CAROL’S SUMMARY:
Social media may help us solve one of the biggest problems facing higher education: student engagement, as featured in today’s article from Ecampus News. Technology experts and other people from business and academia, convened in five cities across the globe (New York City, San Francisco, London, Sao Paulo, and Toronto) for Social Media Week to discuss “how media sites like Facebook and Twitter are shaping global culture.” During a Feb. 6 session called “The Future of Social Media in Higher Education,” a panel explored the following topics:

o How colleges can use social networking to communicate with traditional and nontraditional students,
o What impact the new Apple iPad might have on student-faculty communication, and
o Why Blackboard is not meeting some students’ social media needs.

For all its merits, nationwide studies reveal that some education officials have been reluctant to embrace social networking because of safety and security issues. The article cites a recent survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that nine out of 10 American teens use some form of web-based social networking, and 34 percent of parents are aware of the inherent security risks of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, and teen sexting has become a big concern among educators and parents alike.

With 1 out of 4 students dropping out of college, it’s high time we learn how to use this powerful medium to engage and retain all types of learners and create a more qualified workforce.

How can we increase incentives for professors to innovate ways for engaging students using social media?

What can we do to address security and cyber-abuse issues to help diminish the apprehension some instructors have about social networking?

How can the U.S. lead the world by effectively using technology to enhance learning across all disciplines?

ARTICLE
Ecampus News
by Dennis Carter

Keeping college students and their professors connected through social media outlets could be key in boosting graduation rates, education technology experts said during a panel discussion at Social Media Week in New York.
Social Media Week ran through the first week of February in five cities worldwide—New York City, San Francisco, London, Sao Paulo, and Toronto—and authorities from the business world, academia, and other fields discussed how social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are shaping global culture.
During a Feb. 6 session called “The Future of Social Media in Higher Education,” a five-person panel explored how colleges can use social networking to communicate with traditional and nontraditional students, what impact the new Apple iPad might have on student-faculty communication, and why Blackboard is not meeting some students’ social media needs.

To view the entire article visit
http://bit.ly/9umZjE

CAROL’S SUMMARY:
Leadership can be a vexing topic for me because while many people can manage, few people are inspiring enough to be leaders. I’ve seen that leadership skills are what propel principals to create better schools, teachers better classrooms and counselors better advocates for student success. Emotional intelligence has become a vital part of how today’s leaders meet the significant challenges they face. Being courageous enough to challenge a broken situation with several alternatives, champion a student who is letting themselves off the hook on their abilities, or call forth a colleague who can be performing optimally but is choosing mediocrity is the beginning of courageous conversations which change outcomes.

Small, liberal-arts colleges are facing hard times in today’s economy, and G.T. Smith is trying to change that through leadership and genuine relationships. In the Chronicle of Higher Education article below, Mr. Smith states “The underlying thing for me is relationships—hardly anything important happens that doesn’t have to do with relationships. It’s getting to know people, being interested in them. … Life is built on genuine relationships, where trust and integrity are without question. When that is there, there are no limits.” Mr. Smith’s role model for fostering a sense of community to improve failing small, liberal-arts colleges is Howard Lowry, the College of Wooster’s seventh president where Mr. Smith attended as a student. Mr. Lowry wrote an essay for The Atlantic Monthly in 1966 defending the liberal-arts college in response to W. Allen Wallis’s article predicting the coming irrelevancy of small colleges unless they conformed into university-like institutions. Mr. Lowry’s essay argued that small colleges give students “the capacity to survive change” during “a time when colleges are trying to prepare students for careers 10 years away that do not now exist.”

How can today’s colleges and universities appeal to incoming freshmen’s need for belonging?

How can higher education foster a sense of community with high schools?

How can you be courageous as a leader in the role you play to challenge the status quo and bring about positive change?

ARTICLE:
November 15, 2009
Chronicle of Higher Education

By Scott Carlson
Elkins, W.Va.
Most people here know G.T. Smith simply as “Buck,” a grandfatherly figure who strolls around the wooded campus of Davis & Elkins College picking up bits of litter and chatting up students, professors, and groundskeepers by name.
But in higher education, Mr. Smith is known as a turnaround artist, a man with the talent and disposition to take a failing college and transform it into a winner. Here, at 74 years old, taking no salary, he is trying to save a tiny, debt-ridden college in one of the poorest states in the country. His strategy is so simple and earnest, it may sound naïve to the jaded.

To view the entire article visit
http://chronicle.com/article/Turnaround-President-Makes-the/49138/

CAROL’ SUMMARY:
The author of today’s article, Renee Moore, who teaches English to high school and college students in the Mississippi Delta, highlights the iniquities of our country’s education system similar to Jonathon Kozul’s book published in 2005, The Shame of the Nation, in which Kozol documents his visits to approximately 60 schools, in 30 school districts, across 11 states. Some of these schools are in the South Bronx, where he got to know their principals, their teachers and many of their students. His book is dedicated to a teacher from one of these schools.

The chief academic authority on this issue, whom Kozol interviews and quotes, is Gary Orfield of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who has been as persistent in documenting the scale of segregation, and attacking its presumed educational effects, as Kozol has been in describing it. According to Orfield and his colleagues, writing in 2004, and quoted by Kozol, “American public schools are now 12 years into the process of continuous resegregation. . . . During the 1990’s, the proportion of black students in majority white schools has decreased . . . to a level lower than in any year since 1968.” He expresses outrage at inequities in expenditure, pointing out that New York City in 2002-3 spent $11,627 on the education of each child, while Manhasset (a nearby suburb) spent $22,311, Great Neck $19,705 and so on. There are comparable disparities in other metropolitan areas.

According to a study by Emory University sociologist Dennis Condron, “Racial segregation in the schools is fueling the learning disparity between young black and white children, while out-of-school factors are more important to the growth of social class gaps,” published in the October issue of the American Sociological Review. His research indicated that regardless of social class, black students are less often taught by certified teachers than are white students, and black students are far more likely than white students to attend predominantly minority schools, high-poverty schools and schools located in disadvantaged neighborhoods. “De facto segregation remains high these days, with important implications for education,” Condron said in an interview for the Science Daily (Oct. 2, 2009). “When it comes to both housing and schools, race trumps class as the central axis upon which blacks and whites are segregated. Real solutions to the black-white achievement gap lie far beyond schools and require changes to society more broadly.” A specialist in educational disparities, Condron is currently analyzing data on more than 80 countries to research the impact of economic inequality on countries’ average achievement levels. Here are questions to consider:

How can school districts be considered “good” when certain segments of their student population regularly and consistently perform poorly? And what can these districts do to alleviate such disparities in achievement?

How can parents get involved at their children’s schools to help foster community responsibility?

ARTICLE:
Teacher Magazine
October 16, 2009
Published: October 14, 2009
Reaping What We’ve Sown: How Schools Fail Low-Income Parents
By Renee Moore

Teacher Leaders Network Recently, I’ve been seeing more comments from people who argue that poverty causes people (specifically parents) not to value education. The latest opinion outburst has been prompted in part by the recent story of a young honor student in Chicago being beaten to death (unfortunately, not the only such case, but one of the most dramatic and publicized).

Some of these comments are coming from frustrated educators and others who think we are wasting our time trying to improve poorly performing schools in high-poverty communities because so many, if not most of the parents whose children attend these schools, “just don’t care.”

After 20 years of teaching in one of the poorest regions of the country, I respectfully disagree. Parents who do not love their children or don’t want the best for them─frightful as that is─are still the exception.

To view this entire article visit www.teachermagazine.org

Rising tuition costs.  Waiting lists at many community colleges.  Dwindling savings.  Shrinking availability of financial aid at many colleges.  Fewer jobs available after graduation. Sound familiar?  In these tough economic times, access to higher education has become increasingly challenging.  Coupled with a tough job market, these grim realities have prevented many students from completing their college degree.

In the face of these realities, a wide array of institutions and governments are working to create free online courseware for students of all ages and stages.  With efforts ranging from interactive, discussion based courses to ready-made study materials, organizations ranging from M.I.T.  to the United Nations are joining the movement.  As computer and web-literacy continue to spread across countries, generations and income levels, these online courses become ever more feasible and valuable.

As access to knowledge becomes increasingly open and low-cost, higher education institutions must examine ways in which they can adapt to this new reality.  If free online courseware becomes widely accredited, what benefits can traditional universities offer to their students?  As endowments shrink and more required courses are taught through a large, impersonal lecture hall format, the benefits become even harder to define.  At this juncture, it is critical for colleges and universities to focus on the essentials: brand, reputation, classroom experience, extracurricular activities, social opportunities and that elusive must-have - the delivery of a transformational experience.

In the Future, the Cost of Education Will Be Zero

July 24th, 2009 | by Josh Catone

The average cost of yearly tuition at a private, four-year college in the US this year was $25,143, and for public schools, students could expect to pay $6,585 on average for the 2008-09 school year, according to the College Board. That was up 5.9% and 6.4% respectively over the previous year, which is well ahead of the national average rate of inflation. What that means is that for many people, college is out of reach financially. But what if social media tools would allow the cost of an education to drop nearly all the way down to zero?

Of course, quality education will always have costs involved — professors and other experts need to be compensated for their time and efforts, for example, and certain disciplines require expensive, specialized equipment to train students (i.e., you can’t learn to be a surgeon without access to an operating theater). However, social media can drastically reduce much of the overhead involved with higher education — such as administrative costs and even the campus itself — and open source or reusable and adaptive learning materials can drive costs down even further.

---

The University of the People

---

One vision for the school of the future comes from the United Nations. Founded this year by the UN’s Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technology and Development (GAID), the University of the People is a not-for-profit institution that aims to offer higher education opportunities to people who generally couldn’t afford it by leveraging social media technologies and ideas.The school is a one hundred percent online institution, and utilizes open source courseware and peer-to-peer learning to deliver information to students without charging tuition. There are some costs, however. Students must pay an application fee (though the idea is to accept everyone who applies that has a high school diploma and speaks English), and when they’re ready, students must pay to take tests, which they are required to pass in order to continue their education. All fees are set on a sliding scale based on the student’s country of origin, and never exceed $100.Read more…

For many students, the road to college is a familiar one. Many graduating high school students have heard their parents reminisce for years about their college days and provide advice about how to succeed. For most, college isn’t merely a privilege: it’s an expectation, a necessary step on their career path.

This is not, however, the reality for all students. Nationally, around 30% of all graduates are the first in their family to attend college. The vast majority of these students are low-income, and many face passive reactions or even opposition from their family when they decide to attend college. If the United States hopes to reach Obama’s goal of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world, this population is especially important: only eleven percent of these graduates actually finish college within six years.

How should higher education institutions support and retain these students?  As many first-generation students enter college without the support network that other students have, colleges and universities must work hard to create in-house networks for these students. The University of Cincinnati provides one excellent model: help students with study skills, time management, the college transition and - especially key - dealing with their families during this new and confusing time.

While some might argue that such efforts - special housing for first generation students, additional coursework, staff support - would be exceptionally expensive, I would argue that higher education institutions cannot afford to ignore these students and let them drop out. Consider the situation from a business perspective: if you knew that you would have a 27% customer attrition rate, wouldn’t you focus your resources and efforts at lowering this number? Of course, it makes sense to also consider this issue from a social perspective: what impact, what new achievements would be possible for the US if we helped these highly motivated, resilient and tenacious young students develop to their fullest potential?

Second Home for First-Gens

COMFORT ZONE The Gen-1 Theme House at the University of Cincinnati gives first-generation freshmen a place to settle in to college life.

By DANA JENNINGS

As thousands of low-income, first-generation freshmen flock to campus in the next two months, many, despite their intelligence and optimism, will arrive only to be gone in an academic eye blink. Just 11 percent of them earn a bachelor’s degree after six years, according to the Pell Institute, compared with 55 percent of their peers.

That fact was frustrating administrators at the University of Cincinnati, where more than 40 percent of its 5,000 freshmen this fall will be the first in their families to go to college. In its mission to get low-income, first-generation students through its doors, the university was succeeding. But once in, many were failing.“These students find themselves on campus, and overwhelmed quickly,” says Stephanie A. Cappel, the executive director of Partner for Achieving School Success, a center devoted to university-community partnerships and outreach programs.“They don’t even know what questions to ask.”

Read more…

Today’s article discusses the link between education policy and the skills needed for a successful career.  As Martha Kanter clearly knows, students are too often allowed to leave school without the necessary emotional, social and practical tools to be effective in the world of work.  The sweeping movement towards educational standards in the United States must include skills and metrics that stretch far beyond test scores and graduation rates - and Kanter’s efforts to link labor and education are a step in the right direction.

 In order to be successful, students need critical thinking skills, an awareness of their gifts and talents, the emotional intelligence to build up a network of supporters and the internal motivation and maturity to make a positive impact both in the classroom and in the workplace.  LifeBound’s Critical and Creative Thinking for Teenagers helps students develop all of these skills through the lens of medicine, nature, entrepreneurship and other core subjects.  Learn more here: http://lifebound.com/lifebound-books/critical_creative_thinking.html

Job Training Is Stressed at Education Dept., State Leaders Are Told

By SARA HEBEL
Santa Fe, N.M.

Martha J. Kanter, the U.S. under secretary of education, told state higher-education leaders gathered here on Wednesday for their annual meeting that she would make improving job training a priority.

 

She said she wanted to better align federal education and labor programs that often operate in isolation from one another even though they have complementary goals of preparing people for the work force.

 

“I really want to marry work and education in a more systematic way,” Ms. Kanter said. More than half of the nation’s college students work while they are enrolled, she said, and federal policy does not do enough to make sure they can effectively balance work and study.

 

Ms. Kanter spoke to the State Higher Education Executive Officers’ meeting on her 15th day in office. In those first few weeks, she said, she had already met three times with officials at the Department of Labor. Today she and Jane Oates, the Labor Department’s assistant secretary for employment and training administration, will appear together before a Senate subcommittee on employment and work-force safety to discuss their priorities for revamping the Workforce Investment Act, which provides money for job training at community colleges and elsewhere.

 

As an example of the disconnect in the current system, Ms. Kanter cited a federal youth-employment program. She said money was distributed through local Workforce Investment Boards without any emphasis to program recipients that they should continue their education to improve their long-term job prospects.

 

State officials praised Ms. Kanter’s remarks.

 

Jack R. Warner, executive director and chief executive of the South Dakota Board of Regents, told Ms. Kanter he was “very pleased to hear” that she planned to push for better coordination and alignment in job-training programs. “I really find a disjunction there,” Mr. Warner said. “Higher education needs to play a stronger role” in such training.

 

The question of how state and federal governments should help working students came up at a conference session about rethinking student aid. Sandy Baum, senior policy analyst for the College Board, said that one needed public-policy conversation was how to best allocate financial aid to adult students. The central question for many students is not how they are going to be able to pay tuition itself—the focus of much current student-aid policy—but how they can afford to pay basic living expenses while classes and study are preventing them from working as many hours as they could, Ms. Baum said.

 

Global Competition

 

On the issue of global competition, Ms. Kanter reiterated the Obama administration’s goal of stepping up American performance so that the United States is atop the world by 2020 in the proportion of residents who hold a degree or certificate. She said her recent conversations at the 2009 World Conference on Higher Education, held by Unesco in Paris last week, had given her ideas for how the United States might improve and made her concerned about how the country could slip behind.

 

Canada’s experience, she said, showed that an emphasis on helping colleges, students, and others adopt best practices—rather than putting a focus on accountability alone—could foster rapid improvement in student success. Her talks with Chinese officials demonstrated how actively other countries were also seeking to move up, she said.

 

During a question-and-answer period following her speech, Ms. Kanter fielded a question about whether the federal government should make at least some education beyond high school available to everyone.

 

Ann E. Daley, executive director of the Washington Higher Education Coordinating Board, asked whether the Obama administration had considered a new financing model for higher education, in which the concept of the government’s providing everyone with a public education through the 12th grade would be extended to at least a 13th year.

 

Ms. Kanter said the idea was “certainly worth looking at,” although she did not know whether it was something administration officials were specifically considering.

CAROL’S SUMMARY:

In the article below, the case is made that many of today’s students are tech-savvy and research-stupid. Faculty assume that because students know how to use technology that they also know how to make good judgments,
evaluate sources, acquire information on-line as well as from the library, etc. Indeed, many college students don’t know how to use the library.

The bigger issue here goes beyond research skills to the general ability to have solid critical and creative thinking skills. If high schools begin to work with their freshmen on these skills they will not only have better research abilities, they will also make more informed life decisions, be able
to weigh pros and cons in decisions they make and be much more mature in their overall outlook on college, career and life. If these skills are developed, they will be better students, get better jobs and lead better lives.

LifeBound is publishing Critical and Creative Thinking for Teenagers next month.

ARTICLE:
Chronicle of Higher Education

Just because your students are computer-literate doesn’t mean they are research-literate.

By TODD GILMAN

As an academic librarian, I hear an awful lot of hype about using technology to enhance instruction in colleges and universities. While the very word “technology” — not to mention the jargon that crops up around it, like “interactive whiteboards” and “smart classrooms” — sounds exciting and impressive, what it boils down to is really just a set of tools. They’re useful tools, but they don’t offer content beyond what the users put into them

To view the entire article visit
http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=vSG8HzkMfbPHYRzjzzKGxyrkjdztnxKH

CAROL’S SUMMARY: 

As the article below indicates, over the next four years, one third of the nation’s 3.2 million teachers are slated to retire. In addition to that, many entering the profession—one in three–drop out in their first five years of teaching.

What can we do to keep talented young teachers on the teaching track? What are we not doing in our schools of education to prepare these students for what lies ahead? How can we recruit some of the best and brightest people from industry to get their teaching certificates and become teachers in this tough economy? How can we look to other nations for top talent in teachers who can inspire and educate our students in the United States? How can more talented teachers become principals or leaders in their districts in other important capacities?

Many people with industry experience are now being considered for Superintendent positions. School boards value managers who are data driven, smart and able to motivate and inspire people beyond what they have always done. Michael Bennett in Colorado was a lawyer and a successful business person before he ran Denver Public Schools. Now that he is a United States Senator, his successor was the CFO under Bennet and has the same business sensibilities as the new Superintendent.

ARTICLE
New York Times

By SAM DILLON
April 7, 2009
Over the next four years, more than a third of the nation’s 3.2 million teachers could retire, depriving classrooms of experienced instructors and straining taxpayer-financed retirement systems, according to a new report.

To view entire article visit
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/education/07teacher.html?emc=eta1

CAROL’S SUMMARY:

The article below is about a new strain of ambition seen from women, equalizing the male and female career ladder. These trends are no doubt fueled by student loan debt, general debt grads may have acquired and the recent downturn in the economy which may make the model of one parent staying at home extremely difficult financially.

Women as well as men are less likely in this economy and this decade to take their jobs for granted. If they are dissatisfied, they may be more cautious about building their skills and networks while still maintaining their day job, paycheck and benefits at least for the next few years until things turn around. In the meantime, it is nose to grindstone for those of us who have jobs balancing work, family, and often a second job or school at night for better prospects in the future.

ARTICLE
Wall Street Journal
By SUE SHELLENBARGER
After decades of glacial change in gender roles, a new generation of working women is proving to be as ambitious as their male counterparts, as measured by their eagerness to move up the career ladder.

Based on a unique long-term study of attitudes in the U.S. work force, about two-thirds of both men and women under age 29 say they desire more responsibility on the job. Having children doesn’t dent the ambitions of young women workers; 69% of mothers in this age group say they want to move up on the job, compared with 66% of women without children, says the study of about 3,500 wage, salaried and self-employed workers and small-business owners, released Thursday by the nonprofit Families and Work Institute in New York.

To view the entire article visit
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB123801512551141207-lMyQjAxMDI5MzI4NTAyMTU1Wj.html

CAROL’S SUMMARY: According to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education (2006), the United States ranks in the bottom half–16th among 27 countries compared–in the proportion of students who complete college degrees or certificate programs. President Obama has committed his administration to raise this standard so that by 2020, U.S. graduates lead in college graduation rates world wide. His appeal isn’t only in terms of what we owe our young people ethically, but what it’s costing us as a nation financially. In this country, 1.2 million high school students drop out every year. This translates into 9 out of every 30 students. Of those 9, 4 will be unemployed, 3 will be on government assistance, and 2 will have no health insurance (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development www.ascd.org).

Turning around this disturbing trend must start earlier than high school. An article published by the Chicago Tribune (Dec. 11, 2008), reported that college preparation begins in elementary and middle school, too, based on separate studies by the ACT and the University of Chicago’s Consortium on Chicago School Research. The ACT report found that students who earned average scores in 8th grade had only a one-in-four chance of scoring high enough on the ACT to go to college. The Consortium study reported similar predictions.

These findings pose several important questions:

1) What can be done at the elementary school level to prepare students for success in middle school? Are we as a country addressing the needs of the whole child? Not only academically, but emotionally and socially?

2) What are middle schools (and parents) doing to prepare students to make a smooth transition from 8th grade to high school, what districts call “the freshmen transition”? As school reform advocates, how can we expand and support these programs?

3) What skills will graduates need in the 21st-century in order to complete globally? How can we help ensure that our schools are building the skills into the core curriculum?

ARTICLE:

He wants U.S. to have highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020.
By Frank James, Posted February 25, 2009 at www.latimes.com

Reporting from Washington — President Obama on Tuesday laid out a series of challenges for the nation to meet in job training and college attainment, part of an effort to give every child a “complete and competitive education.”

The president, in his first address to a joint session of Congress, said his administration would provide the support needed to give the U.S. the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020. He said there was a vital need for Americans to complete more years of education if the nation is to compete globally.

Visit www.latimes.com for the entire article