Academic Impressions Conference: Bringing Mobile Learning to Your Institution

http://www.academicimpressions.com/PDF/0212-mobile-learning.pdf

February 20-22, 2012 Houston, TX

Create a plan for implementing and developing mobile learning on your campus.

Mobile devices are increasingly popular on college campuses and are becoming more functional as access to high bandwidth grows. Using portable mobile learning devices like tablets (iPads, Amazon Fire, Android, etc.) and smartphones (iPhones, Androids, etc.), students are capable of accessing educational content, activities, and services from anywhere and at any time.


Program Brochure (pdf)
Pricing & Registration
Agenda


Join us at this working conference to examine the decisions that need to be made when building and implementing m-learning and when creating interactive and collaborative learning activities for use on mobile devices.


Our expert instructors will help you develop planning guidelines for your institution framed around six key areas:
• Objectives
• Audience
• Budget
• Instructional strategies
• Stakeholders
• Technology


Please plan to bring your mobile device(s) to the conference as you will be actively engaged in hands-on understanding and activities. Conference proceedings will be made available to you online and on a flash drive.


BRING YOUR TEAM, REGISTER TODAY
Building and implementing mobile learning requires both institutional commitment and the combined efforts of multiple departments to effectively meet the needs of all stakeholders. We encourage you to send teams that include representatives from a variety of departments that would benefit from the planning guidelines presented at this workshop.


Register for this event online or call 720.488.6800. Register three people from your institution and the fourth can attend for free. Questions? Call us to determine if this event is right for you.

Academic Impressions Conference: Bringing Mobile Learning to Your Institution

Diverse Issues in Higher Education: National Report Card Shows Only a Third of Country’s Fourth- and Eighth-Graders Proficient in Reading and Math

http://diverseeducation.com/article/16593/

November 2, 2011
by Jamaal Abdul-Alim


In a situation that calls into question the United States’ ability to meet its ambitious college completion goals, a national “report card” released Tuesday shows that only about one-third of the country’s fourth- and eighth-graders were proficient in 2011 in reading and math.


The numbers were even more dire for African-American and Hispanic students. Among those groups, the proficiency rates ranged from 24 percent to as low as 13 percent.


Such are the findings of The Nation’s Report Card, which are based on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, an ongoing project of the National Center for Education Statistics.


Though the report card doesn’t frame the findings based on what they mean for the future of higher education in the United States, the report card provides a snapshot of the current levels of proficiency for students who will represent the Class of 2015 and the Class of 2019.


Experts say the lackluster proficiency results among these groups show that serious obstacles lie in the path of the Obama administration’s “2020 goal” to restore the United States to its former prominence as the nation with the highest proportion of college degree holders in the world.


“You won’t reach a college completion goal with 80 percent of students not proficient,” said John Michael Lee Jr., policy director at the College Board’s Advocacy & Policy Center.


“You’re not going to reach your STEM goals if they’re not proficient in math. You’re not going to reach any of your national goals that way.”


Though Lee hadn’t personally reviewed the latest NAEP results, he based his comments on the fact that the latest numbers were similar to what they’ve been in the past.


The latest figures from the 2011 nation’s report card show that:


- Only 17 percent and 18 percent of Black and Hispanic fourth-graders, respectively, were proficient or better in reading, compared with 44 percent of White fourth-graders.


- Similarly, only 15 percent and 19 percent of Black and Hispanic eighth-graders, respectively, were proficient in reading, compared with 43 percent of White students.


- Only 17 percent and 24 percent of Black and Hispanic fourth-graders were proficient in math, compared with 52 percent of White students.


- Only 13 percent and 20 percent of Black and Hispanic eighth-graders were proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of White students.


The numbers released Tuesday reflect little change from 2009, the last comparative year.


Nationally, 34 percent of all fourth-graders were proficient in reading in 2011, up slightly from 33 percent in 2009. Similarly, 34 percent of eighth-graders were proficient in reading in 2011, up from 32 percent in 2009.


In math, 40 percent of the nation’s fourth-graders were proficient in math, up from 39 percent in 2009. Among eighth-graders, 35 percent were proficient in math, compared with 34 percent in 2009.


Dr. David Driscoll, former commissioner of education in Massachusetts and chairman of the executive committee of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the NAEP, also sounded alarms about what the NAEP results mean for higher education.


“Fifty percent of Black eighth-graders and 40 percent of Hispanic eighth-graders are below basic achievement level in math,” Driscoll said Tuesday in a web conference with reporters. “This means they still have difficulty doing basic arithmetic. Students doing math at that level will have trouble doing algebra they need to be able to do in college.”


Asian students outscored all racial and ethnic groups, although a number of Asian academics in the United States said recently that the high performance of some Asian students masked the underperformance of various Asian subgroups.


Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called the 2011 increases part of a “pattern of modest progress” that followed more significant gains in the 1990s.


“The modest increases in NAEP scores are reason for concern as much as optimism,” Duncan said in his statement. “While student achievement is up since 2009 in both grades in mathematics and in eighth-grade reading, it’s clear that achievement is not accelerating fast enough for our nation’s children to compete in the knowledge economy of the 21st century.”


Duncan’s statement also veered into the political, specifically, the issue of teacher jobs. He pointed out that $30 billion in the proposed, but stalled, American Jobs Act would be devoted to “keep teachers in the classroom and off the unemployment line.”


Another $30 billion, the education secretary said, would be used to repair and modernize schools in order to create “21st century learning environments in America’s antiquated school buildings.”


Duncan also touted the fact that the Obama administration offers flexibility in the form of waivers from No Child Left Behind.


Various members of the National Governing Assessment Board, which oversees the NAEP, offered a variety of insights into and solutions the problems revealed in The Nation’s Report Card.


Board member Doris Hicks, principal and CEO of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School for Science and Technology in New Orleans, spoke of various efforts her school makes in order to make reading more fun and exciting for its students. These efforts include “Jazzed Up Reading” where a jazz band performs and students make commitments to increase their reading levels. She also encouraged more parents to read to their children at home.


For Lee, of the College Board, the NAEP results point to a need for greater emphasis in providing a quality education at the pre-K level.


Citing research that shows minority students with access to quality pre-K instruction tend to do better than their peers without such instruction, Lee said the K-12 system is not good at catching students up.


“It’s a challenge once a student is behind as to how do you ensure they’re able to catch up,” Lee said, citing additional research that shows catch-up becomes more difficult with time. “That’s something I don’t think we’ve figured out how to do.”

Diverse Issues in Higher Education: National Report Card Shows Only a Third of Country’s Fourth- and Eighth-Graders Proficient in Reading and Math

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Academic Libraries Expand Their Publishing Services, but With Limited Resources

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/academic-libraries-expand-their-publishing-services-but-with-limited-resources/34086

November 1, 2011
By Jennifer Howard


Publishing services offered by academic libraries are “expanding and professionalizing,” says a new report based on a survey of library directors at research and liberal-arts institutions. But those publishing operations are often still hampered by a lack of full-time staffing and by the small scale of much of what they do.


The survey went out to top librarians at the 223 member institutions of the Association of Research Libraries. It also went to library heads at the 80 or so liberal-arts colleges that belong to the Oberlin Group and at some 25 institutions in the University Libraries Group. The full report, “Library Publishing Services: Strategies for Success,” has been posted online for public comment here here. (Comments close at the end of the year, and a final version will be released early in 2012.) A PDF can be downloaded here.


In good news for advocates of library-based publishing, the report says that more than half of all respondents reported that their institutions have developed or are developing library-based publishing services, and that faculty demand for those services is high. Charles Watkinson, director of Purdue University Press—a unit of Purdue Libraries—has been closely involved in the survey process.


“Libraries are finding a lot of faculty demand in the area of new types of publication, especially in the digital-humanities field,” Mr. Watkinson said. “And they’re also finding an opportunity to professionalize how what has traditionally been viewed as gray literature is being published.” (Gray literature refers to working papers, technical reports, conference proceedings, and other material that traditional publishing tends not to handle.)


Library-based publishing programs “were originally founded to shake up the scholarly communication system,” and the survey showed that most remain strongly committed to open access, Mr. Watkinson told The Chronicle. But open-access publishing has a pragmatic appeal. It tends to be easier and more economical for library publishing programs that are understaffed.


Many are. The report identifies a lack of adequate staffing as a standing barrier to the success of library-based publishing. Many libraries don’t have a full-time employee dedicated to publishing.


“Without a full-time champion, it’s hard to get these things off the ground,” Mr. Watkinson said. “One of the issues here is that library schools are not preparing people with publishing skills. They’re not preparing librarians to fill these roles. And libraries are behind the times in establishing dedicated library-publishing positions.” Several institutions, including the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and Columbia University, are notable exceptions.


The report confirmed that most library-based publishing tends to be campus-focused, Mr. Watkinson said. Library publishing often draws on partnerships with academic departments or other campus units—but only sometimes with university presses. “The main collaboration with university presses is at a very minor level, and it tends to be around the digitization of backlist,” he said. “It’s not at a strategic level.”


Many institutions don’t have a university press at all. In any case, presses tend to have very different revenue models than libraries do. That can make it hard to work together, Mr. Watkinson said. “A major insight of the report is it’s just not possible to have those relations with one’s university press” much of the time, he said. “But this is a topic of major interest to the university presses.” For instance, the Association of American University Presses now has a committee dedicated to library-press relations, and in some cases, like Purdue’s, the press reports to the library.


The report was prepared by a team of library administrators and consultants on behalf of the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition, or Sparc, with support from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, Berkeley Electronic Press, and Microsoft Research. The deans of the libraries at Purdue University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Utah were the principal investigators on the project.

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Academic Libraries Expand Their Publishing Services, but With Limited Resources

Inside Higher Ed: Higher Ed Research Roundup

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/11/21/report-higher-education-research-groups-annual-meeting

November 21, 2011 - 3:00am
By Doug Lederman


CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- With much of the potential drama of the annual meeting having unfolded before it began -- with the cancellation of a planned session on the validity of the National Survey of Student Engagement -- there was no obvious center of gravity as the members of the Association for the Study of Higher Education gathered here. Instead, the conference offered its usual dizzying array of topics for exploration -- from student access and persistence to the changing role of the faculty to countless sessions on diversity.


Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/11/21/report-higher-education-research-groups-annual-meeting#ixzz1eMCv6m28  


Inside Higher Ed

Inside Higher Ed: Higher Ed Research Roundup