Group items tagged

By Dakaria I. Aarons in Education Week, March 25 2010. The New Leaders for New Schools principal-training program has launched a new version of its online portal for the Effective Practice Incentive Community (EPIC). The article reports that the portal is a "Web-based compendium of professional-development resources for principals, staff-development coaches, and teachers." The article links to the database. Full article is subscription only. For access, contact your local library.

By Ros Smith, published by JISC, Sept 6 2010. Announcement and podcast posted on the JISC site. This newly published guide raises questions about the meaning of assessment, and how more effective assessment (ideally taking advantage of current technologies) might also promote the idea of students becoming lifelong learners. There is a 13 minute podcast with Ros Smith, the author. The new guide can be downloaded by chapter, of full guide (as PDF or Word docs). Also, until Oct 31, 2010, printed copies can be ordered for free.

Published by Center for Community College Student Engagement, 2010. This report looks at the Survey of Entering Student Engagement (SENSE), launched fall 2006. From the report, "To date, more than 91,000 students from 197 colleges in 37 states have participated in SENSE, thereby helping to create a wealth of new and actionable data about the entering community college student experience."

By Wick Sloane, in a column called The Devil's Workshop in Inside Higher Ed, September 20 2010. Sloane, previously the CFO of a public university, has embedded himself as a writing teacher at Bunker Hill Community College. In this column, he ties completion to the many varied needs of under-served students, many of whom live in poverty.

By Scott Jaschik, from the News section, Inside Higher Ed, March 30, 2010. Katrina Nichols, Rosemary Arca, and Marisa Klages took part in the annual meeting of the League for Innovation in the Community College. This article describes their presentation and the GSCC project more generally. Links to the GSCC blog.

A series of online forums sponsored by UNESCO to look at issues surrounding OER, particularly re-use of OER materials. Scheduled themes of discussions are: 23 - 29 September 2010: Taking OER beyond the OER Community: Policy and Capacity; 20 - 26 October 2010: What works, what does not and under what conditions?; 10 - 16 November 2010: Copyright and the development and re-use of OER. This page contains other background information, including links to the online forums.

By Alissa Gardenhire-Crooks, Herbert Collado, Kasey Martin, and Alma Castro with Thomas Brock and Genevieve Orr, published by MRDC in March 2010. The overview page (bookmarked) provides links to the Executive Summary and the full report (both available as PDFs). \nFrom the overview: "This study draws on the experiences of 87 African-American, Hispanic, and Native American men who were enrolled in developmental math courses at four Achieving the Dream institutions to find out more about what affects the success of men of color in community college."

With the tagline "search, recommend, collaborate, remix," Folksemantic claims over 110,000 OERs. The product was developed for the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning. At the current time (Sept 2010), they are asking for help evaluating their recommender tool.

Edited by Terry Freedman and published on Informations and Communications Technology (ICT) in Education: The Educational Technology Site, March 2010. This is a really great e-book (free, downloadable PDF) which organizes Web 2.0 education projects by grade level, including a section for adult learners, and a section of resources. There are links to all projects and analysis and self-reflection by the project creators.

By Andrea Fuller in the Government section of The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 20, 2010. At North Virginia Community College, President Obama signs legislation that ends the bank-based lending system for student loans. The savings from ending this program will be used to provide spending on education. The president also announces that Jill Biden will lead a community-college summit at the White House in the fall.

By Simon Mackie of GigaOM, in the New York Times, April 2, 2010. Here are 10 great tricks to try when searching in Google.

By Alan Greenblatt on NPR, March 29 2010. Greenblatt reports that there was initially great promise for community colleges in the health care reconciliation bill that was passed at the end of March. However, "Congress ultimately took a pass on restructuring the mission of the nation's community colleges." The $12 billion American Graduation Initiative recognized the important role that community colleges could play in producing more college graduates, but the initiative was not included in the final law.

By Tara Siler on All Things Considered, NPR, March 31, 2010. Siler reports that students miss out on financial aid, particularly in community colleges, because they don't understand the system. Pell Grants can be particularly useful to low income students, if they understand how, when, and why to apply.

By Joshua Kim of the blog BlogU, part of Inside Higher Ed, March 29, 2010. Kim reflects on the more successful online learning experiences that he's taken part in, and points to three attributes that made these experiences successful. The comments section also provides some interesting links.

A blog by the Chronicle of Higher Education that started in May 2010, Innovations brings together several regular bloggers on the topic of innovations. Bloggers include Sandy Baum (Skidmore College), Michael McPherson (Spencer Foundation), Marybeth Gasman (Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania), Richard Kahlenberg (Century Foundation), and Richard Vedder (Center for College Affordability and Productivity/Ohio University).

By Betty Ray, on Edutopia, July 8 2010. This is a post by guest blogger Rob Jacobs, a recent participant in twitter group #edchat's topic, "What actions are needed to move the education reform movement from conversation to action." This guest post is on the same topic. Not only is this an interesting post, but #edchat sounds like a great twitter to follow.

By Sara Lipka in the Students section of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov 11 2010. Reporting on the latest report from the Center for Community College Student Engagement, which states that "Increasing college completion is meaningless unless certificates and degrees represent real learning, which community colleges must work harder to ensure."

Mendeley is both a (free) reference manager and an "academic social network." Users can import papers they are using for research, highlight, annotate, and tag them. Mendeley will provide an appropriately formatted citation for the paper. Additionally, users can search the citations (and descriptions) of papers that others have contributed to Mendeley, as well as creating and joining groups with like-minded researchers.

By Daniel R. Rehak, PhD., Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) technical advisor. Presented as keynote at Fourth International Workshop on Search and Exchange of e-le@rning Materials (SE@M '10), September 27-28 2010 in Barcelona Spain. Rehak's basic point is that all of the learning materials already exist -- we just need a better, more viable, more searchable repository for them. Very nicely produced presentation.

Conrad Wolfram presentation on TED.com (filmed July 2010; posted Nov 2010). Wolfram argues that math applications are all around us, and that people in a ever-wider variety of workplaces are excited about math...but students are not. Wolfram argues that bringing computers into the math classroom would help improve math's relevancy -- and build excitement as well. Use the tag wolfram to look at his "knowledge engine," Wolfram Alpha.