GlobalSkillsCC

By Susan Engel, New York Times Opinion Pages, March 14 2011.

Part of LC's lesson, What is Good Writing, week 2, semester 3.

By Tong Xiang in the (Duke) Chronicle, October 7 2010. Review of film, The Social Network.

Part of LC's lesson, What is Good Writing, week 2, semester 3.

By Glenda Ollero on her blog, List Five, April 9 2010.

Part of LC's lesson, What is Good Writing, week 2, semester 3.

Posted by Tony Bates to his blog on August 1, 2011. Bates, who runs a consultancy to teach about e-learning, argues that online learning is ever more important in post-secondary education (he writes from Canada, but his statistics are for all of North America), but that most post-secondary teachers have been trained very little in pedagogy and "teaching" at all, less so in online teaching and learning. He seeks comments and feedback to his argument.

This fun site, one vision of a social media-enabled dictionary, offers not just definitions of words (from a variety of sources), but also contextual references, and the ability to tag and/or build a community around a given word. It's quite hard to describe; I recommend clicking through a few words as they float by on the home page.

This is a Universal Design for Learning project built by CAST, a nonprofit R&D organization that uses Universal Design for Learning as a tool to improve learning opportunities for all individuals, including those with disabilities (originally Center for Applied Special Technology). See the Featured Tools on the home page for some interesting "highly supported" digital tools.

Presented by Innovation in Teaching and Leaning for Technological Innovation at Nashville State Community College. The premise of this project is that a course is linked with a local business and the students work directly with business partners to solve "real-world problems." The site offers background on problem-based and case-based learning, as well as tools to help an instructor connect with a business and frame his/her course.

The website's tag line is "songs for teaching, learning & fun." Created, in part, with an NSF grant, the site's founders are interested in studying the "usefulness of music in science and math education." The searchable database is great, and the blog is interesting -- conferences and other updates on topics of interest to those interested in the intersection of music and education.

By Paul G. West and Lorraine Victor, prepared for The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, May 2011. This paper appears to be an excellent resource for collections of OER, both in the US and around the world.

Published by the University of Nottingham (UK). This site is a "continually updated collection of peer-reviewed academic development resources...[ranging from] "2-5 minute videos [to] 500-1000 word texts...." There are a variety of entry points to access the materials, ranging from discipline areas (on this page) to themes (see Teaching & Learning themes at the top). I also like the Guest editor block (this page, lower left), where a faculty member writes a brief editorial and selects resources of interest.

By Thomas Bailey, Dong Wook Jeong and Sung-Woo Cho, Community College Research Center, Teachers College, Columbia University in Economics of Education Review, Volume 29, Issue 2, April 2010, Pages 255-270. "The purpose of this paper is to analyze the patterns and determinants of student progression through sequences of developmental education starting from initial referral. Our results indicate that fewer than one half of the students who are referred to remediation actually complete the entire sequence to which they are referred..."

For GSCC faculty, there is a copy of this article available in Coffee Klatch

By Ryan Brown in the Community Colleges section of The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 18 2011. The article reports on a recent CCRC study of 51,000 community college students in Washington State between 2004 and 2009. In 2010, CCRC released a similar study looking at online learning in the Virginia community college system. Reasons for this gap are surmised to be "technical difficulties, a lack of structure, and isolation."

Produced by the Commonwealth of Australia, (c) 2008 (with regular updates). This site provides a repository of subject-area toolboxes which can be further customized as needed.

By L. Kupczynski, P. Ice, R. Wiesenmayer, and F. McCluskey in Journal of Interactive Online Learning, vol 9 (1), Spring 2010, pp. 23-43. Based in the Community of Inquiry Framework, this paper looks at the interactions between teaching, social and cognitive presence in the online learning experience.

This site (currently in Beta) was founded by James Gee and is essentially a database of in-progress projects, begging for feedback/interaction/collaboration with and by others. For more on the site, click through or follow the wep tag to see the About page.

In addition to bookmarking the home page of this site (follow tag: wep), I have bookmarked the About page where James Gee welcomes users and explains his vision for worked examples.

An online only grad school for teacher preparation in NY state helps teachers in their own classrooms instead of in a teacher prep class outside of where they work. Videos of teachers teaching and other techniques are used to train teachers.

"As many as four out of five community college students in the United States want to transfer to a four-year institution so they can obtain a bachelor's degree, according to a report released Thursday by the College Board."

NYTimes: The Choice: As many as four out of five community college students in the United States want to transfer to a four-year institution so they can obtain a bachelor's degree, according to a report released Thursday by the College Board.