Twitter has become a necessity in my life - it's how I stay up to date with what's going on in a million different places at once. I'm constantly monitoring who I follow - it's tough because I love to follow funny tweets, but they may not be that useful to me professionally, and there are a lot of tweets that are.
So, by way of saving some info for myself to refer to later when I'm not beat and about to get ready for bed -
90 Foundations that Tweet. Philanthropy 411 Blog. http://bit.ly/NZ2wL
Education Foundations, Etc on Twitter. Jacques of All Trades. http://bit.ly/3aCmp
UPDATE: Just investigating a few foundations that support undergrad education.
Carnegie Foundation
Teagle Foundation (no current requests for proposals, but one to watch - has funded a number of projects at liberal arts colleges)
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Friday, August 21, 2009
College Counselors
This Time interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David L. Marcus describes the role of college counselor in college admissions, and has one of the best descriptions of what administrators are to students I think I've ever read:
"I have no doubt that the best teachers are the ones who don't turn it off at 2:55 p.m., who are constantly thinking of ways to inspire their students just like Smitty does. He's a teacher; he just doesn't have a regular classroom. And frankly, many kids learn better by hanging out with the guidance counselor or going to a job or doing an internship than they do in a 42-minute class."
What administrators do to enhance the classroom experience is an integral part of the curriculum. Even at my place of work we call it "co"-curricular - as if it's alongside - rather than acknowledging all the pieces of the puzzle that make up curriculum.
"Q&A: Inside the College Admissions Process." Cruz, G. Time, August 21, 2009. http://bit.ly/1iQ47
"I have no doubt that the best teachers are the ones who don't turn it off at 2:55 p.m., who are constantly thinking of ways to inspire their students just like Smitty does. He's a teacher; he just doesn't have a regular classroom. And frankly, many kids learn better by hanging out with the guidance counselor or going to a job or doing an internship than they do in a 42-minute class."
What administrators do to enhance the classroom experience is an integral part of the curriculum. Even at my place of work we call it "co"-curricular - as if it's alongside - rather than acknowledging all the pieces of the puzzle that make up curriculum.
"Q&A: Inside the College Admissions Process." Cruz, G. Time, August 21, 2009. http://bit.ly/1iQ47
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Alien Life Forms
Did you know this? It was on this day in 1977 that the Voyager 2 spacecraft was launched. Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1, set out to explore the giant gaseous planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. They did that, and they are still in space, releasing new data constantly. Voyager 2's newest discovery concerns the bubble around our solar system where the solar wind (a thin gas of charged particles, which come from the sun) meets the space beyond our solar system. Voyager 2 has shown that that bubble is irregular, or squashed, not round.
Just in case the Voyagers make it into another solar system with alien life forms, each Voyager has a record that is three-quarters music and one-quarter greetings in 55 languages and various sounds from nature. The music includes Beethoven, Chuck Berry, Louis Armstrong, and traditional songs from all over the world.
I realized that my focus solely on education policy may be a bit boring for some, so just a quick reminder that in addition to writing a dissertation I also have a full time job (which 98% of the time I love) and curiosity about the world in general.
(From The Writer's Almanac for August 20, 2009.)
Just in case the Voyagers make it into another solar system with alien life forms, each Voyager has a record that is three-quarters music and one-quarter greetings in 55 languages and various sounds from nature. The music includes Beethoven, Chuck Berry, Louis Armstrong, and traditional songs from all over the world.
I realized that my focus solely on education policy may be a bit boring for some, so just a quick reminder that in addition to writing a dissertation I also have a full time job (which 98% of the time I love) and curiosity about the world in general.
(From The Writer's Almanac for August 20, 2009.)
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Why Groups Fail to Share Information Effectively
I got this awhile ago from @amitparikh and realized that I'm definitely going to include it in the syllabus for my fall class. In any case, it's about how you can manage groups/teams to let go of anxiety and preconceptions in order to communicate more effectively. I really think this is one of the most pressing problems in the workplace, and despite modern technology, we still have an inability to get information from the best sources out there - our colleagues!
Why Groups Fail to Share Information Effectively
Why Groups Fail to Share Information Effectively
Why rankings don't matter
Inside Higher Ed reviewed the peer surveys distributed to universities which make up 25% of their rankings, and their findings are shocking. It would take 10 hours to adequately complete this survey, time most administrators don't have. They then end up basing their reviews of other institutions on gut feelings, news reports - in short, the same things that the general public knows about institutions of higher education.
What's worse is that many institutions spend so much time and energy trying to get up in these rankings. My personal feeling about educational leadership is that you should outline a bold vision that capitalizes on your strengths and allows you to move forward. Rankings will follow, or they won't, but wouldn't it be great to be known as the university that doesn't bother with piddly rankings? Instead, we could be known as the university that sets our own standards.
My two cents, anyway.
Reputation Without Rigor. Inside Higher Ed. August 19, 2009
What's worse is that many institutions spend so much time and energy trying to get up in these rankings. My personal feeling about educational leadership is that you should outline a bold vision that capitalizes on your strengths and allows you to move forward. Rankings will follow, or they won't, but wouldn't it be great to be known as the university that doesn't bother with piddly rankings? Instead, we could be known as the university that sets our own standards.
My two cents, anyway.
Reputation Without Rigor. Inside Higher Ed. August 19, 2009
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
dissert lines
get it? like a buffet line.
j/k people. I've identified a few different lines of thought that I will need to familiarize myself with in order to write my dissertation proposal. Any resources you've found helpful, you think are pivotal to any of these themes, please, have at it and recommend me some good things.
- history of immigrants in America (due to Alatis's heritage as a son of Greek immigrants in West Virginia)
- educational leadership (obvi here, he was dean of the School of Languages and Linguistics at Georgetown)
- history of foreign language education policy, based primarily on policy documents that Alatis has shared with me
- Other? Development of socio-linguistics? History of English as a Second Language? As much as I'd love to include it, I think I'm going to have to excise the English as a Second Language portion of Alatis's life, at least from the dissertation. It actually would be a whole separate dissertation to write about that portion of his life. Guess that's part of the "this is fascinating and out of scope" disclaimer I'll include in the proposal. Have to write on it another time, though, because it brings up issues of socio-linguistics, class, race, and English hegemony.
And OMG, the airconditioning sounds like a stampede all of the sudden. It's interesting being in the "old" (read, like early 1990s) part of the building.
j/k people. I've identified a few different lines of thought that I will need to familiarize myself with in order to write my dissertation proposal. Any resources you've found helpful, you think are pivotal to any of these themes, please, have at it and recommend me some good things.
- history of immigrants in America (due to Alatis's heritage as a son of Greek immigrants in West Virginia)
- educational leadership (obvi here, he was dean of the School of Languages and Linguistics at Georgetown)
- history of foreign language education policy, based primarily on policy documents that Alatis has shared with me
- Other? Development of socio-linguistics? History of English as a Second Language? As much as I'd love to include it, I think I'm going to have to excise the English as a Second Language portion of Alatis's life, at least from the dissertation. It actually would be a whole separate dissertation to write about that portion of his life. Guess that's part of the "this is fascinating and out of scope" disclaimer I'll include in the proposal. Have to write on it another time, though, because it brings up issues of socio-linguistics, class, race, and English hegemony.
And OMG, the airconditioning sounds like a stampede all of the sudden. It's interesting being in the "old" (read, like early 1990s) part of the building.
The future of education?
I firmly believe that multidisciplinary education is the way of the future. Now, if we can get doctoral programs and The Academy to hire more multidisciplinary faculty - we'll really make some progress.
Here's some help at least for creating undergraduate programs: Project Kaleidoscope. http://www.pkal.org/
Here's some help at least for creating undergraduate programs: Project Kaleidoscope. http://www.pkal.org/
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
this was so hard to write
Digital possibilities offer a number of exciting new ways to conduct and transmit oral history, but transmission alone does not create a paradigm change as defined by Kuhn. The socio-cultural impact of online communication and communities has a broad-reaching impact on how individuals and societies define themselves. Since oral historians are concerned with the myths that make meaning of history, the context and voice of narrators are key to understanding where a narrator’s story matches the record, where it does not, and why these disconnects exist. In order to discover the essential meaning for narrators of the digital age, online interactions and how they match and do not match actual interactions will prove to be a key facet of oral history methodology as we move forward. The transformation in the conception of the self and of society due to the global flows enabled by technology constitutes the paradigm change, as the possibilities for cultural transmission impact how people communicate with others and make choices for their lives in society.
Monday, August 10, 2009
am i making sense?
A paradigm shift changes the fundamentals of a field of understanding. Alistair Thompson uses this term to describe four major paradigm shifts in oral history. These shifts move the craft of oral history from a modern rediscovery following World War II with the advent of the portable tape recorder through reaction to positivist critics, reclamation by interdisciplinary scholars, and to the contemporary era of digital transformation. Thompson characterizes the digital transformation as a change in the way that oral history will be presented. Access to digital archives will allow recordings to supersede transcripts as the true representation of a narrator’s story, returning aurality to the craft. While those changes as well as the ease of collaboration online stand to transform the methods of oral history, Thompson wonders if this change represents a true paradigm shift “as articulated by Thomas Kuhn, a profound change in understanding that revolutionizes our practice as oral historians” and if “this technological revolution [is] also a cognitive revolution.” Even though the medium impacts the message, technology could just offer a new way to view oral history and not a profound cognitive change. The question might be best put, according to Thompson, to the younger generation more adept with the new and changing landscape of technology.
New media do offer a new way to communicate narrators’ stories, but scholars in a variety of fields have explored the profound effects of technology on the concepts of self that is central to oral history. Elizabeth Tonkin describes oral genres that oral historians must note as their storytellers narrate, and that the first person “I” that we might assume to be represented as they narrate is a literary construction. Several “selves” can be present within one narrator. In Appadurai’s technoscape , supercharged by increasing access to the internet in more places , these selves can influence and be influenced by an exploding number of cultural influences. The combination of globalization and technology will create the next paradigm shift for oral history by impacting both the context and the voice that are central to the craft.
New media do offer a new way to communicate narrators’ stories, but scholars in a variety of fields have explored the profound effects of technology on the concepts of self that is central to oral history. Elizabeth Tonkin describes oral genres that oral historians must note as their storytellers narrate, and that the first person “I” that we might assume to be represented as they narrate is a literary construction. Several “selves” can be present within one narrator. In Appadurai’s technoscape , supercharged by increasing access to the internet in more places , these selves can influence and be influenced by an exploding number of cultural influences. The combination of globalization and technology will create the next paradigm shift for oral history by impacting both the context and the voice that are central to the craft.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
writing quote
Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out. ~Samuel Johnson, "Recalling the Advice of a College Tutor," Boswell, Life of Johnson, 1791
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
academics come up with all the ideas
I'm having an epiphany, and that is academics come up with many - most - all - depending on how hyperbolic I'm being, and as you know I can be quite hyperbolic. I'm reading Bounded Rationality: the adaptive toolbox and although it's in academese (quite good academese, but technical and dense writing), I'm recognizing the ideas as similar to those I read in Blink. Bounded Rationality came out in 2002 from MIT Press, obviously an academic publisher. Blink appeared in 2005 from Little, Brown and Company, a more commercial publisher. But the main idea is the same - that when we make decisions, we aren't optimizing by computing all possible outcomes and computing the return on investment, but rather using a heuristic "educated guess" approach based on experience, intuition, and observing others who are successful.
I'm sure Malcolm Gladwell did his proper citations and all that - but it comes to this - he made a lot of money off of popularizing a concept that essentially is not his. I guess when I say that by researching and writing, we're contributing to the common good, we really are - just not to our own personal common goods. Few of us get rich this way, although we're the thinkers who are really shaping what people talk about. Well, except for when we talk about Jon&Kate+8.
I'm sure Malcolm Gladwell did his proper citations and all that - but it comes to this - he made a lot of money off of popularizing a concept that essentially is not his. I guess when I say that by researching and writing, we're contributing to the common good, we really are - just not to our own personal common goods. Few of us get rich this way, although we're the thinkers who are really shaping what people talk about. Well, except for when we talk about Jon&Kate+8.
Exhilarated by nerdy activities
I always love it when I discover what a nerd I am. When I worked at an internship with Women's Wear Daily in Paris, my favorite thing to do was research for the writers. My boss looked at me like I was crazy - she said no one ever liked that part of the job. I couldn't believe that my job was to read. How awesome.
In preparing 3 concurrent grant proposals, I've realized 2 things: a) this is what grad school is preparing you for - writing a grant proposal is much like writing a final paper. Although they should, for one class or another, have you actually put together a proposal. They could then use them to bring money into the college. But I digress; b) I love writing and having it go somewhere - once the grant proposal was finished and is actually being submitted, I felt a sense of exhilaration! Being a nerdy professor preparing grant proposals is clearly what I was meant to do in life.
So to recap, I love to research and I love to write. I love it especially when you have good ideas and make good connections and get funded for doing those things, which then allows you to continue to research and to write. AND, might I add.... to contribute to the greater good.
In preparing 3 concurrent grant proposals, I've realized 2 things: a) this is what grad school is preparing you for - writing a grant proposal is much like writing a final paper. Although they should, for one class or another, have you actually put together a proposal. They could then use them to bring money into the college. But I digress; b) I love writing and having it go somewhere - once the grant proposal was finished and is actually being submitted, I felt a sense of exhilaration! Being a nerdy professor preparing grant proposals is clearly what I was meant to do in life.
So to recap, I love to research and I love to write. I love it especially when you have good ideas and make good connections and get funded for doing those things, which then allows you to continue to research and to write. AND, might I add.... to contribute to the greater good.
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