Red Balloon Resources

"Burning Out, and Fading Away June 10, 2010 WASHINGTON -- College faculty aren't any more burned out than the rest of the U.S. workforce on average, but the struggles of the untenured on the tenure track are the most pronounced, according to a survey presented at an American Association of University Professors conference here Wednesday. In an analysis of professional burnout among professors, a Texas Woman's University Ph.D. candidate found tenure track professors had more significant symptoms of workplace frustration than their tenured and non-tenure track faculty counterparts. Janie Crosmer, who conducted the survey of more than 400 full-time faculty across the U.S. in December 2008, said she was unsurprised that the high stresses of pursuing academe's most coveted status led to burnout. As she discussed those stresses during a presentation Wednesday, audience members nodded in agreement, and one faculty member among them described the pursuit of tenure as "a living hell." "

"Brands are a mighty force in this complicated world. They provide clarity and predictability, a way of quickly categorizing information. Branding seems a natural fit with the predominant method of organizing and governing higher education: creating institutions. Institutions have deep roots in our society and collective consciousness. They create tribes whose markings last a lifetime. The more people around the world who need and desire higher education, the more important institutional brands appear to be. Yet brands fit the reality of higher education less snugly than they seem to. Every Banana Republic in America will sell you the same merino sweater. Even closer parallels in the intellectual-property business have identifiable standards. A randomly selected album issued by Matador Records will almost surely feature fine indie rock. So too with Basic Books, with its roster of nonfiction books by distinguished authors, or the Met, with its renowned operas. What you get from a college, by contrast, varies wildly from department to department, professor to professor, and course to course. The idea implicit in college brands-that every course reflects certain institutional values and standards-is mostly a fraud. In reality, there are both great and terrible courses at the most esteemed and at the most denigrated institutions."

"But Obama's health care and student loan victories overshadowed the collapse of another key domestic priority: helping more students graduate from college. Because of a last-minute-and maddeningly illogical-political development, the Obama administration allowed negotiators of the reconciliation bill to strip out a smart, progressive package of reforms that could have helped millions of low- and moderate-income students earn college degrees."

"They say that everything's relative, and this is certainly true in politics. Normally, the President signing a bill eliminating $87-billion in corporate student-loan welfare would be a huge deal. But when it happens in the same legislation that overhauls the entire American health-care system, people take less notice. And the successful student-loan reform, in turn, overshadowed the collapse of the Obama Administration's college-graduation agenda. That's the subject of an article I wrote for this week's New Republic."

"Middlebury College has been known for years for immersion-based language instruction and liberal arts education. So when the college announced on Wednesday that it is partnering with a for-profit company to build an online language program aimed at middle- and high-school students, it raised some eyebrows. The program, to be called Middlebury Interactive Languages, will open this summer with initial courses in Spanish and French. Middlebury professors and faculty at the Middlebury-Monterey Language Academy - the college's highly touted summer program - will develop the online courses. They will be taught online by Middlebury professors , instructors affiliated with the Monterey Institute, and graduates of the language academy, according to Michael E. Geisler, vice president for language schools at Middlebury and director of the new program"

By Anya Kamenetz, author of DIY U "Gemma and Eliana Singer are big iPhone fans. They love to explore the latest games, flip through photos, and watch YouTube videos while waiting at a restaurant, having their hair done, or between ballet and French lessons. But the Manhattan twins don't yet have their own phones, which is good, since they probably wouldn't be able to manage the monthly data plan: In November, they turned 3. When the Singer sisters were just 6 months old, they already preferred cell phones to almost any other toy, recalls their mom, Fiona Aboud Singer: "They loved to push the buttons and see it light up." The girls knew most of the alphabet by 18 months and are now starting to read, partly thanks to an iPhone app called First Words, which lets them move tiles along the screen to spell c-o-w and d-o-g. They sing along with the Old MacDonald app too, where they can move a bug-eyed cartoon sheep or rooster inside a corral, and they borrow Mom's tablet computer and photo-editing software for a 21st-century version of finger painting. "They just don't have that barrier that technology is hard or that they can't figure it out," Singer says. Gemma and Eliana belong to a generation that has never known a world without ubiquitous handheld and networked technology. American children now spend 7.5 hours a day absorbing and creating media -- as much time as they spend in school. Even more remarkably, they multitask across screens to cram 11 hours of content into those 7.5 hours. More and more of these activities are happening on smartphones equipped with audio, video, SMS, and hundreds of thousands of apps."

Colleges thought they were enhancing efficiency when they moved their course evaluations online, but an unintended consequence of the shift to evaluations not filled out in class is that students started skipping them altogether.

Gardner Campbell of Baylor examining technology literacy from different vantage points. Argues that everyone needs to be a visual artist. Reflects the frustrations of faculty at learning new technologies.

Here is a Sept '09 resource from JISC in Scotland that reports data from employer needs for graduates with digital literacies http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/bpllidav1.pdf

"Lori Whisenant knows that one way to improve the writing skills of undergraduates is to make them write more. But as each student in her course in business law and ethics at the University of Houston began to crank out-often awkwardly-nearly 5,000 words a semester, it became clear to her that what would really help them was consistent, detailed feedback. Her seven teaching assistants, some of whom did not have much experience, couldn't deliver. Their workload was staggering: About 1,000 juniors and seniors enroll in the course each year. "Our graders were great," she says, "but they were not experts in providing feedback." That shortcoming led Ms. Whisenant, director of business law and ethics studies at Houston, to a novel solution last fall. She outsourced assignment grading to a company whose employees are mostly in Asia."

"Is the "bundled" model of higher education outdated? Some higher-ed futurists think so. Choosing the academic program at a single university, they say, is a relic of a time before online education made it possible for a student in Oregon to take courses at a university in Florida if she wants. Since the online-education boom, the notion that students could cobble together a curriculum that includes courses designed and delivered by a variety of different institutions - including for-profit ones - has gained traction in some circles."

A think piece by CSU Northridge Provost Harry Hellenbrand about Learning Management Systems and how we need to think about them more holistically than just a commercial software package.

Gates-funded project, 26 teachers across the country who have had uncommon success in helping remedial students. Goal of the project is to identify successful teaching strategies to achieve 80% success rates with remedial students.

Hilary Pennington, at the ACE Annual Meeting in March 2010, argues that we're moving toward a circumstance where wealthy and middle class students will attend public institutions, and increasingly poor students will attend higher priced for-profit institutions.

"Kotkin (The City) offers a well-researched-and very sunny-forecast for the American economy, arguing that despite its daunting current difficulties, the U.S. will emerge by midcentury as the most affluent, culturally rich, and successful nation in human history."

Liz Coleman (Oct 2007) describes the new curriculum, a series of design labs. It's a terrific paper on core values.

Texas tech will offer a three (3) year medical degree for family practice doctors

Hilary Pennington, at the ACE Annual Meeting in March 2010, argues that we're moving toward a circumstance where wealthy and middle class students will attend public institutions, and increasingly poor students will attend higher priced for-profit institutions.

"Gov. Mitch Daniels called on Indiana's colleges and universities to give Hoosiers the chance to push "fast-forward" on their college careers with the option of earning a bachelor's degree in just three years. Only two schools in Indiana -- Ball State University and Manchester College -- offer such an accelerated degree program, and relatively few students take advantage of it. But cutting out one-fourth of school could save some students up to $25,000."

21st Century Classrooms

Innovative system for grading that encourages collaboration and a high degree of creativity on the part of students.