Group items tagged

article on women's career transitions clubs in Forbes, 2.22.13 ID by Bevan Rogel.

The transition Network's international page that highlights how transition networks can have a local, national, and global impact

In research on CoA communities, went to NYC CoA to see what they offered and ran across the most active site so far. See excerpt below for rebooting your life offered by The Transition Network, which I think is the women's group that Lisa knows. Is relevant to WLS. See book title on Reboot your life, Energize Your Career and Life by Taking a Break in excerpt below. "REBOOT YOUR LIFE - A special workshop on taking a break and making the most of it Are you feeling: Disengaged and too tired to figure out how to change that? A yearning for an adventure, or extended travel to recharge your batteries? A need for time to heal your heart and/or body? Or to get on the path to wellness? Like you need to plan for your "retired" chapter or already retired and wanting a more fulfilling life? Two of the co-authors, Rita Foley and Jaye Smith, will share important and useful insights gained from their four years of research, interviewing over 300 individuals and 50 organizations for their book, Reboot Your Life, Energize Your Career and Life by Taking a Break and from their workshops. With both discussion and fun exercises the authors will cover important topics such as : Overcoming emotional hurdles to taking time off work Turning job loss into an "unexpected sabbatical" Managing and planning for the stages of your Reboot Break Pre- retirement planning Deflecting robbers of your time What can I do next? Living a life of balance and passion Reboot Partners workshops, book and talks have been featured in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and on Martha Stewart radio, Oprah's OWN Network, and WPIX New York."

Transition Network of the USA, working with professional women 50+whose life situations lead them to seek new connections, resources, and opportunities.

interesting site for career transition strategies, Dorothy Dalton who looks to be our age. This post has good ideas for preparing for online interviews.

This page lists on demand webinars and fact sheets available only to AWIS members. Nice layout and treatment of life transition topics.

Second story by Eric Nelson offers good reasons for volunteering during transitions to build relationships, references, reach clarity on new directions, etc. January 29, 2013.

Article in MindShift, KQED, April 24, 2012 by Nathan Miton. Fabulous because it recognizes that content is one leg of learning stool. Excerpt: But at such a huge scale, what are the digital methods of teaching that work best? Philipp Schmidt, founder of the free online university P2PU, preaches three building blocks: community, recognition and content. Endorsement of peer learning potential Excerpt: The Stanford professors readily admit that some of the students who participated in their online courses provided their peers with deeper, more comprehensive answers than they were able to. The exponential explosion in opportunities for learning. Excerpt: in the past 10 years I've heard people say campus-based education better look out, that this will be threatening to their business model, and I've never really felt that until the last six months. The pace of change in open education is qualitatively different than it was even a few months ago." A new breed of digital pedagogy/andragogy/heutagogy Excerpt: "We probably haven't fully made the transition to digitally native pedagogies and learning approaches," Carson said. "The first generation of distance learning is basically an attempt to move the classroom online, and I think that part of the scalable learning of these massive courses is the breakdown of that model."

How the Golden Years Disappeared by Marc Freedman, Salon, April 2, 2012. This is an excerpt from the Big Shift, a book written by Marc Freedman, the man who started Civic Ventures about 10 years ago. Perhaps the WLStudio takes on this social imperative and this is how we get funding? "The new migration is across time and the life course, as tens of millions (8,000 a day, one every ten seconds, are turning sixty) reach the spot where middle age used to end and old age once began, the new territory where a resurgent purpose gap, and gulf in identity, stands. Opportunity is there as well. The surge of people into this new stage of life is one of the most important social phenomena of the new century. Never before have so many people had so much experience and the time and the capacity to do something significant with it. That's the gift of longevity, the great potential payoff on all the progress we've made in extending lives. Realizing these possibilities will require the courage to break from old and familiar patterns that once were our friends but just don't work any longer. It means considering ideas like "gap years" for grown ups, new kinds of internships and fellowships for Americans moving beyond midlife, remodelling higher education to help retrain people who have been working for 40 or 50 years, even the creation of new kinds of investment accounts to help cover the costs of transitioning to new careers. What we're facing is not a solo matter; it's a social imperative, an urgent one that must be solved as the great midlife migration gathers scale and momentum."

I joined Sheryl N-B's Google circle and have wandered through her posts including her Connected Learner Manifesto (that I believe came from a Twitter request she made, subsequently summarized into Circle document). I wrote a couple of entries. Note that on this page advertising the PLP Live 2012 event, they stress the need to do "embedded job learning" with their learners. Makes me wonder if we need to be more specific about the types of transitions/situations we wish to help women with. Because all learning needs to be applied/reflected on/? to be owned and used as a springboard for the next phase? Writing reflections or doing representations of learning advance learning and certainly document waypoints but are they enough?

Four minute video by Michael Wesch in St. George, KS, an assistant professor of anthropology. His video chronicles the evolution of the technical internet through html, XML phases and how the current use of code enables us to share our ideas at an unprecedented rate because anyone can click to write and publish to the world with the simplicity of an off/on TV control. We are (re)creating something new every second and can build relationships with people we never knew existed before. It's now one degree of separation between internet residents even though people may be miles apart in location, employment, lifestyle, temperament, etc. We can choose to collaborate with anyone who agrees to work with us. In fact, we can learn from afar from anyone without affiliating with them or they with us if they have some presence on the internet. We must figure out how to organize the things that matter to us that we harvest from across the internet. Tagging helps us do this. The web 2.0 transition has already had and will have impacts on copyright laws and practices, self-identity in different contexts, privacy, relationships, etc. Are you ready? Am I ready?

article by Steven Mintz for the Chronicle of HE, July 22, 2013 Excerpt: "But the most important challenge involves a shift in the way students consume higher education. Instead of attending a single institution, students receive credit in multiple ways, including from early-college/dual-degree programs, community colleges, online providers, and multiple universities. Students are voting with their feet, embracing online courses and undermining core curricula, which served as a cash cow, by turning to alternate providers, and pursuing fewer majors that require study of a foreign language." Fifteen innovations: 1. e-advising 2. evidence-based pedagogy 3. decline of lone eagle teaching 4. optimized class time 5. earlier educational transitions 6. fewer large lecture classes 7. new frontiers for e-learning 8. personalized adaptive learning 9. increased competency based and prior learning results; 10. data driven instructions 11. aggressive pursuit of new revenue 12. online and low-residency degrees at flagships 13. more certificates and badges 14. free and open textbooks 15. public-private partnerships

A PDF presenting the mission and strategic plan for Association for Women in Science 2011-2014. Well done in design and content. Look at these goals and objectives: Increase awareness of issues that impede and endanger American competitiveness by limiting progress in STEM careers Promulgate results of important national studies on gender inequity in learning environments and workplaces Work with federal and local agencies to show how gender equity aligns with their goals for workforce development Actively seek out opportunities for positive coverage in the media of AWIS activities and positions Highlight ways to restructure STEM environments to foster diversity and inclusion to advance national competitiveness Focus on career transitions and special needs of women of color and other underrepresented groups Actively propose and support federal legislation and initiatives which are consistent with AWIS policies and position statements such as, but not limited to: 1. Economic equity; 2. Flexible work options; 3. Parental leave; 4. Improvement of post-doc employment status; and 5. Title IX compliance. Develop mechanisms to engage individuals and chapters in advocacy Identify opportunities for innovation and systemic change across multiple work sectors Promote best practice models for employers and educators by gathering and highlighting examples from different disciplines, work sectors, and industries Highlight the central role of professional societies in advancing women's careers Expand our voice through strategic alliances and partnerships

World Education's blog and index for adult education teachers on using technology in the classroom. These are practical lessons for use in adult ed, literacy, and college transition classes. They are fun and easy to follow, but don't really build teacher networked skills - they are use when you can or want to. Good for us to refer to, but what we want to offer goes deeper and aims to guide teachers to be networked learners themselves. This site does not do that.

Upcoming workshop by Jane Bozarth on working out loud, December 19, 2014, online. When you ask, What does learning look like? no one answers, Someone talking in front of a room. We learn by doing, and by telling what we're doing, and by watching others do things, and by showing others how we did something. Narrating work can solve so many problems for both organizations and individuals, from capturing tacit knowledge, to easing transitions when workers depart, to reducing duplication of effort, to further enabling informal and social learning. What does it look like, and how can Training & Development (T&D) help it happen?

blog by George Siemens reflecting on his first week of a dual-layer MOOC, October 28, 2014. "I'm biased toward learners owning their own content and owning the spaces where they learn. My reason is simple: knowledge institutions mirror the architecture of knowledge in the era in which they exist. Today, knowledge is diverse, messy, partial, complex, and rapidly changing. What learners need today is not instructivism but rather a process of personal sensemaking and wayfinding where they learn to identify what is important, what matters, and what can be ignored. Most courses assume that the instructor and designer should sensemake for learners. The instructor chooses the important pieces, sets it in a structured path, and feeds content to learners. Essentially, in this model, we take away the sweet spot of learning. Making sense of topic areas through social and exploratory processes is the heart of learning needs in complex knowledge environments. " Though I am biased toward learner-in-control, I do recognize the value of formal instruction, particularly when the topic area is new to a learner. Even then, I would like to see rapid transitions from content provision to having learners create artifacts that reflect their understanding. These artifacts can be images, audio, video, simulations, blog posts, or any other resource that can be created and shared with other learners. Learning transparently is an act of teaching.

riveting interview with Deirdre McCloskey, economist on two points: transition from man to woman, and writing.

eloquent piece on how nonprofits should equip volunteers and others with information on using fastest forms of public transit and bicycle routes to travel to and from nonprofit location

Article by Kerry Hannon, Forbes, 1.25.13 This author asserts that older workers will become more valued by employers even though they aren't making special efforts to hire or retain them now and do not want to pay for the cost of training/retraining them. These trends suggest that taking charge of one's own learning with a PLP, PLN, etc. and taking advantage of all the free opportunities will be valuable skills to have. This author only looks to community colleges for retraining and does not reference any of the online options that we know about from the work on the directory. Should we draft a comment back to Kerry Hannon on this website? "1. Who is going to pay for that training? Most labor market experts I have interviewed say the government and private employers need to ramp up more training programs for older workers and create workplaces that make it easier for them to do their jobs. Employers don't want to spend for it. They've already cut to the bone to stay competitive globally in recent years and this kind of spending is a tough sell. Conceivably, as I discussed as a panel member at a recent Federal Reserve Workforce Development conference, one way to provide the needed training is through the community college system. The coursework could be offered at an affordable cost for the worker. Depending on who foots the bill, employers or employeees could receive tax incentives to ease the tuition bill. (Please continue to next page.) "

excellent explanation by Tom Vander Ark on why parent-managed learner profiles are becoming more important all the time for young people.  Is the corollary true for adults owning their learning in portable, digital carry-alongs for sharing with potential employers, etc.