Archive for September, 2007
Looking for a hike? Look here
September 30th, 2007
Looking for a hike? Look here
Patriot-News - Meet at Jacobsburg Environmental Education Center at 9:45 a.m. Group will travel to Kitchen Creek off of Route 118 west of Bring plenty of water and warm hiking boots to walk a level, 5-mile round-trip distance from Palmer Township’s Riverview
Source: article.wn.com
A deep longing to rekindle any hint of the past
Chicago Tribune - I got my education last week when I took my mother to see her brother. My mother’s little brother is 74 now and 6-foot-2. He But all those years of distance didn’t matter in those four days last week. He was still her brother, the kid who always
Source: www.chicagotribune.com
DR. CHARLES DUNN
Miami Herald - Advanced Search | Top Jobs | Employment TV | School & Education TV | Post Resumes | Post a Job Buy | Sell | Research | Buying Guide | Dealer The United States needs a network of short, fast trains for corridors, to connect with long-distance ones like Empire
Source: www.miamiherald.com
A Crisis At Home
Egypt Today - with the French government in calling on the two belligerents to stop hostilities and withdraw their forces to a distance of The blow to the dissemination of French and British culture and education in the Middle East was fatal, as fleeing foreigners
Source: www.egypttoday.com
Pak inspired Korea?s growing LPGA contingent
September 30th, 2007
San Francisco Gate - She’s atypical in that she completed high school and attended college; many Korean players abandon their education to pursue a career in golf. But Lee is more typical in the way she reached the U.S. - when she landed a good sponsor, a Korean tire
EMS fall symposium to be offered in Grand Island
September 30th, 2007
Grand Island Independent - To pre-register, contact Kieth Vore at (308) 346-4911. The registration fee is $35 for NIS members and $50. for non-members. The workshop is worth 10 continuing education hours. For more information, contact Carol Jorgensen, North Central Nebraska
Northwest Arkansas News - William Mathis, professor in continuing education at the University of Vermont, said software vendors claim positive results for distance education, but that there’s been no gold-standard study proving that distance education helps or hinders
Hudson Hub-Times - looking for fun energetic organized & dedicated full time / part time Teachers committed to teaching Pre-school classrooms. Also Assistant Director/Administrator. BA / BAS / ECE / CDA preferred. Full Benefits. 401K, paid holiday, continuing education
Digital Spy - UFI has announced that it is cancelling its £500,000-per-year sponsorship of The Jeremy Kyle Show . The organisation, which runs Learndirect, the Government’s adult education service, claimed that continuing with the deal would not “protect and
Times of Zambia - He said NIPA recognised that unless the pool and quality of the human resource was increased and enhanced through continuing education and training, the targets for socio-economic development growth set in FNDP would be difficult to achieve.
Dodge City Daily Globe - In the past year, the college has expanded its continuing education and community enrichment classes tremendously through the hard work of DCCC’s Center for Business, Technology and Continuing Education. Approximately 85 percent of the classes
New Haven Register - Barber, president of the New Haven Scholarship Fund, noted, “While it is certainly most important to give students grants to begin college, it is equally important to show those students who have worked hard at continuing their college education
Newark Star-Ledger - The purpose is to get people off campus, and perhaps outside the area in which they live and where they work,” said Patricia Laprey, director of Drew’s Continuing Education and Special Programs. Coordinators decided on Newark after students from
Capital - Continuing education units are awarded to those completing the course. Registration is available by fax at 410-777-4325; by mail at AACC, 101 College Parkway, Arnold, MD 21012-1895; or in person at the Arnold campus, the Fort Meade Army Education
Continuing Education for Business Professionals | Business.com ?
September 29th, 2007
… colleges, distance learning courses, and continuing business education programs. … find business schools, online degree programs and accounting education and …
Academic Keys for Business: Higher education jobs and university jobs at … of our Who’s Who in Business Higher Education directory and thousands of job …
The Tennessee Department of Education: P-12 … Business Services. School Nutrition Services. Data Services/School Approval. Facilities Management …
Plan B
September 28th, 2007
July 1st. Wheee! ...right? Yeah, kinda cool that we're over the hump. 6 out of 12 months have passed. I blinked a few seconds ago, I coulda sworn it was mid-April then. Oh well.
I'm not excited about Monday (technically today). Summer's been fun, but I haven't been paying attention to as much around me as I should have been. Or, maybe enough, but not the right things.
I (and many others around me) have been planning on me beginning my graduate work this Fall. The plan was to enroll at , in Iowa. They have a great distance program that will allow me to keep my Durango life while I work on my M.Div. The thing is, since it is a distance program, it takes a bit longer. 5 years going full-steam every semester. And as much as I'm sure I'll enjoy seminary just for all the great reading and discussion, earning my graduate degree holds significant practical importance. Down the road, formal ordination will allow a church to pay me a tax-exempt housing allowance on top of my salary. Now within the PC(USA), said ordination requires achievement of a Master's degree. Moral of the story, ordination will make life a lot easier, in terms of raising a family and living expenses and all that.
Now, back to why the post is titled "Plan B." I'll know for sure in a few hours, but I have a hunch I may have missed the application deadline to enroll in Dubuque's distance program for this Fall. If so, I'll be kicking myself pretty hard. It was a simple date on the horizon, and I fill out applications well. I just would have had to make a note about July 2 sneaking up, and this would be a non-issue.
What’s on top?
September 26th, 2007
Attention-grabbing title, isn’t it? Welcome to this, the first posting on a new blog and my first foray into the wide world of blogging.
‘What’s on top?’ marks the start of the staff meetings where I work and seems like a good place to start this blog too. The plan is for this to be a careers blog so if you have career concerns go on – answer the question for me. What’s on top for you in your career – or in your plans for one? Let’s start a conversation.
For the record, I work for in New Zealand – as a . If you’re really keen you can find out more about me by selecting ‘About’. I’m not here to sell you anything or to try to persuade you to enrol with Massey. Nor is this an ‘all about Massey’ blog - though I’ll shamelessly highlight university staff, initiatives and support services that I’ve guessed will interest the wider world. I’ll also link to other sites and articles that I (and you) think might be useful – all the usual disclaimers will apply of course and linking should not be taken as an endorsement by Massey University or by me.
and then we’ll let it go….
September 26th, 2007
Ok, it's not exactly the next day, but here is the continuation of my list (which perhaps will become my blog entry because I may never get around to writing about the actual content of the list).
Class would have been on Tuesday, so we'll count Tuesday as the "post date".
Tuesday, Sept 24th: I think I should do some investigation into what Instructional Designers and Instructional Technology Specialists do.
Tuesday, Oct 2nd: I think we will take a look at the value of multimedia and a peek into a few of its applications for learning.
Tuesday, Oct 9th: E-Learning. I'm thinking that this will be a big one and may take more than just one week so....
Tuesday, Oct 16th: We'll plan on continuing it here too.
Tuesday, Oct 23rd: This week we will take a look at Distrance Learning. What works, what doesn't, what's new, what's old.
Tuesday, Oct 30th: Oh... how about "The Knowledge Gap: What happens when the boomers retire". I find myself facinated about this, how will things change? Will we truly loose a huge amount of knowledge or will we be freed to try new things?
Tuesday, Nov 6th: Which brings us to Knowledge Management Systems. I don't know much about this but see this term pop up now and then.
Tuesday, Nov 13th: Asynchrois Learning. What is it anyway?
Tuesday, Nov 27th: I'm going to leave this one open, let's see if we find something worth our while along the way.
Tuesday, Dec 4th: Last day of class!
Whew! No, to find some information about what an ID and an ITS do everyday...
Moodle Observations
September 24th, 2007
I've been teaching on the Moodle online course management system for over 4 weeks now. I was introduced to this past summer conducted at Pitt Community College. I must admit, at first I was a little hesitant to even consider using another CMS beside Blackboard because I have been using Blackboard since its inception (8 years) and feel very comfortable creating courses and teaching on it. With that said, I tried to keep an open mind and got enough training at the workshop to migrate one of my Art Appreciation classes over to the Moodle platform. This in itself took me about 20 + hours because there is no easy way to export course content directly from Blackboard to Moodle. They are two very different learning platforms, so I basically had to rethink how I would teach the class on Moodle and then copy and paste my weekly modules (assignments, lectures, discussion topics, podcasts and external links) over manually.
The only way to truly learn something in my opinion is to teach it so I volunteered to teach a section of my Art Appreciation class for Randall Shearon at Wayne Community College. After having two colleagues look over and critique my Moodle class I then went back and edited and revised it based on their feedback. Once I went through and fine tuned the course I was ready to teach it.
The most difficult thing for me the first week of class was breaking myself away from my Blackboard teaching methodology. Moodle is very different from Blackboard and as an online instructor I had to modify my teaching approach because of the way Moodle is configured. Now after four weeks of teaching on Moodle I can honestly say I like it and am starting to feel very comfortable teaching on this "open source" CMS. In fact, it seems to be more intuitive that Blackboard and I have had no technical problems whatsoever, unlike the issues of slowness, pages timing out and various glitches I find on the discussion board and grade book of Blackboard 7.3.
I find it easier to grade weekly homework and weekly discussions on Moodle and it handles audio, video files beautifully. The other thing I noticed was how quickly my students learned how to use it. Most of them had been taking classes on Blackboard and were in the same boat as me as far as never having taught or taken a course on Moodle. I made it very clear that I was new to this and asked my students for patience and told them I would also have patience with them as we all climbed the learning curve with Moodle.
I have nothing but positive things to say about Moodle after working with it daily for over a month. As a Director of Distance Learning at Carteret Community College I plan on incrementally exposing my faculty to Moodle, although I am well aware their will be lots of dissent and resistance due to the amount of time it takes to migrate Blackboard content over to Moodle. This may be the biggest issue to overcome when selling the idea to faculty. There is no getting away from the amount of time it takes to copy and paste course content over from Blackboard to Moodle, in addition to having to absolutely re-think the instructional design and teaching methodology of your online course.
I hope to teach more sections of my classes on Moodle in the semesters ahead and can envision weaning myself off Blackboard completely in the next 3 years. I am very frustrated with Blackboard, their tech support and the latest version 7.3 in my opinion is disappointing and a step backwards in overall design and navigation.
comments and your thoughts on Blackboard vs. Moodle are welcome
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Anna University, Coimbatore MBA, MCA, MSc Course Distance Education Admission Notice 2007-08
September 19th, 2007
Anna University, Coimbatore MBA, MCA, MSc Course Distance Education Admission Notice 2007-08
# Application can be obtained in person at the office of the directorate of Online and Distance Education, Anna University, Coimbatore, GCT Campus, Coimbatore – 641013 by submitting a demand draft for Rs. 500/- (Rupees Five hundred only) for P.G. Programme/ Rs. 300/- (Rupees Three hundred only) for P.G. Diploma Programme.
# Application can be obtained by post by sending a Demand Draft for Rs. 500/- (Rupees Five hundred only) for P.G. Programme/Rs.300/- (Rupees Three hundred only) for P.G. Diploma Programme to the office of the Directorate of online and Distance Education, Anna University, Coimbatore, GCT Campus, Coimbatore – 641013 with a request letter for the application
A Short Manifesto To Address The Looming Crisis In Big Law
September 17th, 2007
(unfortunately, you need a password to read it online) contains some of the more vocal ciriticism appearing in the press recently, from the lips of corporate in-house counsel who are fed up with emergent trends in the Big Law firms they hire. The gist is straightforward and should be familiar to anyone who has worked for or with large law firms in the past few years. Basically, the salaries of associate attorneys in the major markets are skyrocketing (to give an idea, they are now at $160,000 for first-year lawyers straight out of law school, as compared to $125,000 when I started practice a few years ago in Los Angeles). In-house counsel find this alarming as they fear the inflated salaries will be passed on to clients -- not only in form of higher billing rates, but through higher incentives for associates to "puff up" their hours given that they will be expected to bill more and more to justify the higher salaries paid to them. And there is a growing outrage that first-year lawyers -- who know little to nothing about the practice of law -- are even staffed on cases to begin with, leading in-house counsel to demand that the teams of lawyers assigned to their cases not include the greenest associates. The bottom line: as associate salaries shoot through the roof, companies are becoming even more sick and tired of bankrolling the education of those rookie lawyers who work on their cases.
Is this surprising in any way? In what other servce industry could companies expect their clients to fund the training and development of their newest hires in such an in-your-face manner and not risk total and immediate self-annihilation? While I find the strongly worded criticisms encouraging to the extent that firms like mine (a litigation boutique with low overhead and zero fat-salaried associates) are best positioned to capture business from cost-conscious in-house counsel, I am also alarmed when I think that future law firm hires are going to be shut out of opportunites to learn and grow as lawyers owing to the rapidly changing economics of the legal profession. How did we get here and what can be done? Here are some quick thoughts:
1. Take a hard look at re-designing legal education. It has been no secret for a long time that law schools -- from the lowest to highest ranking -- teach absolutely nothing about the practice of law. Instead, the elite law schools serve as breeding grounds for law professors by offering largely theoretical courses, while the lower ranked schools mainly prepare their students to pass the bar exam. Neither approach is efficient for clients who need young lawyers to understand the mechanics of law practice, although the legal education system was certainly adequate in the bygone era when the big firms competed little with one another and lawyers comprised a big old boys' network. One way to induce change in legal education would be for the corporate clients to intervene directly by endowing chairs and funding practice-based curricula, thereby counteracting the de facto and entrenched subsidization of legal education by large law firms, which is done through the salaries paid to "summer associates" (who are typically first-and second year law students) that are then funneled back to law schools as tuition. Indeed, why on earth shouldn't legal education parallel medical education, with the latter's central practical component?
2. Maybe Big Law Firms should fish or cut bait when it comes to associate development. On the other hand, if the large firms wish to continue in their role as the primary training camps for young lawyers, then perhaps they should do so in a way that doesn't shove that role down the throats of their clients. One option would be to make the first six months or so of an associate's life billable-hour free, and then plug the associate into a series of development opportunities -- e.g., attending depositions and hearings, closings, client presentations , etc.-- without cost to clients. Of course, the law firms would be faced with an even higher cost-of-investment-per-associate on the front end (as the already high cost of development couldn't be recouped by billing out their new associates), but isn't that still preferable to the great risk of alienating clients on the back end by incentivizing those same associates to puff up their hours? And don't overlook the additional benefit that associate satisfaction and retention rates (which are presently miserably low across firms) would surely increase measurably if they didn't feel the pressure to bill in their first six months on the job.
3. It's all about management and innovation, so teach lawyers to be better business people! Ultimately, the recent outrage from in-house lawyers is a function of larger issues endemic to the legal profession, and which have been so for a long time. The legal profession is notoriously resistant to innovation in the area of its own business practices, and this is especially true when you look at the large firms which have historically dominated the market. In my experience, creative and bold managerial types -- i.e., those people who could drive a revolution in law practice management -- simply are repulsed by the idea of becoming lawyers in the first place, given the legal industry's clubby, crusty, and conservative reputation. What needs to happen for law firms to become more innovative -- and to keep up with their clients' needs -- is for the lawyers who work there to think of themselves as business people. And one thought for churning out better bsuiness-minded lawyers is to design integrated JD/MBA programs offered by law schools and business schools which don't just slap two different degrees together (as JD/MBA programs currently do), but actively synthesize them by teaching the business of law, and management courses tailored toward lawyers in this day and age. Another idea: mid-career, one-year executive MBA programs for attorneys to teach them the latest and cutting edge in management trends and techniques.
