes/AP_04_Vilpas.pdf
Using SPSS in research projects
http://www.prio.no/private/jorgen/download/SPSS.pdf
Using SPSS to Understand Research & Data Analysis - Valparaiso
http://wwwstage.valpo.edu/other/dabook/home.htm
Guide to SPSS
http://www.hmdc.harvard.edu/projects/SPSS_Tutorial/spsstut.shtml
Tomorrows-Professor Blog: Writing an Article in 12 Weeks
Regards,
Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
Chronicle of Higher Education: Free for All: National Academies Press Puts All 4,000 Books Online at No Charge
June 2, 2011, 1:01 pm
By Josh Fischman
Today the National Academies Press announced it would offer its entire PDF catalog of books for free, as files that can be downloaded by anyone. The press is the publishing arm of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council, and publishes books and reports that scientists, educators, and policy makers rely on.
Barbara Kline Pope, executive director for the press, said it had previously offered 65 percent of its titles—ones that were narrow in scope—for free. “The 35 percent that we are adding today will reach a wider audience, and we are doing it because it’s central to our mission to get this information to everyone,” she said.
Ms. Pope, who had been up all night testing that the downloads worked properly—the Web site was remarkably slow today—said the first new title taken was Surrounded by Science: Learning Science in Informal Environments, which sells in hardcover for $24.95. A more technical tome, but very popular among researchers, is Prudent Practices in the Laboratory: Handling and Management of Chemical Hazards, which costs $99.95 in hardcover. (The press has published a set of instructions for getting the free PDFs.)
“Eight years ago, if we did this, we would have lost substantial amounts of money,” Ms. Pope says. “But our costs have come down a lot, and our institution says they will stand behind us even if we do lose money.” The operating costs of the press are lower, she said, because it jettisoned its own printing and fulfillment operations (they are now outsourced) and cut staff from about 70 people down to about 40. It also no longer prints catalogs but does all its marketing over the Internet. “So now we can afford to do this,” she says. “Of course, we still need to sell some hardcover books.”
Funeral Services for Retired Dean Tommy Holton of the Dillard University Library in New Orleans, LA, will be held June 10th, 2011
On Friday, June 10, 2011, a celebration of life will be held for Dillard alumnus and former Dean of the Library Tommy Holton, at the Franklin Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans. Tommy was a committed employee of the university, having served Dillard for at least 29 years. He was from a family of Dillard loyalists, including his wife Carolyn Holton and son Garrick Holton, who currently works in ITT. Four of his siblings and both of his children are also Dillard graduates.
Tommy’s love for Dillard was as extraordinary as the panoramic photo of the campus, “My Dillard,” which he captured in four separate photos in May 2009 and presented to the university in December of that same year. The photo depicts a breath-taking view of the entire length of the campus as seen from Gentilly Blvd. It is currently displayed in the Office of the President. Tommy will be missed and remembered for more than that.
Tommy was a dedicated loving family member whom we will forever hold dear in our memories and in our hearts.
Services are as follows:
Friday, June 10, 2011
Franklin Avenue Baptist Church
2515 Franklin Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70117-7532
Visitation: 10 a.m.
Services: 11 a.m.
Dillard University: Important Message from the Office of Financial Aid and Scholarships
Due to a recent information systems software upgrade, the Office of Financial Aid and Scholarships is unable to process any new financial aid awards for academic year 2011-2012 until July 1, 2011. To date, 574 new and 502 continuing students have received financial aid award letters for academic year 2011-2012. None of these financial aid awards will be affected. Additionally, Summer Session 2011 financial aid awards will not be affected. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this might cause. If you have questions, please call us (504) 816-4667, or toll free (800) 216 8094, or e-mail financial_aid@dillard.edu.
Thank you.
Office of Financial Aid and Scholarships
NOLA.com: Interim president chosen for Dillard University
May 24, 2011
James Lyons, a three-time university president who is a member of Dillard University's Board of Trustees, has been named the university's interim president effective July 1.
The board appointed Lyons to this position because Marvalene Hughes will step down as president on June 30, ending a six-year term.
Lyons, 67, a native of New Haven, Conn., earned bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees at the University of Connecticut. He also attended the Harvard University Institute for Education Management.
He has been president of California State University, Dominguez Hills; Jackson State University in Jackson, Miss.; and Bowie State University in Bowie, Md.
Lyons will serve as Dillard's interim leader until Hughes' successor is named. A national search for a new president, which is being led by the Boston firm Isaacson, Miller, is expected to take about a year, Dillard spokeswoman Mona Duffel Jones said.
An eight-member internal search committee of trustees, faculty, staff and students also has been formed, Duffel Jones said.
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Online Learning Portals: Customizing Colleges Right Out of Higher Education
May 29, 2011
By David Glenn
Somewhere out there is an ambitious but frugal high-school graduate who wants to avoid a traditional college path. Maybe she has read Anya Kamenetz's DIYU or one of the other end-higher-education-as-we-know-it manifestoes that have circulated in recent years.
Her plan is to pursue an education à la carte, spending as little money as possible. She'll use free online resources like MIT's OpenCourseWare project. She'll find workplace apprenticeships. If she needs specialized training, she might take a few classes at a local college. Maybe this will all eventually add up to a formal degree, and maybe it won't. What our student really cares about is cultivating skills and wisdom, and persuading employers that she has educated herself well.
That strategy might or might not be smart. But an online infrastructure is emerging that could someday make it easier to attempt it. Depending on how it evolves, this infrastructure might profoundly change how Americans certify their skills and transform their relationship with colleges.
The new infrastructure consists of online portals that allow students to create portfolios that document their workplace skills and to have those portfolios assessed by college professors. The portals¬—the most prominent are Learning Counts and Knext—also let students package their certification credentials, including scores from the College Board's College Level Examination Program and specialized certifications such as Microsoft's.
Taken individually, those elements are not new. Colleges have assessed students' prior workplace learning for decades. But the portals for the first time give students universal, accessible, portable tools for certifying what they know and can do.
The portals have been designed to award college credits and to help students finish degrees. But there is no reason, in theory, why students couldn't eliminate the middleman. Instead of packaging their portfolios and test scores and petitioning a college for credit, they could take those packages directly to employers and petition for a job.
"I absolutely think that that is where this will lead," says Pamela Tate, president of the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, known as CAEL, which is the leading force behind the Learning Counts portal. "We are in discussion with so many employers who have said to us, 'Once students have these portfolios, this could be incredibly useful for our own purposes.'"
At least two employers, Ms. Tate says, have asked about adapting Learning Counts for their hiring and promotion processes.
Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future, a California-based think tank, has recently been lecturing to accrediting organizations about what she calls the disaggregation and personalization of higher education. She does not believe that universities will disappear; in fact, she says face-to-face learning communities are more important than ever. But she does expect traditional credit-hour and degree structures to change fundamentally as students find new tools for demonstrating their competencies.
"Degrees will continue to play an important role," Ms. Gorbis says. "But it's very hard to assess higher-level skills simply by knowing that someone has a degree." For that reason, she believes, portfolios and specialized tests will become more important to employers than simple course transcripts. And that, in turn, might lead students to lower their costs by doing as much of their learning as possible outside the high-tuition confines of a traditional degree program.
Caution is in order, of course, when predicting earthquakes in higher education. Seers have been prophesying the end of the traditional degree structure since the Web emerged, in the 1990s, and their track record is no better than Harold Camping's. As wages for Americans without a college education have continued to fall, people have naturally clung to the security of the bachelor's degree. For large categories of workers—nurses, police officers, and administrative assistants among them—employers expect more, not less, formal education than they did 20 years ago.
But there is a widespread sense that tuition cannot rise forever at twice the rate of inflation. Something has to give. If these new portals make employers comfortable with accepting credentials other than traditional degrees, they might change the nature of college-going for millions of students.
How the Portals Work
Learning Counts, a collaboration of CAEL, the College Board, and the American Council on Education, made its debut in January. More than 80 colleges have signed up as pilot institutions. Knext, a project of Kaplan Higher Education, went online in early May and so far has just three educational affiliates.
In each service, interested students begin with a free telephone-advising session to determine whether their workplace learning might warrant course credit. Students who pass that threshold are invited to sign up for an online course that will teach them to prepare portfolios that reflect their learning. (Each subject area for which the student wants credit—say, computer science or management or communications—gets a separate portfolio.) Those portfolios are then submitted to an evaluator from a national panel of subject-matter experts, who deems the portfolio worthy (or not) of course credit.
Knext's fees are $999 all-inclusive, while students in Learning Counts pay $500 for the portfolio-development course and $250 for each subject-area portfolio assessment.
The 80-plus two-year and four-year colleges affiliated with Learning Counts have pledged to accept the credit recommendations of the national panel. And the three for-profit universities affiliated with Knext (most notably, Kaplan University, its corporate sibling) have promised to accept the Knext panel's credit rulings.
Students are free to present their portfolios and test scores to unaffiliated colleges, though there is no guarantee in such cases that they will be granted any course credit. They are also free to bring their portfolios and scores directly to employers.
Barbara Wright, vice president of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges' Accrediting Commission for Senior Colleges and Universities, says she is pleased to see the emergence of new portals, especially Learning Counts, that can provide universal, high-quality certifications of workplace learning. But she hopes that employers and employees will bear in mind the limits of certification tests. A single test or portfolio, she says, is unlikely to give a full sense of a student's thinking and writing skills. There are certain kinds of learning that only a full degree program can provide.
To make that point, Ms. Wright draws on her hobby as a gardener. "When I think of myself as a self-trained botanist and naturalist," she says, "I can identify hundreds of wildflowers. But I don't have a larger framework of understanding. I couldn't tell you about some of the more chemical aspects of what makes a flower thrive. I couldn't tell you about their role in an ecosystem. I couldn't tell you about a lot of things, because I'm purely self-taught, and I don't have that larger theoretical and disciplinary framework. That's what going through a formal degree program, validated by an institution, gives you."
Similarly, she suggests, a student who holds a certain kind of Microsoft certification might have strong technical skills but lack the kind of theoretical framework that a full computer-science major might have.
How to Hire
Precisely that debate, as it happens, used to rage within the offices of Check Solutions, a technology firm co-founded by Joe M. Rowell in 1981. Mr. Rowell himself had not completed a degree, and he didn't much care whether his software engineers had, either. But his deputies, who did most of the direct hiring, tended to insist on bachelor's degrees for new employees.
Today, at the age of 59, Mr. Rowell is finally finishing his own degree.
He isn't doing it for the money. His old firm did well, and he retired comfortably in 2003. But he had promised his late parents that he would finally graduate, and so he enrolled at the University of Memphis's University College, which is one of the Learning Counts pilot institutions.
His first step was to complete a portfolio that would allow him to apply for college credit based on his experience in the workplace. "I thought it would be like résumé-writing on steroids," he says. "But it turned out to be much more complex than that. I had to go back through 20 years of my career and explain how those skills match the courses here and how they reflect college-level learning."
And as he completed that process, Mr. Rowell had a revelation: He should have asked for portfolios like these when he examined job candidates at his company. "This kind of thing would be extremely useful in the workplace," he says. "I really think this could be a new paradigm."
With portfolios like those, he says, he could have won the old arguments about whether degrees were necessary. At the same time he wishes that he had completed his own degree earlier. In Memphis's courses, he says, he is learning principles of management and communication that would have served him well.
Dan Lattimore, dean of Memphis's University College, says Learning Counts will vastly expand his institution's ability to assess adult students' workplace learning. The college has offered such services since 1975, but the standardized process and the national panel of evaluators provided by Learning Counts should allow the college to triple its volume, from roughly 35 students per year to more than 100, he says.
Does Mr. Lattimore expect that Learning Counts will someday lead students to present their skills directly to employers, forgoing degree programs?
Time will tell, he says, but he expects that his institution will play an important role whether or not students want to complete degrees. Workers at FedEx, a major local employer, are offered tuition reimbursement for courses they take in Mr. Lattimore's program. Perhaps someday, he speculates, they will be offered promotions if they complete a specific short sequence of courses and add certain elements to their Learning Counts portfolios.
Ms. Wright, of the Western Association, says colleges need to be humble. "If we're going to be truly student-centered," she says, "it's the learning outcomes that really matter. As hard as it sometimes is for colleges to hear it, we're only a means to an end."
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