August 12th, 2010
Education News
Roundup
Articles posted by five reliably interesting sources of
news about higher education.
Crowd Sourcing a Promotion
Case…
Source: http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=53106
August 12th, 2010
I totally admire people who are willing to take a risk like this
- Tony Hirst outsources his promotion case. He writes, "I have
been told there is a need to "demonstrate clearly your claims of
excellence in relation to the promotion criteria. The statement
needs to inform the Academic Staff Promotions Committee
of the contributions you have made at the Open University,
and the impact and significance of these.... So racked with
embarrassment at doing this ('tis what happens when you
don't publish formally, don't get academic citations in the
literature, and don't have a "proper" academic impact factor;-)
I'm going to take the next 10 days off in a place with no internet
connection…. but anyway, here goes: an attempt at crowd-
sourcing parts of my promotion case …." Tony Hirst, OUseful
Info, August 11, 2010 [ Link ] [ Comment ]
British Exam Howlers
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/12/howlers
August 12th, 2010
One student has inadvertently invented a new name for the
phenomenon: "Confusionism."
In fact, the third-year student had intended to refer to the
system of philosophical and ethical teachings founded by the
Chinese philosopher Confucius.
Proving that they are just as fallible as all those to have gone
before them, students' comical cock-ups have been revealed
in entries to Times Higher Education's "exam howlers"
competition 2010.
Thank you to Michael Gold, senior lecturer in employment
relations at Royal Holloway, University of London, for sending
in the Confucianism error.
Many of this year's entries have a medical theme. John Lee,
head of undergraduate studies in nursing and midwifery at the
University of Dundee, was told that "Vagina Henderson" was
Published by: philosophyandrew
one of the first modern nurses of the 20th century (her name,
of course, was Virginia).
Along the same lines, Anthony Pinching, interim dean of
medicine and associate dean of the Cornwall Peninsula College
of Medicine and Dentistry Knowledge Spa, was informed
by a student that HIV was discovered by Galileo (rather
than Robert Gallo). And Mary Williams, senior lecturer in
journalism at the University of Portsmouth, enjoyed a feature
by a journalism student on "complimentary" medicine. "I quite
liked the idea of picking up a pill and it saying nice things to you
to make you feel better," Williams said. She also appreciated
a fashion article that described the subject's sense of style as
very "sheikh."
Also on a medical theme, a student who was asked to define
otitis media - a medical condition known as "glue ear" --
informed Liz Morrish, principal lecturer in linguistics at
Nottingham Trent University, that it was "a text specially
designed for people who are otistic."
Morrish was equally amused to read that Polari (which
Morrish described as "a coded version of English spoken by
gay men, prior to the decriminalization of gay male sex" in
Britain) was an ancient language of the Inuit.
Elsewhere, an academic at the University of Warwick was
given a description of Sara Baartman, the so-called "Hottentot
Venus," as a "Hot 'n' Tot," and of the Hindu practice of sati
as "when a woman throws herself on her husband's funeral
parlor."
In a drama examination, one student explained Adolphe
Appia's revolutionary contribution to scenography thus: "He
moved projectors on to surfaces and shuddered at moments of
climax."
"Great to see he derived such joy from his work," said Philip
Crispin, a lecturer at the University of Hull, who submitted the
entry.
Today's students have little faith in the next generation, it
seems.
"The U.K. birth rate is currently increasing. We have more
than 700,000 new suspects every year," Padmini Ray Murray,
lecturer in publishing studies at the University of Stirling, was
warned.
But earlier generations were impressively tough. In seeking to
explain the origins of the term "nuclear family," the author of a
paper marked by Keith Kintrea, deputy head of the department
of urban studies at the University of Glasgow, claimed the
social unit "could enjure [sic] anything up to and including a
nuclear war."
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August 12th, 2010
Throughout one essay, a student from the University
of Portsmouth wrote about "anus" crimes. The academic
marking the paper eventually realized that he meant "heinous"
crimes.
Finally, a student sent a winning apology for missing an
exam to Lisa Burton, operation and examinations manager at
Warwick Business School. The email culminates with the line:
"I am sorry if this caused you any incontinence."
Founded in 1892 and accredited by the Middle States
Commission on Higher Education, the University's mission is
to make high quality post-secondary ...
The chair is the faculty member responsible for daily
administrative operation and academic delivery of approved
programs. He or she is also ...
OEOD-4925 Position: Academic Coordinator II Writing
Director, Payroll title of Academic Coordinator II – Academic
Year Humanities Core Course ...
Qualified candidates must have a Master's degree with 18
graduate credits in area of teaching. For details and to apply,
please visit the Job ...
internettime Daily
Source: http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=53105
August 12th, 2010
Here's another one of those paper.li pages, this time from
Jay Cross's Internet Time list. I've been following paper.li lists
for a few weeks now (I subscribe to Alan Levine's, Jane Hart's
and Doug Peterson's). I still like them, and they certainly keep
me up to speed on the Twitter-posed links. But my biggest
problem with them is duplicates. Not even duplicates between
papers - that's bad enough - but the same link appearing day
after day on the same paper. Contrast that to, say, OLDaily,
which will rarely (and only by accident) post the same link
twice. Jay Cross, Internet Time, August 11, 2010 [ Link ] [
Comment ]
The Fog
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/08/12/street
August 12th, 2010
Students come not to college but to college, where buildings
become halls, classes seminars, teachers professors. A
professor’s job is more than teaching, of course: two-thirds
more, in the common division of teaching, research and
service. But whatever the fraction, the hidden portion can
have an effect on students like pea soup, if not purple haze.
Academics are often accused of dumbing down our offerings.
But it’s more complicated than that.
And it’s not entirely academia’s fault. The culture at large,
with its common wisdom that a college degree is the new
high school diploma, and caricatures of educators from Jerry
Lewis’s to Eddie Murphy’s, can warp students’ expectations
of what we’re about and how to get the most from us, as well
Published by: philosophyandrew
as diminish our value. So too can our instinctive American
equation of cost with worth distort what we’re about. George
Orwell’s advice "never use a long word when a short one will
do" can seem like a rip-off if you’re paying thousands of dollars
in tuition for it (at that price, a spade should be an "implement
for the manual effectuation of soil removal," at least).
But academics’ famous self-involvement, insularity, and
preoccupation with the minutiae of maintaining our
institution, even under the guise of making it better,
can thicken the fog. Our simplest communications and
instructions, filtered through our institutional constructs,
can seem to the uninitiated like conundrums and mazes,
necessitating special keys, passwords, and maps of our own
design and marketing. “…from the moment you arrive on
campus,” reads the promotional copy of one institution,
“[ours] has a special support system in place to make certain
you have every chance to succeed. We call it the First-Year
Experience.” That same term calls up 193,000,000 other
Google hits. How special can it be?
On the other hand, in a recent professional venue I
heard a term for the first time: “agentive,” which sounds
like “offensive” but apparently applies simply to students
learning actively instead of passively, a goal or “desirable
educational outcome,” though the form in that case might
be “agentiveness,” or maybe “agentivity” … I’m not sure…
someone must know…what authority can I ask? .... Actually,
don’t those questions indicate the very opposite of the
behavior the word’s intended to urge?
College: where common experience is made rarefied and
simple truths complicated.
One of our simplest truths is that our two-tiered institution
enables a few of us to work extremely hard for the title of
“professor” and a guarantee of lifetime employment at a livable
salary, plus opportunities to follow our career bliss, feather our
intellectual community, and other less measurable benefits,
while it keeps many others of us – a majority now, nationwide
– working extremely hard for as long as we can hold on,
semester by semester or year by year, sometimes with the help
of food stamps, to do some of the same work as the others.
To point out that this situation arises from job-market supply
and demand, or that many adjuncts have tenured spouses
or other careers or sources of income or health insurance
and so don’t really need a fair or living wage, or that “real”
professors have responsibilities besides teaching, or that now
is not the time to address such matters … is to change
the conversation from the central facts of inequity, which
are, as Cary Nelson, president of the American Association
of University Professors, said recently in a more particular
context, “germane to every moment of every class."
Central facts such as two faculty members at the same
institution teaching different sections of the same course for
pay differentials like 43 percent (that’s how much my own
salary once dropped when I taught the same course at the
same institution under two different kinds of contract). Or the
same two faculty members’ widening salary differentials, even
with the same annual pay-increase rate (at 3 percent, e.g., in
five years the gap between initial base salaries of $70,000 and
$15,000 grows by almost $14,000, from $55,000 to $63,758).
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August 12th, 2010
Or this new wrinkle, where an adjunct I know works. The
teaching program has an all-contingent faculty (only the
director’s on a tenure streamer). A handful of full-timers teach
eight courses each on yearly salaries and two-year contracts.
Thirty part-timers each teach from one to three of the same
two courses – but on per-course salaries that, if multiplied by
eight and subtracted from the others’ yearly salaries, leaves
about half. The full-timers say they’re worked to death. They’d
like to balance the workload, the others the money, but none of
them have any security beyond their current contract, so they
all sit tight ... and the fog’s so thick you can’t see who’s come
to faculty meetings, my friend says – or, worse, who’s come to
class.
Facts like these indicate inequity. Facts like these indicate
exploitation. Facts like these get in the way of education. Facts
like these make even a concept like “teacher” problematic.
Facts like this don’t bring to mind what people imagine when
you are talking about professors.
And to change the conversation from such facts is to
obfuscate all the topics, education included. In a first-semester
classroom, a teacher’s call for questions at the end of a
presentation on, say, paragraph structure might be met with a
conversation-changing “What’s due Tuesday?” or “How many
pages is the paper supposed to be?” A focused teacher might
need a second to shift gears, though from some students’ point
of view, if it’s all about college, it’s all connected. In fact, any
two items that come up in a classroom might seem more clearly
connected to each other than either of them is to anything else
in life, whether as lived or as surfed online.
But whether between paragraphs and page length, equity and
economics, or any given college subject and college, from the
gaps in changed conversations arises an intellectual fog like
sulfur dioxide from a volcano. Inhaling sulfur dioxide can
cause breathing problems unto death; our fog causes thinking
problems unto confusion, paralysis, and anti-agentivity, as
we academics might call it – not just a dumbing down but a
stupefaction.
Non-tenure-track faculty are teaching almost half the
undergraduate courses in public educational institutions
in the country, according to the American Federation of
Teachers’ compilation of U.S. Department of Education data,
at a cost to our employers ranging to less than a quarter, in
a U.S. News & World Report estimate, of those who have to
spend a third of their time, in that common wisdom again,
serving the institution itself, often enough on committees
charged with searching for, vetting, scrutinizing, credentialing
and honoring only the 30 percent of faculty that sit or will sit
on other committees and teach the other half of courses, while
the 70 percent of contingent faculty continue, unseen for the
fog.
As everyone involved in it knows, education is a delicate
business. So our institutions need to be delicate, too.
Colleges should be glass houses: like good prose, they
should be transparent, not fog- but sunshine-filled. Then
students and the general public wouldn’t have quite so many
misconceptions about college, because they could see right
through to what should and would engage them, if they didn’t
have to try to make sense of our institutional structures and
strictures first.
Published by: philosophyandrew
And conversations about equity wouldn’t have to be changed
or prolonged for decades, as this one has been, because equity
would be the unquestioned assumption, as common and real
and readily understood as “career window” is now. And we’d
all have to stop throwing stones and get on with our work.
Since 1980, Steve Street has taught writing and literature --
off the tenure track -- in over a dozen American colleges and
universities in four states and abroad.
Founded in 1892 and accredited by the Middle States
Commission on Higher Education, the University's mission is
to make high quality post-secondary ...
The chair is the faculty member responsible for daily
administrative operation and academic delivery of approved
programs. He or she is also ...
OEOD-4925 Position: Academic Coordinator II Writing
Director, Payroll title of Academic Coordinator II – Academic
Year Humanities Core Course ...
Qualified candidates must have a Master's degree with 18
graduate credits in area of teaching. For details and to apply,
please visit the Job ...
Expertise-in-use
Source: http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=53104
August 12th, 2010
Heli on Connectivism: "I try to conceptualize the development
of expertise in ill-defined, open questions." She writes,
summarizing (?) Eteläpelto A. The Development of Expertise
in Information Systems Design (1998): "complex cognitive
skills are learned through the acquisition of large integrated
chunks of knowledge. Chunks take the form of larger,
more detailed conditions and actions of production rules.
Larger conditions provide more precise specifications of
the circumstances under which the action is appropriate.
Reduction in the need to access declarative memory allows
speedier rule-firing due to increase in the strengths of rules
which are needed in each successful application." (Except...
and here again maybe language is a barrier... humans don't
fire rules . That's how production systems think, but humans
are not production systems.)
Heli, Heli on Connectivism, August 11, 2010 [ Link ] [
Comment ]
Asking More Than Male or
Female
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/12/questions
August 12th, 2010
The Common Application is considering adding voluntary
questions about applicants' sexual orientation and gender
identity. The application is used by hundreds of colleges and
universities -- including many of the most competitive.
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August 12th, 2010
The current norm in higher education is not to ask such
questions, even on a voluntary basis. But with more students
coming out in high school, and with some colleges explicitly
taking steps to recruit gay applicants, some admissions officers
and some advocates for gay students want to encourage
colleges to ask the questions. But the possible switch could
be controversial. The Common Application has conducted a
nonbinding survey of its members and -- while not releasing
results -- has indicated that the membership is split. (The
association's board will decide the question.)
The current Common Application simply gives two choices --
male or female -- on gender. Common Application officials
have stressed that they will continue to ask that question,
and to specify that applicants should check the box consistent
with their birth certificates. That's because colleges use some
of the demographic data collected to meet federal reporting
requirements, and single-sex institutions need to know that
applicants are eligible for admission.
On the issue of sexual orientation, one proposal under
consideration would feature a drop-down menu that would let
students select gay/lesbian, bisexual, straight/heterosexual or
"another identity" that could be listed. Another approach --
if the organization adds a question on sexual orientation -- is
to simply provide a free text field and ask the question about
orientation.
On the issue of gender identity, the Common Application is
considering options that would explain why the male/female
question must be asked consistent with federal reporting
requirements, but which would then go on to tell applicants
that if there is a word that better describes their identity
beyond male or female, they are welcome to add that.
Shane L. Windmeyer, the founder of Campus Pride, a
national group that works on behalf of gay students and
sponsors college fairs at which gay students can meet college
representatives, said it was past time for colleges to add
such questions. "It is 2010," he said. "Colleges should take
responsibility for their LGBT students at the front end of the
admissions process. We have students from across the country
who are already out when they apply, and this should just be
part of the process. There is no reason these students should
be invisible when it comes to applying for college."
Campus Pride and the Consortium of Higher Education LGBT
Resource Professionals are among the groups that have been
urging the Common Application to add the questions.
David Hawkins, director of public policy and research at the
National Association for College Admission Counseling, said
that "the more data that can be collected, the more that can
be done with it," and he stressed that admissions officials use
demographic data to recruit students and improve student
services.
Most public discussion of the demographic boxes students
check on college applications focuses on affirmative action,
but most colleges are not terribly competitive in admissions so
it is much more common for colleges to use the information
for tracking and recruitment purposes. So colleges will pay
attention to trends in applications and enrollments from a
range of groups that they consider important for various
reasons, and ask why so few female engineers enroll, for
Published by: philosophyandrew
instance, or why an institution has gained popularity with
Texans. Likewise colleges use demographic information to
reach out to students -- before admissions decisions have been
made -- to tell them about programs and services for various
groups.
Hawkins stressed that admissions officers would support
asking only those questions "that promote understanding and
nondiscrimination." (The Common Application has a strict
anti-bias policy that includes sexual orientation.) He said he
could see the possible questions as a good way for some high
school students to find out whether colleges will be welcoming.
"The more we can offer openness and comfort for all students,
the better," he said.
He also said he thought the Common Application had
enough clout that a move by it in this direction could likely
influence other institutions. (The Common Application has
a competitor, the Universal College Application, with fewer
members, and that group has indicated that it would consider
adding additional questions, too, if members expressed
support.)
Rob Killion, executive director of the Common Application,
said that comments members have sent in for consideration by
the association's board are confidential, so he couldn't release
them. But generally, he said that those with concerns about
adding the voluntary questions have cited issues from the
applicants' perspective: "Would the student feel pressure to
answer? Would the student worry how this information would
be used? Would the student worry who had access to this
information? Would the student worry that a negative decision
was in part because of their answer?"
He said that those writing in favor of the questions also
"typically cited the benefits for the student," such as "targeted
recruiting efforts, campus diversity efforts, funding for
adequate campus resources, etc."
The College of William & Mary invites applications and
nominations for the position of Senior Associate Dean of
Admission. The Senior Associate Dean ...
Director of AdmissionsPosition Located in Qatar - Begins
January 2011 Review of Applications Begins September 15,
2010 and continues until position is ...
Three Things You Should
Really Know about Avatars
(and their relationship to you)
Source: http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=53103
August 12th, 2010
Karl Kapp points to research supporting three contentions
about avatars:
1) An experience as an avatar can change a person's real life
perceptions.
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August 12th, 2010
2) Watching an avatar that looks like you performing an
activity influences you to perform a similar or same activity in
the future.
3) People tend to conform to how their avatar appears
regardless of how it is perceived by others.
All this goes to show that the experiences we have as avatars
are real experiences, and result in real learning and concept
formation. Which actually does make sense. Karl Kapp, Kapp
Notes, August 11, 2010 [ Link ] [ Comment ]
Quinnipiac Will Add Women's
Rugby
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/12/qt/
quinnipiac_will_add_women_s_rugby
August 12th, 2010
Quinnipiac University announced Wednesday that it will
add women's rugby -- while keeping other women's teams,
including competitive cheer -- to comply with a federal judge's
ruling last month that found the institution out of compliance
with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. The
Associated Press reported that during the trial in a suit
challenging the university's compliance, Quinnipiac officials
suggested that they might drop the cheer squad if it could not
count toward Title IX requirements. A judge said that the sport
could not count (at least at this time), but the university is
sticking with that activity while complying by adding women's
rugby.
A Vision for Learning: Back to
School Activities
Source: http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=53102
August 12th, 2010
Following the link to the backchannel of this presentation
takes me to Chatzy , a nifty little backchannel service.
Awesome. Julie Lindsay takes the first ten slides of this
presentation to prepare people for backchannel participation
(it's a pretty good model to follow). The rest of the presentation
is on e-learning at at Beijing (BISS) International School
. She writes, "We looked at the role of e-learning at BISS,
digital citizenship, digital learners and how we can improve
classroom practice to best cater for their needs in a digital
world. I also gave an overview of Flat Classroom Projects and
played the Flat Classroom Conference documentary so that
everyone at BISS is aware of what is coming in February."
Julie Lindsay, E-Learning Journeys, August 11, 2010 [ Link ]
[ Comment ]
The Politician as Chancellor
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/12/tennessee
August 12th, 2010
If there was not an orchestrated plan to make John Morgan
the next chancellor of the Tennessee Board of Regents, a
Published by: philosophyandrew
remarkable set of coincidences resulted in the state’s deputy
governor getting the job.
To wit:
• In March 2009, a year into a search to replace then-
Chancellor Charles Manning, the Tennessee Board of
Regents suspended the process, citing the economic
downturn and Gov. Phil Bredesen's then-embryonic plan
to restructure the state's higher education system.
• Last January, Bredesen -- with the hands-on help of
Morgan, his deputy governor and the state's longtime
comptroller -- pushed through a special session of
the legislature his "Complete College Tennessee Act of
2010," which reshaped the state's system for funding and
governing higher education.
• In May, the Tennessee Board of Regents, which governs
four state universities and 13 community colleges,
began a new search for a chancellor by rewriting
the criteria for the position in ways that played to
Morgan's strengths, focusing on candidates' ability to
communicate with the governor and other political
leaders and an understanding of and commitment to
the new law. To the dismay of faculty leaders and
some legislative critics, the search committee also
downgraded the educational requirements for the job
from a doctorate to “a postsecondary education degree
earned from an accredited institution.” (Morgan has only
a bachelor’s degree from Austin Peay State University, a
Board of Regents institution.)
• Less than six weeks later, after a search that attracted few
qualified candidates and for which Morgan was the only
candidate formally interviewed, the regents hired him in
July.
"The job description was obviously written for somebody, and
it sure looks like it was written for John Morgan," said State
Sen. Dolores Gresham, a Republican who heads the Senate's
education committee. Late in the process, Gresham asked the
Board of Regents to extend the search to add more candidates
with stronger academic credentials. "I think the leader has to
lead by example, and if you're going to lead an educational
system, you have to be steeped in scholarship. He just doesn’t
have credentials I think he ought to have."
Faculty leaders also criticized the process and the selection,
noting that the search committee contained no professors and
that Morgan has no scholarly or administrative experience
within higher education.
"Even if the search was legitimate, it has the appearance that
'the fix was in,' and thus has the potential of becoming a public
relations disaster," Larry Burriss, a journalism professor at
Middle Tennessee State University who sits on the Board of
Regents' faculty advisory council, said in an e-mail message to
Inside Higher Ed.
Board of Regents officials dismiss as conspiracy theorizing
the notion that the search process was constructed with
Morgan in mind. But they and other supporters of Morgan are
unapologetic about their view that the public college system
needs a savvy leader who can help the institutions maneuver
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August 12th, 2010
through a fast-changing political and policy environment --
and that Morgan, unfairly caricatured as a Bredesen crony
with little background in higher education, is the right person
for the job.
"It's true that he was the point person on Complete College
Tennessee," said Aims McGuinness, a senior associate with the
National Center for Higher Education Management Systems
who has worked on governance and other issues in Tennessee
and many other states. "But for more than a decade, long
before the governor's initiative came about, John Morgan has
been a major force in connecting higher education to larger
policies in Tennessee. He's somebody who understands higher
education in Tennessee, can work with both political parties,
and can provide the kind of dynamic leadership that the
system hasn't always had."
Process ...
The situation involving Morgan raises two separate (if perhaps
related) issues. The first surrounds the process the regents
used to select him, whether it was legitimate or flawed, and
how it will affect his ability to manage the system. The second,
and arguably more interesting and important, set of issues
involves the extent to which public higher education should
turn to politicians as leaders and how much alignment is
appropriate, and desirable, between state government and
higher education.
Critics point to an array of circumstances to argue that the
process was imperfect, if not rigged. Among them: that the
Board of Regents abandoned their longstanding practice of
requiring chancellor candidates to have earned a doctorate,
enabling Morgan's candidacy; that the job description focused
so heavily on the ability to work with state leaders, and on
familiarity with the new higher education law that Morgan
helped enact; that the entire search process lasted all of six
weeks; and that few candidates were considered and only one
interviewed.
The search committee interviewed Morgan on July 30, 15 days
after the deadline for applications closed, and interviewed
no one else. A week later, the full board voted to hire him.
"That's quite clearly a very short period of time, if board
members are really interested in considering a wide range of
candidates," said Donald E. Heller, a professor and director of
the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Pennsylvania
State University. "I can understand why people might look at
the process and question it."
That's all the more true given a local television station's
report this week that a Democratic state legislator had
introduced legislation in January that would have exempted
from state requirements that candidates for higher education
chancellorships or presidencies anyone with "10 or more years
of service" in state government positions such as "secretary of
state ... treasurer, ... cabinet level staff, ..." -- or comptroller of
the treasury, Morgan's post from 1999 to 2009.
Faculty leaders also object to the fact that the regents included
no faculty representatives on the search committee, and say
that reflects a troubling inclination on the part of the board
to minimize the views of the professoriate. "I think the faculty
are going to want to hear from Chancellor Morgan that he is
going to consult with the faculty on major initiatives that affect
Published by: philosophyandrew
higher education in this state," Barry Gidcomb, a historian
at Columbus State University who cast the lone vote against
Morgan on the Board of Regents, told The Tennessean after
last week's vote.
Agenia Cole, a regent who headed the search committee, said
in an interview Wednesday that she was disappointed by the
suggestions that the panel's search process was anything but
above board. She disputed several assertions by critics, but
most took issue with the idea that the committee had focused
on the Complete College law to help Morgan. How could the
Tennessee regents focus on anything but the law, given how it
will reshape the higher education picture in the state for the
next several years? she suggested.
"The new legislation is going to be the constant [for the Board
of Regents system] for the near future, and it gave us a
complete and total different set of lenses to look at the system
through," said Cole. "So in putting together the job description,
I started with that obvious focus."
Cole also challenged the notion that the regents kept the
applicant pool small to favor Morgan. She said she spoke
privately to several strong candidates (including some more
traditional ones) who were discouraged from applying because
Tennessee's strong open records law would have revealed their
identities early in the process, putting their current jobs at risk.
The same thing happened during the 2008-9 search that the
board scuttled, she said, well before Morgan appeared on the
scene.
... and Politics
The immediate concerns about how the regents went about
selecting Morgan reflect a larger discomfort -- within
Tennessee and nationally -- about the intertwining of politics
and public higher education. This is not a new concern; public
colleges (and public higher education systems) have appointed
politicians as leaders for a long time, and now as before, there
are good ones and bad ones, just as there is great variation
in the quality and skill of presidents and chancellors from all
backgrounds. (There have been some high-profile flameouts in
recent years by politicians who could not change their stripes
to fit well in academe.)
Many faculty leaders and others still cling to the idea that
public colleges should be led by people with experience
as academic administrators, who "have a good working
knowledge of faculty concerns, student issues and staff
problems," Burriss, the Middle Tennessee professor, said in
his e-mail about the selection. "I am thus concerned about
how much Mr. Morgan really understands about higher
education."
Burriss, reflecting concerns commonly held by faculty
members and some higher education officials in Tennessee,
also sees Morgan as part of a line of "state-level administrators
in Tennessee [who] have tried to apply an assembly-line
model to the educational system, assuming that students
and graduates are nothing more than 'products' that can be
cranked out like widgets.... I am afraid this appointment will
merely continue the 'bean counting' mentality that is currently
applied to higher education."
6
August 12th, 2010
Paul Lingenfelter, president of the State Higher Education
Executive Officers, said he understands the concerns of many
faculty and staff members about universities' turning to
politicians as leaders. "I think it's important to be sensitive to
these issues, but not have a categorical, kneejerk response," he
said. "It'd be a mistake for academics, in reflexive reaction, to
say that anyone with political engagement is not good for the
job. The important issue is, did a board make a decision, and
did they decide this is the right person to meet the needs of an
institution going forward?"
For some in Tennessee, the issue is less about a politician
leading a university system than about the tight alignment
between the state's political leaders and (now) the chancellor
of the Board of Regents. In an era when more and more
states are imposing (or at least considering) governor-led,
statewide initiatives to reform higher education, it's widely
understood that state chief executives will put close colleagues
or others they trust into higher education cabinet posts or the
equivalent.
But is it wise, or necessary, for institutional leaders to be linked
to a governor, too? Especially a governor who, as Bredesen is,
will be out of office by January, when he must leave because
of term limits?
McGuinness of the National Center for Higher Education
Management Systems said he believed that it shortchanges
Morgan to emphasize his ties to Bredesen, rather than his deep
knowledge of the state's financial and educational operations
and his background as a "very low-key problem solver with an
incredible reputation for integrity."
"This is just somebody who understands Tennessee, and what
higher education there needs to be and do to help its future,"
he said.
David Gregory, vice chancellor for finance and administration
at the Tennessee Board of Regents, offers a more practical
reason why harmony with well-connected leaders in the state
might be good for a public college system like his. "If you
have alignment or connectivity, and general buy-in on where
the system needs to be moving forward -- if they can see that
we're moving to achieve state goals, by having more students
complete college -- we stand a chance to increase our level of
resources," he said.
But given how whimsical state policy directions are, and
how quickly the winds of political change blow, counting on
political savvy or connections may be risky, said Heller of
Penn State. Which is why, ultimately, the question of whether
Morgan was a good choice for the Tennessee regents will have
little to do with what he did as deputy governor.
"There's a big difference between crafting a political solution
and working it through the legislature, and being the leader
of a large complex organization like [the Tennessee Board
of Regents]," Heller said. "The question now is, can he be
successful in that kind of position?"
Position Summary: The Princeton University Art Museum
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Changed but Still Critical:
Brick and Mortar School
Libraries in the Digital Age
Source: http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=53100
August 12th, 2010
Are brick and mortar school libraries still relevant in the
digital age? I don't think so - unless it's a place where you can
recharge your e-reader and maybe work out on the Wii. Doug
Johnson, though, thinks that libraries are a little more relevant
than that. "I would argue that the best school libraries are
not just surviving, but thriving, in this new digital information
environment – but not without seriously re-purposing their
physical spaces." He cites three major ways in this two part
( part one , part two ) article: as social learning spaces,
as multi-media production and presentation spaces, and as
teaching spaces. Well - that kind of makes my point. None
of these are uses we would typically associate with a library.
What about the books? He writes, "Books will be available in
multiple formats for a very long time. Print, audio and digital
will continue to co-exist quite nicely much as radio, television
and the Internet does now." You think? I don't. Doug Johnson,
Blue Skunk Blog, August 11, 2010 [ Link ] [ Comment ]
Georgia Counts
Undocumented Students
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/12/qt/
georgia_counts_undocumented_students
August 12th, 2010
A Kennesaw State University student's minor traffic violation
led to the discovery that she lacked the legal documentation
to be in the United States -- and her case set off a
political furor in Georgia over students like her, leading to
demands that Georgia's colleges count them (and be sure they
weren't receiving in-state tuition rates). Data released by the
University System of Georgia Wednesday suggests that such
students are relatively few in number. Of nearly 50,000 new
students expected statewide this fall, 242 are undocumented
7
August 12th, 2010
students, and all will be charged out-of-state tuition,
Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
From Teachers' Manifesto to
Learners' Manifesto
Source: http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=53098
August 12th, 2010
I like the idea of a learner's manifesto , but this manifesto
reads as students' instructions to teachers. That's not a
manifesto (which is typically a call to action for ourselves )
but rather a list of demands (or maybe preferences). A real
learners' manifesto would contain a list of statements from
learners about what we will do with respect to learning. For
example, instead of telling teachers to "place more emphasis
on the skills that will help young people to progress and
prosper in the twenty-first century..." it would say "we will
study 21st-century skills..."
This is not just a wording change. It's a change in attitude. It
is a statement that we (learners) will take control of our own
learning, and that no manner what it taught in the classroom,
we will convert it to ways we can help ourselves learn critical
thinking, focus on real-world problems, embrace diversity,
and the rest of it. Or as I sometimes tell people when they ask
about my work history: "if I just did my job as I was told, I'd
still be doing that job. What I did instead was to transform my
job into a way to accomplish my goals."
John Connell, Weblog, August 11, 2010 [ Link ] [ Comment ]
Hunting Out West
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/12/cobleskill
August 12th, 2010
The strategy may not be new, but few expected it to come out
of Cobleskill, N.Y.
As an economic downturn forces California’s public
universities to cut enrollment, the State University of New
York at Cobleskill is unabashedly gunning for disenchanted
students there who may now be considering other options.
Out-of-state recruitment is common among many colleges and
universities, but for SUNY Cobleskill – a rural upstate campus
of just 2,600 students – an advertising campaign designed
to lure Californians is a marked strategic shift, suggesting
institutions of varied size and name recognition are poised to
make inroads in the troubled Golden State.
Cobleskill’s efforts began last fall with something of a media
blitz. The campus ran a series of advertisements in the
newspapers of California community colleges with programs
similar to those of Cobleskill. In the spring, officials followed
up that campaign with another round of ads, promoting the
campus' agricultural bent under the headline “Got College? We
Do!”
Apart from its co-opting of the iconic “Got Milk?” campaign,
there was something else painfully obvious about Cobleskill’s
Published by: philosophyandrew
The ads: The campaign was suggesting students have good reason
to be dissatisfied with options in a state long associated with
the nation’s premiere public system of higher education.
“It would have been a nonviable strategy five years ago,
because there was plenty of room at the inn in California," said
Donald Zingale, president of Cobleskill.
Zingale is no stranger to California. While he may be a New
York native, he built his academic career out West. Zingale
came to Cobleskill from California State University’s Maritime
Academy, and previously held administrative posts at three
other California State University campuses in San Francisco,
Los Angeles and Sacramento.
“It’s only natural that I continue to follow trends in higher
education in my state of origin, and of course what I find out is
California community colleges are this year about to graduate
a number of well-prepared students, quite a few of them from
the ag area, who will not find slots in the Cal State system or
the UC system,” Zingale said. “Here are kids who are wanting
for a college education to transfer, and we have a number of
baccalaureate programs that are well-suited to certain kinds
of students.”
That's not to say SUNY doesn't have its own problems.
Lawmakers just cut $210 million from the system's budget,
and they rejected legislation that would have given the
university greater tuition flexibility. Even so, Cobleskill sees
potential in California, where public institutions have indeed
cut enrollment. California State University, which closed
admission for the last spring term, has curtailed enrollment by
about 20,000 students. More hopeful budget predictions have
officials suggesting those cuts could be reversed by this coming
spring, but last spring's admissions closure was particularly
hard on community college students, who often transfer at that
time. The University of California has also reduced enrollment
by 3,800 students across the system since 2009, although the
university has increased its admission of community college
students by 1,000 students in that same time frame.
Photo: SUNY Cobleskill
An advertisement promoting SUNY Cobleskill ran in more
than 60 California community college newspapers in fall 2009
and spring 2010. The campus aims to recruit students who
may be frustrated about shrinking offerings in California.
There is no doubt that California students, particularly in
heavily enrolled majors, are fighting harder for seats at their
top-choice institutions, and “that’s a huge opportunity for
a school like us,” said Chris Tacea, Cobleskill’s director of
8
August 12th, 2010
admissions. Admittedly, however, California’s struggles have
yet to translate into a surge of students for Cobleskill. In
the wake of this first push, only one California student has
accepted Cobleskill’s invitation. But compared to a norm of
zero, it's easy to see why Cobleskill officials are encouraged.
While the campaign has yet to produce much in the way
of tangible results, it’s already paid for itself, Zingale said.
Cobleskill spent $4,000 on its advertisements, and “all you
need is one student to enroll and you’ve literally paid for the
entire project,” he said.
Nonresident tuition is $12,870 at Cobleskill – more than
double the $5,070 New Yorkers pay. That kind of out-of-state
price tag will likely be a deterrent for a lot of Californians, even
if they're frustrated with shrinking offerings in their home
state.
"California’s public colleges and universities remain among
the most affordable in the country," Terri Carbaugh,
spokeswoman for California Community Colleges, wrote in an
e-mail to Inside Higher Ed. "California places a high priority
on investing in human capital. Even though they are often
courted by out-of-state universities, more likely than not, our
students remain in state."
For those who may leave, however, Carbaugh noted that it
serves the national agenda for greater college completion rates
-- even if it's not what California education officials would
prefer.
"If a California student transfers to an out of state university,
it is not great news for the California economy, but likewise it
is not terrible news for our nation's economy," she wrote. "We
are all facing these challenging times together whether you live
in California, Texas, New York or Mississippi."
Unlike some other states, New York does not set a cap on
the number of nonresidents a public university can admit
-- and many politicians there have said they would actually
like to see more out-of-state students. Moreover, New York's
funding model arguably creates an incentive for at least some
of an institution’s students to be from elsewhere. Cobleskill
receives a state subsidy (along with tuition) for every full-
time equivalent (FTE) student up to a total enrollment of
2,400, but there’s no subsidy for the approximately 200
other students the campus typically enrolls in a given year.
It therefore makes economic sense for most of the students
over the 2,400 threshold to be out-of-staters or international
students who bring in additional revenue to offset the lack of
subsidy, Zingale said.
“We’ll have fulfilled our commitment to the state of New York,
and the other students will be self-supporting in that they are
from other states,” he said.
Zingale argued that diversifying the student body is another
good reason for seeking nonresidents, insisting that “the
money is the icing on the cake.” That’s a common argument
in public higher education, but it’s often viewed as more
of a political justification than an honestly held position.
It was telling, for instance, that a crowd gathered recently
for the annual meeting of the National Association of
Colleges and University Business Officers (NACUBO) in San
Francisco laughed heartily when Zingale spoke publicly about
Published by: philosophyandrew
Cobleskill’s California campaign. Indeed, a panelist for the
discussion mockingly stated that nonresidents “really add to
the enrichment” of the learning environment. That drew even
bigger laughs.
“The chucklers probably came from [college officials in]
large metropolitan areas,” Zingale said. “Probably who wasn’t
chuckling were the campuses in [less diverse] small rural areas
like us.”
Beyond the advertising campaign, Cobleskill is playing up
its niche with trips to California. Campus officials were in
Fresno, Calif., for instance, at a meeting of the National
FFA Organization, formerly known as the Future Farmers of
America. The meeting draws students who are interested in
agriculture, and Cobleskill expects its programs to appeal to
them.
Asked if he saw anything Machiavellian about targeting a
state in trouble, Zingale suggested he might actually be doing
California a favor.
"A lot of those students are going to go back to California, and
California will benefit from their increased tax base at no cost
to the state of California because we're educating them," he
said.
And if they don't?
"In that case, maybe we did rip off California," he said. "But
the kidchose to stay here."
The College of William & Mary invites applications and
nominations for the position of Senior Associate Dean of
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Director of AdmissionsPosition Located in Qatar - Begins
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HTML5 Boilerplate
Source: http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=53097
August 12th, 2010
I spent a good half hour studying this HTML5 boilerplate,
which automatically tells me it's worth passing on. Basically,
the page contains default header information, .htaccess and
styling to prepare your site for a range of possible browser
configurations. That said, if you don't understand it, don't use
it. The CSS is pretty safe, but the Google analytics will fail
without modification, the .htaccess may mess up your page
address rewrite rules, and if you're using JSON you may find
changes to document.write may block it. And I don't know
what "remap jQuery to $" does. Paul Irish and Divya Manian,
Website, August 11, 2010 [ Link ] [ Comment ]
Not Just a Foot in the Door
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/12/baccalaureate
9
August 12th, 2010
August 12th, 2010
When the first community colleges sought permission to offer
four-year degrees, they generally said that it would only be
one or two programs — nothing dramatic. But in Florida,
where the community college baccalaureate movement is
strongest, community colleges now offer more than 100
four-year degrees, and the figure could be about to jump
significantly.
Though a handful of Florida community colleges had won
approval to offer select four-year degrees around 2001, the
rest of the state took hold of the idea in 2008, when Gov.
Charlie Crist signed a controversial bill rebranding the state’s
community college system so that its institutions could more
readily offer baccalaureate degrees. The four-year degrees
authorized were those in disciplines such as nursing and
education, where local four-year institutions could not meet
the high demand, and in the career-specific concentrations of
the applied sciences.
Despite strict state rules keeping the growth of these
community college baccalaureate degrees in check, ensuring
that they would not adversely affect existing associate degree
programs or compete in an unhealthy way with nearby
offerings at four-year institutions, some critics remained
concerned about the move. Growth, however, was rapid.
In 2008, 10 of the state’s 28 community colleges offered 70
baccalaureate degrees. Now, 18 community colleges offer 111
four-year degrees. Most of the degrees are still in nursing and
education; however, growth in the variety of applied science
programs has introduced a range of concentrations, from
homeland security to fire science management; from interior
design to international business. With 24 baccalaureate
degrees to choose from, St. Petersburg College offers the most
of any community college in the state.
Pamela Menke, vice provost for education at Miami Dade
College, said she no longer hears colleagues at four-year
institutions or other critics accuse her institution of “mission
creep.” Nearby public and private four-year institutions must
be consulted when a Florida community college wishes to
add a baccalaureate degree, and they can offer competing
proposals to address the high need for these programs on
their campuses instead. Menke notes that none of the 12
baccalaureate degrees now offered by Miami Dade generated
a competing proposal.
By and large, Menke explained, it is less expensive for a
community college to add the remaining two years for a
program they already offer at the associate degree level than
for a nearby four-year institution to create a baccalaureate
program from scratch. This, she added, is the case with the
college’s new four-year degree in film, television and digital
production, as the college already has a studio and all of the
high-tech equipment in place.
To show how far these new degrees have come in being
accepted around the state, Menke pointed to recent state-
level changes in how certain community colleges can introduce
them.
Last month, a change in Florida state statute went into effect,
giving community colleges that have already successfully
Published by: philosophyandrew
added baccalaureate degree programs the ability to petition
the state for local autonomy in pursuing further four-year
degrees. The details have yet to be finalized by the state system,
but the rule change will eventually give boards at colleges
that have offered four-year degrees for at least three years the
ability to approve any new offerings themselves.
“This will pretty much give our community colleges the
same protocol that state universities have when they add
baccalaureate degrees,” said Judith Bilsky, executive vice
chancellor in the Florida Department of Education’s Office of
Student and Academic Success. “It doesn’t say colleges have to
go that route. … If anything’s changed, I think it’s that there’s a
better understanding of what it means to be part of the Florida
College System.”
Bilsky argued that the demographics of students in these
new community college baccalaureate degree programs have
convinced many that they are not stealing students who would
otherwise have gone to four-year institutions. For instance,
whereas three-fourths of the students in the state’s public four-
year institutions are between the ages of 18 and 25, more than
three-fourths of students in community college baccalaureate
programs are older than 26 (with most of those being older
than 35).
Bilsky added that these new programs are also attracting
students from “underserved populations” that have not
typically thrived at the state’s four-year institutions. She does
not expect future expansion of these degrees to “compete” in
any way with those offered by existing state universities.
“I expect any growth of these baccalaureate degrees to come
from local need and demand in the areas we’ve already
authorized," Bilsky said. “I don’t anticipate the addition of
liberal arts degrees. I just don’t see that in the future. Although,
ten years ago I didn’t think we’d be where we are now. … If
anything, I think we may see the Florida colleges taking on
more responsibility for training teachers at the baccalaureate
level.”
Menke echoed a similar sentiment about the slim possibility of
liberal arts offerings at Miami Dade, which offers the second-
most community college baccalaureate degrees in the state.
“It would seem unlikely,” Menke said. “It would be hard to
offer English or something like that unless there were clear
workforce applications for the degree.”
To Add or Not to Add
The predominant difference between the 18 Florida
community colleges that offer baccalaureate degrees and
the 10 that do not — as both groups contain a mix of
rural and urban institutions and those with fewer and
greater neighboring four-year institutions — seems to be the
philosophy of their leaders.
Kenneth Walker, president of Edison State College, noted that
his institution decided to begin offering baccalaureate degrees
in various education concentrations because of the shortage
of elementary and secondary school teachers in its five-county
service area. In the past two years, the college has also added
programs in nursing and public safety management, among
others. Walker noted that none of the college’s new degrees
10
August 12th, 2010
generated competing proposals from neighboring four-year
institutions.
Though Edison State’s current baccalaureate degrees have not
generated any flack from nearby universities — in fact, Florida
Gulf Coast University’s president has been complimentary
about them in the local press — the community college’s
unique plan for the future has produced some concern.
Earlier this year, Walker announced he would like to see his
institution eventually create a “spinoff” private institution,
offering baccalaureate and master’s degrees. In theory, this
new institution would not be subject to the limits placed on
Edison State as to what kinds of four-year degrees it can offer.
J. David Armstrong, president of Broward College and
chancellor of the Florida College System from 2001 to 2006,
argued that, despite the attention baccalaureate degrees at his
institution receive, they remain just a small portion of what the
college offers. He estimated that enrollment in the nine four-
year degrees at his institution makes up less than 5 percent
of its more than 65,000 students. Also, he noted, the college
continues to add new two-year programs.
“Initially, people were concerned about the cannibalization
of the tradition community college mission,” Armstrong said.
“There were concerns that it would whittle down and take
money away from adult education and other programs, but
that certainly has not happened here. I keep on telling people
that these [baccalaureate] degrees are no more important than
some of our new [associate degree] programs, such as marine
technology — that’s far more expensive to run than any of our
baccalaureate programs. Also, we just added a new air traffic
control program that has a $1 million flight simulator. That’s
also far more expensive than anything for our baccalaureate
degrees.”
Sandy Shugart, president of Valencia Community College, had
no intention of adding baccalaureate degrees at his institution.
That is, until a nearby four-year institution changed his mind.
“We’re just so committed to our community college mission
here that we didn’t want to do anything to devalue it
in any way,” said Shugart, noting that Valencia’s main
commitment is to its transfer mission and DirectConnect, a
new program which gives its students guaranteed admission
to the neighboring University of Central Florida.
Central Florida, however, is having overcrowding issues of
its own, and has ballooned to become one of the largest
undergraduate institutions in the country. Recently, Shugart
said, Central Florida officials told him and other neighboring
community colleges that regularly feed students into it that
the university was dropping a handful of majors due to budget
constraints. There programs were, he explained, “reasonably
well-enrolled programs [in engineering and allied health] that
lead to mostly terminal baccalaureate degrees.”
Given that there was still demand for these programs, Central
Florida wanted Valencia to take on at least two of them. So,
if Valencia wins the state board's approval, it plans to begin
offering baccalaureate degrees in engineering technology
and radiology imaging. Shugart acknowledged that if his
institution did not offer these degrees they probably would not
be offered in and around the Orlando area. Still, he is not eager
to add any more four-year degrees.
Published by: philosophyandrew
“We would not have done this if [Central Florida] had not
approached us,” Shugart said. “We have our hands pretty full
already. As long as the need was met elsewhere, we wouldn’t
have done this. … At least for now, ‘community’ is our middle
name. I’d like to keep it that way.”
That reluctance to add baccalaureate degree remains for some
of Shugart’s colleagues at community colleges around the
state. Few of them, however, express outright opposition to the
idea, either on their campuses or on others. Instead, many just
think their communities don't require it.
James Drake, president of Brevard Community College, noted
that the thought of adding baccalaureate degrees is simply not
on his “radar.”
“I don’t foresee the college considering baccalaureate
programs, at least in the near-term, because we have
longstanding ‘two plus-two’ articulation agreements with the
University of Central Florida and the Florida Institution of
Technology, both of which guarantee admission to graduates
of our A.A. programs, as well as to an increasing number
of our A.S. programs,” Drake wrote in an e-mail. “With a
guarantee of admission to two nationally known universities in
our service area, and with the workforce retraining challenges
our residents are facing because of the discontinuation of the
space-shuttle program, we have a full plate as it is.”
Katherine Johnson, president of Pasco-Hernando Community
College, also felt that her institution is fulfilling the needs
of its service area by concentrating on two-year degrees and
workforce development programs.
“At this point, we believe that [the college] is filling a unique
and much needed niche for our constituency,” Johnson wrote
in an e-mail. “Our students are able to complete associate’s
degrees affordably and conveniently with many options to
transfer degrees to a variety of public and private four-year
institutions. … If the need arises, [the college] would certainly
do our best to meet the needs of our students by adding
bachelor degree programs.”
Some scholars, however, remain concerned about the rapid
growth of these degrees.
Linda Serra Hagedorn, professor and director of the Research
Institute for Studies in Higher Education at Iowa State
University, said that adding too many baccalaureate degrees
might water down the traditional mission of community
colleges.
“There are a lot of different types of students who knock
at the door of community colleges,” said Hagedorn, who
before moving to Iowa State was a longtime educational
policy researcher at the University of Florida. “I just worry
that they’re not going to be able to serve all those different
types if they’re bringing in more four-year program students.
There will be less room for remediation and truly vocational
programs. Some are not going to be as well-served as others.
We have to remember the reason community colleges were
established in the first place.”
Still, Hagedorn conceded that scholars do not know enough
about these community college baccalaureate programs to
say whether they have adversely affected existing two-year
11
August 12th, 2010
programs. As to why the furor in Florida over these degrees
had died down, she said the answer was simple.
"The cry that ‘oh my god, the community colleges are going
to be taking away our students’ didn’t happen,” Hagedorn
said. “There’s no shortage of students going to the University
of Florida or the University of Central Florida or to any of
Florida’s other universities right now.”
Assist faculty, staff and students to implement software
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Higher Ed Economics: How
Can We Have an Informed
National Conversation?
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning/ the_education_of_oronte_churm/unified_communications_at_illinois
higher_ed_economics_how_can_we_have_an_informed_national_conversationAugust 12th, 2010
August 12th, 2010
By Joshua Kim August 11, 2010 9:30 pm
The discussion around the economics of higher education
yesterday was really amazing.
I now have a list of articles and places to research to begin to go
up the learning curve of post-secondary finance. Thank you.
What I'm wondering now is how we can have an informed,
nationwide discussion around the economics of higher
education?
Ideally, this discussion would be online and asynchronous. I'm
not saying that we don't discuss costs, access, and productivity
at our existing face-to-face conferences. However, in my
experience these discussion tend to be amongst peers in
similar jobs (say CIO to CIO), as opposed to colleagues in
different leadership positions at our institutions.
An online discussion could also be more inclusive, bringing in
campus leaders - but also people working on the front-lines.
The broader the range of professions the better. A discussion
such as this could include faculty and administrators.
People who teach and people who manage and run the
technology. People in charge of getting the money (enrollment,
admissions, marketing, development, etc.) and people in
Published by: philosophyandrew
charge of spending the money (faculty, administrators etc.).
Maybe even some student input.
My fantasy for such a discussion is that it would be run like a
great online course. We would have a core set of readings, and
structured discussions based on those readings. The course
(discussion) would be led by recognized experts in the field
of higher ed economics. We would come away from the
experience with a set of concrete recommendations and ideas
we could bring back to our communities.
The problem is that I have no idea how to make something like
this actually happen. Even if we could figure out a platform
that allowed the sharing of materials and discussions, we
would need the "expert(s)" to actually build the environment.
And even if we had an expert and a platform, would we really
be able to engage higher education decision makers in this
discussion?
Are these discussions on the economics of higher ed already
taking place? Has the Obama administration brought together
college presidents, CIOs, CFOs, provosts, deans, faculty and
students to talk about productivity, costs, and access in higher
education? Has the Department of Education published a set
of best-practices and case studies of institutions that have
lowered costs (lowered tuition), while increasing enrollment
and quality? Are their grants available aimed specifically at
programs that increase enrollments while lowering costs?
How do we start, maintain, and participate in a national
conversation on the economics of higher ed?
Unified Communications at
Illinois
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/
By Oronte August 11, 2010 6:15 pm
Several sessions were held this week by Campus Information
Technologies and Educational Services (CITES) at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to explain the
campus move from “legacy” technology to Microsoft’s unified
communications system.
The session I attended, for faculty, was held in a three-
ballroom space filled with hundreds of chairs. It was staffed
with six or eight people, including three Microsoft reps, and
they had enough technology among them to run the Bulgarian
space program. Two large screens, one on either side of the
dais, had been set up for the demonstration so everyone could
see, but only about three dozen faculty, lecturers, instructors,
or teaching assistants attended, which is to say, less than one-
fifth of those who teach in my department alone.
A Beatles’ session tape was playing as we waited. One of the
Microsoft reps shut it off during “The Long and Winding Road”
and began with a wry and perhaps premeditated comment that
there had been “some years of work already” to get us to this
point.
Illinois currently uses different tools for e-mail, conferencing,
“calendaring,” instant messaging, and telephony and voice
mail.
12
August 12th, 2010
“…Microsoft’s Exchange Server and Unified Communications
products…will replace [individual] systems,” the CITES
website reads. “These changes, which will result in significant
savings in time and money for the campus, will leverage our
world-class data network and cutting-edge communication
and collaboration tools.” The update was a mandate at a school
that not only prides itself on its engineering and computer
science programs but also belongs to a state system in deep
financial trouble.
“June 2012 is the date for turning off all non-unified systems,”
said Charley Kline, IT Architect at CITES. By spending two
million dollars for upgrades now, he said, the university
will save three million dollars each year until then, what he
described as “an ROI [return on investment] any business
would like to have.”
Existing e-mail and calendaring “have to go away,” Kline said.
“They’re at the end.” And instead of multiple e-mail addresses,
phone numbers, and other ways of routing communications
from various users, “your e-mail address will become your
[sole] identity in the future.”
The advantages of the new system, we were told, is that Illinois
faculty would: A) use one communications tool and one sign-
in; B) have access to all their messages from desktops, laptops,
PDAs, cell phones, or landlines; C) be able to read voicemail
by email, and listen to and reply to email over the phone; D)
see “colleagues’ real-time status and identify their preferred
method of communication”; and E) personalize the features of
the system, such as level of contact with others.
A Microsoft rep did several of these tasks and projected
them on the big screens. Much of it worked well, though it
was a little dizzying as the screens and popups flashed by,
driven by an expert user who occasionally made mistakes
and wandered around at lightning speed in the applications
to fix his problems. The audience laughed when the
pleasant voice of the computer interface chided him for not
speaking his commands more simply, during the hands-free
demonstration, though it completed his requests. The video
conference he tried to put together on the spot didn’t go
through, and while describing the ease of “bringing people in
real quick” he admitted to having hit the wrong button in a
demonstration at Northwestern and auto-calling 22 people on
a list. “I had to send e-mails for two days saying sorry,” he said.
I know too that transcription of voicemails to a text message
or e-mail can be tricky. I left a voicemail for a friend recently,
as I was driving my boys home from a visit to see his parents,
where the band .38 Special was playing at the local festival,
and tickets were $12. The e-mail version he received read:
Hey, you know man. Peace in the boys are driving home. Mr
Aaron faster Curran. It's a color monitor so I guess we got to
go home now. The interested last night with your mom and
dad appreciate that. Peace lot of. I guess. Go over to his from
drinking and player tub of Miller Beer with so it was. Yeah.
And yeah, I would like to try to get all as well, so I just wanna
go over it that anyway. 38 Specialist plant last night but as i
said, i think i did you go from being like and Syria. Chin, M,
T V, 1 M, T V or something down to play on the Herrin fast
or Tickets are $12 billion. Anyway, and we're doing well and
I'll catch you later. Bye.
Published by: philosophyandrew
But it's clear the new system will do many things, including
provide the ability to poll students in real-time during a lecture
(“do you understand the lecture?” was the example provided)
and record lectures and capture other materials for archiving.
(“Some professors who think of their lectures as ‘theirs’ might
have some problems with this feature,” a Microsoft rep said
after the session. “But I think those used to thinking in the
newer ways will realize that it benefits their institutions to have
that material available to, say, the whole Big Ten, the entire
nation, to third-world countries.”)
New components that will be installed with the change include
fake telephones on every desk—actually small computers
transmitting on the wireless network—that have no hardwired
phone lines, and the possibility of “adjunct thumb[-print
recognition] swipers” for people who share phones in group
offices.
The tradeoff, Kline admitted, is that software systems won’t
be as reliable as hardware, and any system that allows remote
use from personal computers is even less so. In the telecom
world, there’s a “five nines” rule of reliability: public phone
systems must work 99.999% of the time, which allows for only
five minutes per year of unplanned downtime. Cell phones, he
said, are typically 99.9% reliable, with 8.76 hours of downtime
per year, and desktop PCs are just 99% reliable—3.65 days of
downtime. A unified system such as the one at Illinois will be
tied to that weakest link.
Personal computer, software, server, and network failures,
and building or city power-outages become, with this kind of
system, blocks to productivity at best; at worst, they’re life-
threatening emergencies, such as if someone gets trapped in
an elevator and can’t call the police, or there’s a fire in a lab
and no one can dial the fire department. Possible solutions,
Kline said, include both education (awareness and training
of alternatives in case of the coincidence of emergency and
outage) and old-style hardwired phones in key locations such
as elevators, hallways of buildings, and “blue light” emergency
kiosks around campus.
While it seems many might balk at losing reliability for any
reason, at any time, Kline said that our society has already
chosen the increased functionality of smartphones over their
lesser reliability, so it shouldn’t be a problem.
In the brief Q&A session following the presentation, a few of
those present asked about other concerns. One woman said
she taught large lectures and stored all her grades on her
laptop. “Since everything I do now will live in some server
cloud, will Microsoft guarantee the security of all this personal
information?” she demanded.
No, said the Microsoft rep, he would not commit Microsoft
to the security of everything that was on her personal laptop.
The audience laughed, and she looked flustered and angry. He
gently went on to explain that she could choose how much
access anyone on the unified system had to her data, and that
there were always risks, every time she got on the Internet,
through any portal.
She responded by saying she never got on the Internet with
that computer, ever—admitting a breath later she sometimes
downloaded some things—then asked, “Am I paranoid?”
13
August 12th, 2010
The Microsoft rep paused and said, “Maybe above the mean.”
The room rang with laughter.
But a CITES employee told me privately that unless users know
how to use the system well, it might be easy, if using a personal
laptop or home desktop, to leave open a path to data that
could be shattering in the wrong hands. If, for instance, you let
students or friends have access to something on your desktop
—say, an open-source program like Audacity—they could
suddenly find their way into your personal bank statements,
medical information, perhaps mean-spirited correspondence,
or stash of porn.
For reasons having nothing to do with paranoia I can say with
some certainty that I will never in a million years use all the
features of the new system. As an adjunct in the humanities
I don’t usually get invited to participate in video conferences
—though I was once nearly a junior participant in a State
Department-funded video conference on Chekhov, until the
gig fell through because there was no easy way to get us
to a video link—and I don’t online chat or “calendar” as a
verb or do voice-recognition tasks or check to see if my peers
have blocked their calls with “in a meeting” messages. I don’t
teach online, and my big lecture classes rely on, at most, a
microphone, an overhead projector, and sometimes a DVD
player. I don’t even use my ancient office phone.
The last question of the day, for which there was no time,
was from a prof who reminded the corporate reps that the
university had strict rules against using school resources
(including phones and computers) to do any personal task.
Indeed, the state-required ethics test we all take online once a
year makes it clear that violations can be punished by loss of
job, fines, and legal prosecution. I could be fired, for instance,
if I used my university e-mail account to send a message to my
editor here at IHE. With a unified system “there’s no longer
a wall” between work we do as employees and work we do
for ourselves, the prof said—especially if our e-mail addresses,
which are the same as our university IDs, become our sole
online identities in a system meant to subsume all ways of
communicating with each other.
Charley Kline blinked and said that the “state rules were
archaic,” but the man who asked the question wasn’t
convinced. A Microsoft rep stepped forward and assured him
that a committee had been formed to look into that. As
his co-workers shut down their system connections, e-mail
accounts, chat spaces, electronic calendars, address books,
onboard cameras, and internal and external microphones in
their laptops, along with their projectors, Bluetooths, and
who knows what other software and hardware, the rep said
the committee would “help us perhaps re-think those archaic
rules.”
Back to breadcrumbs (#7) -
Plastiki
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/getting_to_green/
back_to_breadcrumbs_7_plastiki
August 12th, 2010
By G. Rendell August 11, 2010 4:00 pm
Published by: philosophyandrew
In case you missed it a couple of weeks back, a boat constructed
almost entirely from re-purposed plastic soda bottles has
sailed from San Francisco to Sydney, Australia!
While I doubt that this will set a new standard in nautical
design, I do think it makes a compelling (and classroom-
appropriate) argument for the idea that what we currently
consider waste could just as easily be considered a stream of
useful materials.
And it's a material stream which is inherently sized and located
appropriately to the distribution of human population, or at
least consumption of manufactured goods. In waste as in real
estate, maybe location is everything.
Are the Social Sciences
Becoming Global?
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/the_world_view/
are_the_social_sciences_becoming_global
August 12th, 2010
By Jorge Balán August 11, 2010 9:15 am
Much of the debate on the globalization of higher education
and knowledge production focuses on science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Research in the
social sciences and humanities (SSH), however, has also
been deeply affected by the growth in academic mobility,
the revolution in information technology, and changes in
the institutional and organizational arrangements of the
research and advanced training enterprise. Differences remain
important, however, because of the degree to which STEM and
SSH knowledge production is embedded in global systems:
important segments of the SSH in all countries are deeply
rooted in the national and regional societies and cultures,
addressing local needs and audiences in vernacular languages
–although the social science production of some countries,
most notably the US, is at the same time domestic and
international.
The World Social Science Report 2010, produced by the
International Social Science Council for UNESCO and
available online at www.unesco.org/shs/wssr, brings a wealth
of data and analysis on the uneven internationalization of
the social sciences worldwide during the last decade. I found
contributions in Chapter IV, based on indicators developed by
international databases of social science journals, publications
and articles (Thomson’s SSCI, Ulrich, Elsevier’s Scopus,
UNESCO’s International Bibliography of the Social Sciences),
particularly helpful to gauge national and regional trends
in the size and shape of the segment regularly captured by
those sources which, as authors and editors are well aware,
cover only the internationally visible production, more often
than not rendered in English. European and North American
publications make up the bulk of indexed academic journals
in the social sciences, between 75% of the total in the less
selective Ulrich database and 90% in Reuters’ SSCI.
14
August 12th, 2010
The social sciences in developing countries might be described
as rapidly growing enterprises whose visible tips –their
internationalized segments—still represent only a very small
part of the whole. China is an extreme example: according
to the SSCI, China was by 2007 the largest producer of
internationally recognized social science research papers
among developing countries –in 1995 it was still behind
India and Brazil—but only 1% of all papers in Chinese
national journals are indexed by the SSCI, mostly in English.
Unfortunately, we know very little about the other 99%. In
Brazil, Mexico, or India, the ratio of the internationally visible
tip to the total production is about one in three, but still the
bulk is domestically oriented, rooted in the academic demands
of rapidly expanding higher education systems, the needs
of governments and nongovernmental agencies for applied
research, and the interests of educated readers. The complex
relations between these two segments –the international,
oriented to the global social science community, and the
domestic, serving students, policymakers, and public opinion
—remain largely unexplored in this Report and elsewhere.
An examination of the number of papers produced by authors
from different world regions shows very uneven growth rates.
Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) had the largest
increase between 1998 and 2007 among all world regions,
supported perhaps by the growing tendency to publish in
indexed journals. The SSCI reported a fourfold increase from
the LAC region as a whole, with a six-fold increase in Brazil
alone. China’s growth was even faster, but India’s much
smaller increase got reflected in a lower average for Asian
production. India ranked first among developing countries by
the mid-1990s, but dropped to third place behind China and
Brazil a decade later.
The rapid increase in the size of the internationalized
domestic production in all developing countries brought down
the proportion of self-citations and citations to domestic
papers. In other words, the visible tip became larger and
more internationalized than in the past. Citations to their
production by authors in the central countries remain few,
but have tended to grow. Collaborative papers authored in
different regions are on the increase and show, as expected,
the heavy participation of authors from central countries.
Yet, as the domestic production increases in large developing
countries, the proportion of collaborative papers across
regions declines. Smaller countries, however, remain heavily
dependent upon co-authorship to participate in the global
social science.
North America (the US and Canada) is the largest producer
of indexed papers, but in a decade it has declined
about ten percentage points to slightly over 50% of the
global production. The largest relative increase has taken
place in Europe, now dominant in interregional research
collaboration. Citations from the rest of the world are almost
equally divided to papers produced in these two regions –
although Asia and Latin America tend to gravitate to North
America and Africa to Europe. The increased European weight
Published by: philosophyandrew
in the social science may be in part due to the inclusion of
a greater number of European journals in the databases, but
I guess it can also be attributed to the wider use of English
in academic publication and advanced training and the
formidable efforts of the European Community in sponsoring
both intraregional and interregional research collaboration.
Last, but not least, the regional analysis of social science
production reported by UNESCO shows the relative decline
in the production of social science papers within the CIS
countries (Commonwealth of Independent States, or former
Soviet republics), reflecting the disorganization of the higher
education systems following the fall of the Soviet Union and
most likely the effects of the massive brain drain during the
1990s and early 2000s. Unlike other dramatic cases of brain
drain, such as China or Korea, CIS countries have yet to benefit
on a large scale from the academic communities of expatriates
currently prospering in Western Europe and North America.
Jorge Balán is a senior researcher with CEDES in Argentina
and a Visiting Professor at OISE, University of Toronto.
The tweeting Dean of
Students
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/
student_affairs_and_technology/the_tweeting_dean_of_students
August 12th, 2010
By Eric Stoller August 11, 2010 4:30 am
I've been keeping track of as many tweeting Senior Student
Affairs Officers (SSAOs) as I possibly can via a Twitter list.
It is interesting to see how different tweeting styles emerge
based on personality, strategy, and a willingness to adopt
social media from a leadership perspective.
While he does not tweet a lot, Kenn Elmore, the Dean of
Students at Boston University (BU), has an amazing way of
finding interesting tidbits or "musings" to send out to the
Twitter universe.
"DeanElmore" frequently posts links to New York Times
articles and poses questions based on the context of the article.
With more than 3,400 followers, Dean Elmore is the most-
followed SSAO on my Twitter list. His tweets are usually
posted via an iPhone in order to keep up with the dean's busy
schedule.
I've spoken with Dean Elmore numerous times about using
Twitter as a communications platform from within a student
affairs position. We both agree that microblogs can be a
powerful medium for branding and engagement. The dean
does not respond to his fellow twitterers very often. When a
reply is posted, it is usually to a member of the BU community.
The effect of this type of engagement is especially provocative
15
August 12th, 2010 Published by: philosophyandrew
and powerful. Only a handful of folks receive replies on a working off a common understanding of the economics of
regular basis. In Dean Elmore's "Twitterverse," less is truly higher education.
more. I'm still waiting for one of those coveted replies...
If you are an SSAO and you're interested in how you can use
Twitter, I would highly suggest that you follow Dean Elmore's
tweet stream.
Are you an SSAO? Are you on Twitter? Why? Why not?
Do you tweet? Follow me on Twitter.

Questions on Economics of
Higher Ed
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning/
questions_on_economics_of_higher_ed
August 12th, 2010

By Joshua Kim August 11, 2010 4:15 am

Reading President Obama's higher ed speech, and the
comments about his speech from all of you, has left me with a
number of questions.

• Does anyone know of a really good primer, or set of

articles, on the economics of higher education?

• Why is it exactly that the cost of tuition has risen faster

than wages or inflation?

• Who are the main payers in higher ed (government,

students, parents)?

• What components make up the main costs of higher ed?

I know that labor costs are something like 80% (is that
correct?), but what I don't know is how this has changed
over the decades?

• Does higher ed resemble health care, in that we see

significant variations in both cost and outcomes? Are
there any IHE's that have managed to drive down tuition
while increasing educational quality?

• In the technology world, how focused are we on

increasing educational productivity? We talk a great
deal about supporting authentic and active learning, and
meeting the needs of a new generation of learners. But
how much do we focus on utilizing technology as a lever
to increase the number of students we can serve while
maintaining educational quality?

• Does high education match health care in terms of being

a high fixed cost industry? If so, that would suggest that
the only way to lower tuition is to spread the costs out
over more students. Or does higher ed have high variable
costs, and if so what are they?

• If you are a CIO, and your university president came to

you tomorrow and asked, "How can we use technology to
serve more students, lower costs, and increase quality?",
what would be your top three recommendations?

I think we all need to talk about costs. Perhaps the first step
is to figure out how we can all speak the same language by

16