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The Diverted Dream

tcstanley — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 20:27:02 CDT

p. vi - Indeed, one can make a case that there are many features of public two-year colleges - their openness to the entire adult population, their rootedness to the communities in which they are located, and the willingness to deviate from traditional academic patterns - that make them the most democratic component in teh system of higher education.

p. 6 Enrolling fewer than 10 thousand students in 1920, the American junior college had by 1980 grown to enroll well over four million students (Eells 1931a, p. 70; U.S Bureau of the Census 1987, p. 138).

With over one-half of all college freshmen now enrolled in two-year institutions (U.S. Department of Education 1986, p. 111), the community college has come to be an integral feature of America's educational landscape. Yet as recently as 1900, the junior college was no more than a dream in the minds of a few administrators at a handful of America''s leading universities. Enrolling under 2 percent of all college freshman in 1920 (U.S. Office of Education 1944, pp. 4,6), the year in which the American Association of Junior Colleges (AAJC) was founded, the junior college came to play an increasingly pivotal role in the transformation of the nation's system of colleges and universities. Perhaps more than any other segment of postsecondary education, the community college was at the forefront of the postwar demographic expansion that changed the face of American higher education.

p. 9 No one could deny the inequalities of wealth and power in the United States. But what made these inequalities tolerable, perhaps, was that everyone - or so the national ideology claimed - has a chance to advance as far as his ability and ambition would take him. And once education became established as the principal vehicle of this advancement, it became politically difficult for any group to oppose its expansion.

p. 12 (talking about resistance to vocational programs) Remarkable, this pattern of resistance to vocational education continued despite a dramatic increase in the number of students enrolled in community colleges, from just over 200,000 students in 1948 to almost 1.3 million in 1968 (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975, p. 383).

After decades of student resistance, enrollments in community college vocational programs finally surged after 1970, following a decline in the market for college graduates. By the mid-1970s, the percentage of students in programs specifically designed to provide occupational training had risen to at least 50 percent, and by the 1980, the proportion had grown to approximately 70 percent.

p. 23-24 In the late nineteenth century, an elite reform movement swept through the leading American universities. Beginning with Henry Tappan at the University of Michigan in the early 1950s and extending after the 1870s to Nicholas Murray Butler (p. 24) at Columbia, David Starr Jordan at Stanford, and William Rainey Harper in Chicago, one leading university president after another began to view the first two years of college as an unnecessary part of university -level instruction.

p. 24 By "purifying" their institutions through the removal of the intellectually less capable students, the presidents hoped to achieve for their institutions something approaching the status enjoyed by the German universities.

p. 25 For the university sponsors of what later came to be known as the "people's colleges," the growth of the two-year institution had little to do with the democratization of higher education. On the contrary, the diffusion of the junior college was primarily a means of diverting students away from the university into an upward extension of the high school. Thus protected from those clamoring for access, the university would be free to pursue its higher tasks of research and advanced professional training.

William Rainey Harper of the University of Chicago was the first to find organizational forms appropriate to this elitist model. Harper pursued the plan to purify the universities in two ways.

In 1892 Harper separated instruction at the University of Chicago into two divisions - one for the first two years of instruction and one for the last two. - and by 1896 these two divisions were known as the Junior College and the Senior College. In 1900 he convinced the faculty and trustees to grant an "associate's degree" to students who completed work at the Junior College. His hope was that many students would voluntarily terminate their education at this point, so that only the most gifted would go on to the upper division and graduate work.

The origin of the public junior college as a distinct organizational form, however, can be traced more directly to Harper's efforts to persuade Chicago area high schools to introduce college-level courses. After many years of fruitless lobbying by Harper among these high schools, J. Stanley Brown, the principal of Joliet High School, began to work on a plan to expand his school's curriculum to include college-level courses. Brown's move was apparently influenced not only by his personal association with Harper but also by Harper's offer to grant Joliet students advanced standing at the University of Chicago. In 1901 Joliet Junior College opened its doors, with much fanfare, as the country's self-proclaimed first independent public junior college (Eells 1931a, p. 54)

p. 31-32 According to the president of a Detroit junior college: "I think that it is a great mistake to limit the scope of the junior college.... If democracy is to be preserved by education, it will be by bringing education down to the masses. There (p. 32) are many intelligent people in large communities who are capable of profiting by college work... The junior college ought to offer a large number of courses that will appeal to such persons" (MacKenzie, quoted in Eells, 1831a, p. 236)

p. 52 The Great Depression brought an unexpected boost to the junior college movement. Whereas the junior colleges, both public and private, enrolled under 56,000 students in 1929, by 1939 the figure had risen to almost 150,000.

p. 54 During the 1930s, a consensus began to emerge in the AAJC on the proper functions of junior colleges. the idea of a curriculum with two tracks - one for students who would continue their education and another for those who would not - gradually gained general approval.

p. 66 By the time that the United States entered World War II, the junior college had become established as the major organizational innovation in twentieth-century American higher education. Spurred on by both sponsorship from above and popular demand from below, the junior college grew at a truly extraordinary rate. Enrolling only 4,504 students in 46 institutions in 1918, by 1940 two-year colleges enrolled 149,854 students in 456 institutions (U.S. Office of Education 1944, p. 6). Between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II, the proportion of American undergraduates enrolled in junior colleges grew from less than 1 student in 100 to about 1 in 10 (calculated from U.S. Bureau of the Census 1975, p. 383).

p. 70 One of the most interesting aspects of the Truman Commission's report was its proposal to abandon the term junior college in favor of the term community college. The Commission's logic here was tied to its endorsement of the vocationalization project of the junior-college vanguard: because one of the principal tasks of the two-year institution was to provide "terminal curricula" to the majority of students who will never transfer to a four-year institution, "a change of name is suggested because 'junior' no longer covers one of the functions being performed" (1948, vol. 3, pp 7-8). Since such an institution "must fit into the community life as the high school has done," the Commission suggested "the name 'community college' to be applied to the institution designed to serve chiefly local community education needs" (1948, vol. 3, p. 5). What the Commission had in mind here was a vision of the community college as a "people's college" (see Koos 1947): an institution designed, as least in principle, to serve the needs of the entire local population.

p. 71 But the greatest impact of the Commission's report on the two-year college movement was not the symbolic one of the changing a name, but the more substantive one of legitimating an enormous increase in the prominence of the community college within the larger system of higher education. ... Although not all of these students were to be channeled into two-year institutions, the Commission repeatedly made clear that its central goal of extending educational opportunities could not be achieved without a drastic expansion of the community college.

The junior college leadership was understandably the delighted by the attention showered on it by the President's Commission. Placing the community college at the center of future developments in higher education, the recommendations of the Truman Commission could hardly have been better had they been written by Leonard Koos himself. For a movement wracked by feelings of insecurity and marginality from its beginning, the public recognition that it had sought so long had finally arrived.

p. 84 According to government figures, degree-credit enrollments at the two-year colleges more than tripled between 1960 and 1970, from 451,000 to 1,630,000.

p. 101 Whereas in 1946, just 17 percent of all students who entered higher education started in a junior college, by 1970 the proportion had grown to more than 40 percent (U.S. Department of Education, Center for Statistics 1986, p. 111).

p. 107 During the same period, another important corporate group, the Council for Financial Aid to Education (CFAE), hailed the community colleges as "the most important innovation in American education during the twentieth century" and called their vocationalization project one of "the strongest movements in higher education today" (CFAE 1973, p. 1).

p. 108 Like members of the Carnegie Commission, Nixon administration officials were clearly impressed by the growing popularity of the year-year institutions. some, like Chester Finn, a participant in the administration's education policy group, explicitly noted the administration's desire to channel this popularity into pathways consistent with an expansion of vocational programs. According to Finn:
<indent> The community colleges constituted much the fastest growing sector within the world of nonprofit post-secondary education and already enrolled nearly one out of every five students. An obvious role for the federal government was to provide financial incentives to channel this growth in the direction of 'career education' rather than liberal arts. (Finn 1976, p. 64)

p. 110 The federal funds, channeled through state allocation boards into many community colleges throughout the country, were used mainly to develop new occupational programs that would train people for the kinds of middle-level jobs emphasized by advocates of community college vocationalization. The language of the Higher Education Act of 1972 made clear that the funds were not to be used to train professional or to subsidize four-year colleges and universities.
<indent> The term "postsecondary occupational education" means education, training or retraining...conducted by an institution...which is designed to prepared individual for gain employment as semi-skilled or skilled workers or technicians or sub-professionals in recognized occupations (including new and emerging occupations).... but excluding any program to prepare individuals for employment in occupations...to be generally considered professional or which require a baccalaureate or advanced degree. (Higher Education Act of 1972, p. 87).
The channeling of students away from four-year institutions and into community college terminal occupational programs - a policy favored by the Carnegie Commission as well as many leaders in the junior college movement - was for the first time being reinforced by major federal financial incentives.

o. 113-115 (114 is a table) A CBS television special entitled "Higher Education: Who Needs it?" broadcast in the sprong of 1972 is representative of the early expressions of this view. The (p. 115) show opened with a scene of a college commencement. Several recent graduates were then interviewed, and not one of them had been able to obtain a job; the consensus was that with a bachelor's degree it was almost impossible to find work.

p. 115 Wall Street Journal described the plight of a National Merit Scholar who had accumulated awards and graduated with high honors but still could not find a job ("Sally Gerhardt" 1975). [Newsweek (1976) and Time (1976) also ran similar articles]

According to a Fortune article in 1970, "The colleges and universities are turning out too many school teachers and Ph.Ds. ... and two few graduates with vocational certificates for technical level jobs (Faltemeyer 1970, p. 100). In the same vein, the CBS special noted above quoted college president Robert Ewiglegen's expert view that "in this very community there isn't a licensed plumber, and yet we could tomorrow hire twenty Ph.Ds in physics." Later in the broadcast, CBS predicted that enrollments would increase in the "already popular" community colleges as high school students realized that bachelor's degrees no longer assured employment.

p. 116 Just as the media had predicted and as many policymakers had hoped, students began to look with increasing favor on vocational training programs. Between 1970 and 1977 the proportion of full-time students enrolled in occupational programs rose from no more than one-third to well over 50 percent - the largest and most rapid shift in the history of the junior college (Blackstone 1978; Bushnell 1973; Cohen and Brawer 1982; pp. 200-203; Medsker and Tillery 1971; Parker 1974, 1975).

Community College in America

tcstanley — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 18:23:51 CDT

p. 8 -9 While community services and continuing education have long been a part of the community college philosophy, it was not until the 1970's that the concept of lifelong (p.9) learning for adults gained hegemony in many community colleges. Today, lifelong learning in its many forms occupies a place of prominence beside the transfer and occupational technical functions.

p. 11 The Morrill Act of 1862 greatly broadened the base of higher education. the land-grant institutions resulting from the act taught both students and subjects previously excluded from higher education. These institutions gave credence to the concept of the "people's college," a term widely used to describe community colleges. In many respect, the land-grant institutions fought the battles regarding 'practical" versus "liberal" education, who should go to college, and what courses and programs should legitimately be included as part of higher education, and thus paved the way for similar battles later fought by community colleges. ... In summary, the community college borrowed heavily from the land-grant institutions and continued and expanded the democratization theme developed largely as a result of the Morrill Act of 1862.

p. 13 While the modern-day community college is quite different from the junior college as envisioned by Harper, he is nevertheless still viewed by many as the "spiritual father" of the "movement."

pp. 17-18 The Servicemen's Readjustment Act, popularly known as the GI Bill passed Congress in 1944. Th GI Bill provided a form of scholarship for veterans of World War II. While entitlement to the money rested on military service, and while the voucher went to the educational institution, the GI Bill nevertheless represented a major step toward breaking the financial access barrier for millions of veterans of World War II and later U.S. military activities. More important, perhaps, is the fact that the GI Bill marked a major milestone in regard to federal involvement in the financing of higher education for individuals. although the period following the war placed emphasis on the academically qualified, many social and economic barriers were broken by the returning veterans. No longer was it fashionable or desirable for only those people who were extremely bright or who happened to be from the "right" family to attend college: the GI Bill broke the barriers and provided the basis for a later commitment on the part of the federal government to see that no one was denied access to higher education because of financial need.

pp. 18-19 (The 1947 President's Commission on Higher Education for American Democracy "Truman commission") ...the Commission believed that if America was successfully to fulfill its role as the world's leading advocate for democracy, the nation must break down the barriers to educational opportunity at the post-high school level. One way of breaking down the barriers, the Commission felt was (p.19) to establish a network of community colleges through the nation, thus placing higher educational opportunities within reach of a greater number of citizens. These community colleges would have no tuition, would serve as cultural centers for the community, offer continuing education for adults, emphasize civic responsibilities, be comprehensive, offer technical and general education, be locally controlled and blend into statewide systems of higher education, wile at the same time coordinating their efforts wit the high schools. The Commissions' use of the term "community college" popularized the term and influenced its use by Bogue in his 1950 book on the community college. The Commission clearly placed community colleges in higher education's camp. Stating its belief that forty-nine percent of the nation's youth could profit from two years of education beyond high school, the Commission's report did much to thrust the community college into the mainstream of the debate as post-war America strove to define America's brand of democracy in terms of an educated populace.

pp. 25-26 Perhaps no single concept influenced the development of the community colleges as did the belief that all Americans should have access to higher education. While the way was paved for open access byt eh Truman Commission, the GI Bill, and various other events, it was not until the 1960's that society, in part as a result of various social movements and in part due to the availability of student based financial aid, committed itself to the belief that education beyond high school was a right and not just a privilege. The result was the entry into higher education of "new students" who came from the lower quartile of their high school graduating class and from the lower socioeconomic segment of society. Prominent among the new students were member of minority groups and women. Open access through the com-(p.26) munity college's "open door" became the hallmark of the community college, and the work the community college has done and is doing with the new students is among the most significant contributions to the nation's scheme of education.

p. 26 Open access to higher education was achieved during the 1960's. A key to this achievement was financial aid which went directly to the student as a grant and which was transportable from institution to institution. As suggested earlier, the federal government first major involvement with providing aid to students was the GI Bill. Beginning with the Higher Education Act of 1965 and continuing with the Higher Education Amendments of 1972, the federal government committed itself to putting higher education within reach of lower socio-economic groups.

p. 30 The 1970's saw part-time enrollments in higher education reach new peaks. Indeed, in some states, part-time enrollments reached as high as eighty percent. These part-time students were often older than traditional college students, most worked full or part-time, many were women. Significant is the fact that part-time enrollments greatly changed the composition of the student body. By the late 1970's the number of women outnumbered men enrolled in community colleges nationwide. The enrollment of part-time students, new students, older students, and working students all combined to make up a student body that was far from typical when compared to traditional student bodies made up almost entirely of 18-24 year olds.

Community Colleges

tcstanley — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:53:17 CDT

The American Community College / Cohen & Brawer
Cohen, A. M., & Brawer, F. B. (2003). The American community college. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

The Diverted Dream... / Brint & Karabel
Brint, S. G., & Karabel, J. (1989). The diverted dream: Community colleges and the promise of educational opportunity in America, 1900-1985. New York: Oxford University Press.

The Community College in America: A Pocket History / Vaughan
Vaughan, G. B. (1982). The community college in America: A pocket history. AACJC pocket reader, 4. Washington, D.C.: American Association of Community and Junior Colleges.

American Community College

tcstanley — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 17:45:14 CDT

p. xv-xvi - This book focuses mainly on the period since 1960, when the community colleges underwent several major changes. since that (xvi) time, the number of public two-year institutions has increased by 250 percent and their enrollments by 700 percent.

p. 1 The American community college dates from the early years of the twentieth century. Among the social forces that contributed to its rise, most prominent were the need for workers trained to operate the nation's expanding industries; the lengthened period of adolescence, which mandated custodial care of the young for a longer time; and the drive for social equality, which supposedly would be enhanced if more people has access to higher education. Community colleges seemed also to reflect the growing power of external authority over everyone's life, the peculiarly American belief that people cannot be legitimately educated, employed, religiously observant, ill, or healthy unless some institution sanctions that aspect of their being.

p. 3 The community colleges thrived on the new responsibilities because they had no traditions to defend, no alumni to question their role, no autonomous professional staff to be moved aside, no statements of philosophy that would militate against their taking on responsibility for everything.

P. 3-4 Two generic names have been applied to two-year colleges. From their beginnings until the 1940's, they were known most commonly as junior colleges. ... At the second annual meeting of the American Association of Junior Colleges, in 1922, a junior college was defined as "an institution offering two years of instruction of strictly collegiate grade" (Bogue, 1950, p. xvii). In 1925, the definition was modified slightly (p. 4) to include this statement: "The junior college may, and is likely to, develop a different type of curriculum suited to the larger and ever-changing civic, social, religious, and vocational needs of the entire community in which the college is location. It is understood that in this case, also, the work offered shall be on a level appropriate for high-school graduates" (p.xvii).

p. 4 During the 1950s and 1960s, the term junior college was applied more often to the lower-division branches of private universities and to two-year colleges supported by churches or organized independently, while community college came gradually to be used for the comprehensive, publicly supported institutions. by the 1970s, the term community college was usually applied to both types.

p. 5 We define the community college as any institution regionally accredited to award the associate in arts or the associate in science as its highest degree.

p. 6 Why community colleges? A major reason is that several prominent nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century educators wanted the universities to abandon their freshman and sophomore classes and relegate the function of teaching adolescents to a new set of institutions, to be called junior colleges. Proposals that the junior college should relieve the university of the burden of providing general education for young people were made in 1851 by Henry Tappan, president of the University of Michigan; in 1859 by William Mitchell, a University of Georgia trustee; and in 1869 by William Folwell, president of the University of Minnesota. All insisted that the universities would not become true research and professional development centers until they relinquished their lower-division preparatory work.

p. 7 If the universities had shut down their lower division and surrendered their freshmen and sophomores to the two-year colleges, these newly formed institutions would have been part of the mainstream. But they did not, and the community colleges remained adjunctive well in the middle of the century.

p. 11 ... the development of the early public community colleges to local community conditions and interests. Frequently operating in high school facilities, the colleges were local institutions, and much civic pride surrounded their development.

p. 13 By 1922, thirty-seven of the forty-eight states contained junior colleges, this within two decades of their founding. Of the 207 institutions operating in that year, 137 were privately supported.

p. 16 Throughout the nation, in city after city, as community colleges opened their doors, the percentage of students beginning college expanded dramatically. During the 1950s and 1960s, whenever a community college was established in a locale where there had been no publicly supported college, the proportion of high school graduates in the area who began college immediately increased, sometimes as much as 50 percent. The pattern has not changed.

p. 18 Even now, more than half of the college students in Arizona, Washington, and Wyoming, as well as California, are in community colleges.

p. 20 The various curricular functions noted in each state's legislation usually include academic transfer preparation, vocational-technical education, continuing education, developmental education, and community service. All have been present in public colleges from the beginning.

p. 21 Academic transfer, or collegiate, studies were meant to fulfill several institutional purposes: a popularizing role, a democratizing pursuit, and a function of conducting lower-division courses for the university. The popularizing role was to have the effect of advertising higher education showing what it could do for the individual and encouraging people to attend. The democratizing pursuit was realized as the community colleges became the point of first access for people entering higher education: by the late 1970s, 40 percent of all first-time-in-college, full-time freshmen were in the two-year institutions.

p. 22 The continuing education function arouse early, and the percentage of adults enrolled increased dramatically in the 1940s. The 1947 President's Commission on Higher Education emphasized the importance of this function, and Bogue noted with approval a Texas college's slogan: "We will teach anyone, anywhere, anything, at any time whenever there are enough people interested in the program to justify its offering" (1950, p. 215).

p. 27 Of all the higher education institutions, the community colleges contributed most to opening the system. Established in every metropolitan area, they were available to all comers, attracting the "new students": minorities, women, people who had done poorly in high school, those who would otherwise never have considered further education.

p. 28 But the new students have had the most pronounced effect. The community colleges reached out to attract those who were not being served by traditional higher education: those who could not afford the tuition; who could not take the time to attend a college full time; whose ethnic background had constrained them from participating; who had inadequate preparation in the lower schools; who educational progress had been interrupted by some temporary condition; who had become obsolete in their jobs or had never been trained to work at any job; who needed a connection to obtain a job; who were confined in prisons, physically disabled, or otherwise unable to attend classes on campus; or who were faced with a need to fill increased leisure time meaningfully.

p. 29 As an example, they could quite easily convert their libraries to learning resource centers because the libraries did not have heritage of the elaborate routines accompanying maintenance and preservation of large collections. They could be adapted to the instructional programs.

p. 30 Two years of postsecondary education are within the reach - financially, geographically, practically - of virtually every American. Two generations have passed since President Truman's Commission on Higher Education recommended that the door to higher education be swung open. Now community colleges are everywhere.

p. 33 Third, the trend toward less-than-college-level instruction has accelerated. In addition to the increased number of remedial courses as a proportion of the curriculum, expectations in collegiate courses have changed. To take one example, students in community college English literature courses in 1977 were expected to read 560 pages per term, on average, whereas, according to Koos (1924), the average was three times that in high school literature courses in 1922. These figures are offered not to derogate community colleges, only to point out that the institutions cannot be understood in traditional terms. They are struggling to find ways of educating students whose prior learning has been dominated by nonprint images.

p. 35 Books on higher education published from the turn of the century, when the first community colleges appeared, through the 1980s rarely gave even a nod to the community college; one searches in vain for a reference to them in indexes. In 1950, Bogue deplored the lack of attention paid to the junior colleges, saying that he had examined twenty-seven authoritative histories of American education and found only superficial treatment of junior colleges or none at all.

p. 38 - 39 the increased in community college enrollments may be attributed to several conditions in addition to general population expansion: older students' participation; financial aid; part-time attendance; the reclassification of institutions; the redefinition of students and courses; and high attendance by low-ability women, and minority (p. 39) students.

p. 39 In order to make up for the shortfall in potential younger students, the colleges expanded programs attractive to older students. Numbers of working adults seeking skills that would enable them to change or upgrade their jobs or activities to satisfy their personal interests enrolled because they could attend part time. Older students swelled the roster. According to the AACJC Directory, the mean age of students enrolled for credit in 1980 was twenty-seven, the median age was twenty-three, and the modal age was nineteen. A national survey conducted by the Center for the Study of Community Colleges (1986) found that by 1986, the mean had gone up to twenty-nine, the median had increased to twenty-fine, adn the mode had remained at nineteen. Surveys made in the late 1990s found the mean at twenty-nine, the median at twenty-three, and the mode still at nineteen (National Center for Education Statistics, 2001b, p. 206).

p. 43 Nonetheless, the proportion of Americans attending college increased steadily through the twentieth century, and the availability of community colleges contributed notably to this growth. In 1997, 44 percent of all students beginning postsecondary education enrolled first in two-year college (National Center for Education Statistics, 2001b).

p. 349 - 350 Like other schools, the community colleges conduct little research, and even less attention is paid to them by extramural research agencies. Data about the college are sometimes embedded in reports of postsecondary education in a state or in the nation. but there is no generally accepted national research agenda for community colleges and few educational resources directing their attention toward them. The words community college, junior college, and two-year college do not appear in the index to Feldman and Newcomb's two-volume compendium of research, The Impact of College on Students (1969), and only a handful of students that include community college student data are among the more than twenty-five hundred reports cited by Pascarella and Terenzini in their successor volume, How College Affects Students (1991). Thus, according tot hose who study the effects of postsecondary schooling, nearly 40 percent of American's college (p. 350) students, the proportion enrolled in the community college, are not even important enough to tabulate.

p. 403-404 The number of public community colleges will hardly change; practically all the colleges necessary had been built by 1975, when (p. 405) a college could be found within commuting distance of nearly all the people in all but a few states. The number has remained constant ever since, reaching stasis at under eleven hundred.

p. 407 In general, the community colleges will sustain their enrollments because the demand for postsecondary education will remain high. They will continue to get their share of eighteen year olds because of their traditional appeal: easy access, low cost, and part-time attendance possibilities. They will continue enrolling job seekers because of the high demand for people in occupations for which some postsecondary training but not a bachelor's degree is expected. According to the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2001), of the ten occupations with the largest job growth for the decade subsequent to 1998, eight are in fields for which the two-year colleges have training programs: retail salespersons cashiers, truck drivers, office clerks, registered nurses, computer support specialists, personal care (p. 408) and home care aides, and teacher assistants.

Research Articles

tcstanley — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 11:05:31 CDT

There is no abstract available for this page revision.

Using Interactive Technologies in Libraries

tcstanley — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 23:42:20 CDT

p. 19-20 RSS is an amazing new application of commonplace technology. Using standard internet protocol and markup languages together with straightforward XML formatting rules, RSS allows for content to be easily aggregated from multiple sources or integrated into multiple services. It allows for non-technical users to access, package, and present content in a highly customized fashion. The user only need to do the initial site or service setup. The content is automatically updated and refreshed.
Application of RSS on the Web is increasing at an astonishing rate, and application in libraries and universities is quickly catching on.
Offering RSS feeds for subscription databases provides the following benefits

Expands the exposure and accessibility of database content for libraries, their institutions, and ptrons
Increases the "embeddedness" of library resources in online environments, placing the content in context for users and in creasing the prominence of the library in the user environment
(p. 20) Increases usage of subscription databases, fostering an improved value proposition
Enables customized selection of licensed content to be displayed at compelling points of use, including course sites and library subject pages
Allows end users to subscribe to feeds of relevant articles based on their unique research topics and then have ongoing access feed conveniently from their RSS aggregator/reader (freely available on the Web) along with their other sources of research

Librarians are excited about the potential that RSS holds for increasing exposure of library resources, thereby improving the value proposition (and perception) of the library among their constituents. RSS enables the packaging of library resources into custom feeds tailored for particular audiences, topics, and applications. Placing access to library resources, packaged in this fashion, in various library and non-library Web spaces raises the profile of the library and their resources.

Student Engagement and Information Literacy

tcstanley — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 21:27:15 CDT

Maughan, P. D. (2006) The winds of change: Generation Y, studnet learning, and assessment in higher education. Gibson, C. Ed. Student engagement and information literacy. Chicago : Association of College and Research Libraries, American Library Association.

pp. 68-69 Every other year, the University of California, Los Angeles's School of Education and Information Studies hosts fifteen senior fellows and provides them with the opportunity to reflect on their work and to study individual and collective interests relating to librarianship. In 2003, the fellows chose to replicate and update the work of Deborah Grimes, who studies the centrality of academic libraries to their home institutions. They interviewed the presidents and provosts of six universities with student bodies that range in size from fifteen to twenty-eight thousand and library collections that ranged in size from 1.3 to five million volumes. they asked these leaders, "When is the library a top priority?"
Presidents responded that it is when the library matters emerge as part of the campus strategic planning; provosts said it is when they hear complaints or problems wit the library. The presidents and provosts interviewed commonly viewed the library as a depository, a physical space, a psychological center for the university, a social and working place for students, and a campus site for reliable information. A few mentioned the role of library as publisher. Within their comments, there seems to be a glaring omission of the library's (P. 60) campus educational partner that can meaningfully contribute to the goal and assessment of student learning. These academic leaders viewed the libraries as n "odd man out," noting that libraries do not ask for budgets in the same way that other departments and academic units do (e.g., by linking their budget requests to student enrollments). This suggests that the educational role of the library is largely unrecognized and overlooked. Presidents and provosts also noted the importance of assessment and commented on the lack of high-quality data linking library collections and services to the campus's research and educational accomplishments. the fellows concluded that a major shift in library attributes and centrality indicators needs to occur before libraries will be viewed as "key players" at their home institutions. In developing strategies, products, and collaborations with faculty and other campus learning experts, and documenting their collective impact on student learning, libraries need to re-envision their role and become a more integral part of the teaching and learning enterprise.
Libraries are cultural, social, political, and intellectual institutions that, if they are to be effective and valued, must understand and respond to the changes and forces present in the larger communities in which they exist. Academic libraries are not only situated on college and university campuses, but also within the realm of higher education as a whole. They must continually scan these environments for changes and plan to respond accordingly, or in some cases to lead change, if they are to ensure their continued viability. Changes in today's higher education front are evident in three critical areas: in the learning and behavior characteristics of today's college students, in higher educations' shift in emphasis to student-centered and active learning approaches to education, and in the growing and accountability movement within public and higher education institutions.

Born Digital

tcstanley — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 13:49:45 CDT

p.4 Unlike those of us just a shade older, this new generation didn't have to relearn anything to live lives of digital immersion. They learned in digital the first time around; they only know a world that is digital.

p. 8 Teachers worry that they are out of step with the Digital Natives they are teaching, that the skills they have imparted over time are becoming either lost or obsolete, and that the pedagogy of our educational system cannot keep up with the changes in the digital landscape. Librarians, too, are reimagining their role: Instead of primarily organizing book titles in musty card catalogs and shelving the books in the stacks , they serve as guides to an increasingly variegated information environment.

p. 12 BOOK'S WIKI -- http://www.digitalnative.org/

p.14 Rather than calling Digital natives a generation - an overstatement, especially in light of the fact that only 1 billion of the 6 billion in the world even have access to digital technologies - we prefer to think of them as a population.

p. 125 Digital technology gives everyone the means to express themselves, and it empowers them to speak - and to be heard by others, including those in power - in ways that previous generations could only have imagined. Creators no longer need to rely on the old gatekeepers like professional agencies, editorial boards, and producers. Digital technology allows creators "to route around " the traditional intermediaries by using the hardware and software in their dorms and homes. [cites: Jack Balkin, "Digital Speech and Democratic Culture: A Theory of Freedom of Expression for the Information Society," New York University Law Review 79 (2004):1.]

p. 148 Although no single innovation could fix all the quality problems on the Internet, there's much we can do using technology to address the information -quality challenge. Search technology, syndication, and aggregation, especially when combined with rating and recommendation technologies, are promising. These tools work best when they can blend the aggregated human judgment - the wisdom of the crowds - with the best technical approaches.
We should never underestimate Digital Natives' willingness to learn about the challenges they face online and their ability to adjust to them. The most sophisticated kids we've talked to are using rating systems, content aggregators, and applications that can help to create an information niche with an appropriate level of information quality.

p. 201-202 Many of the new information -navigation tools are based primarily on how information is organized (or disorganized, for tha matter) in the online space. Traditional classification systems for information have broken down during the transition to the digital era. Gone are the card catalogs of yeteryear. Traditional "experts" are still classifying things, now online, but they have been joined by groups of passionate amateurs who are inventing their own information order.
One method of user-based categorization is frequently used is tagging. [cites: According to a Pew survey, 28 percent of Internet users have tagged or categorized online content such as photos, news stories, or blog posts. See "Pew Report: Online Activities and Pursuits: Tagging, " January 2007, http://www.pewinternet.org/PDF/r/201/report_display.asp ] Tags are essentially keywords that are associated with a piece of information - for example, a photo, blog post, or video, - in a keyword-based classification scheme. [cites: See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_%28metadata%29] Tagging, in other words, is like creating a label for online content. Here's an example: After creating an account on a site like Del.icio.us, each user can put customized virtual labels onto websites of his choice - for instance, someone could label a website with travel information about Boston as "Red Sox Country." Once the label is added, anyone who looks for "Red Sox Country" in the Del.icio.us search bar can find the Boston travel information website - as well as all other websites that are similarly tagged. This technique helps Digital Natives find information based on descriptions of their choice.
Tags have a social dimension as well as a personal dimension, which makes them useful to other people after the person doing the tagging has left his mark. Once aggregated, tags become part of a bottom-up, highly evolutionary categorization system created around shared semantics among users rather than experts [cites: David Weinberger, "Tagging and Why It Matters," 2005, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/uploads/507/07-WhyTaggingMatters.pdf ] By creating a new, user-driven orientation and navigation system for digital information-overload situations in the future. This idea is known as a "folksonomy," as opposed to a formal "taxonomy" created only by experts, as in John Dewey and his famous decimal system.
Technology-enabled responses that make use of peer knowledge and the "wisdom of the crowd" are a key to addressing the challenges faced by (p. 202) Digital Natives and triggered by the digital information explosion. In fact, technological innovation is a solution to a problem created by technology. [cites:Among the most prominent critics of such an approach is Neil Postman. See his Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1993.)]

p. 233 Digital Natives are good at collaboration, online and offline, and sometimes will do so for free on behalf of companies willing to listen to them.
[cites: Keith Sawyer, Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration (New York: Basic Books, 2007). See also James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations (New York: Doubleday, 2004); Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (New York, Portfolio, 2006).

p. 239 In order for schools to adapt to the habits of Digital Natives and how they are processing information, educators need to accept that the mode of learning is changing rapidly in a digital age. Before answering the questions about how precisely to use technology in schools, we must understand these changes. To do so, it's necessary to expand the frame to all learning, not just the kind that happens in the classroom.

p. 243 The difference between a Digital Native and one's aunt with the new e-mail account in this regard is that the Digital Native is likely more sophisticaed about what she shares and how.

p. 244 Digital Natives are doing the same things their parents did with information, just in different ways. While they may not be learning the same things through the same processes, it's not the case that Digital Natives are interacting less with information. They are simply coping with more information, and that information comes to their attention in new ways - offering new possibilities for engagement.

p. 247 Instead of worrying about the "digital divide" in terms of just access to technologies, schools need to adopt affirmative strategies to teach kids who other wise are being left behind by the digitally mediated world to function effectively within it.

p. 250 The changes for libraries over the past couple of decades have been even more radical than the changes in the classroom. Libraries are the facet of education that will change the most in the digital age.
Librarians have no choice but to ask hard questions about acquisitions, given the increasing importance of digital resources to the library's core users. The problem is that both digital works and traditional print materials cost money. The ideal scenario - in which a collection includes a hard copy version and a digital version of every book, for searching, cataloging, borrowing, and citation - is implausible.
Many libraries are already being transformed. Some are devoting less and less room to books, and more and more to computers and printers. In the process, many libraries are becoming more like bookstores with every passing year. Digital technologies allow them to know more about what their patrons are reading, just as bookstores use them to track their customers' preferences. The need to spend on digital works and services - in part to meet the demand from Digital Natives - is concurrently reducing the amount of money available to spend on books. Libraries are teaming up with one another to acquire books for just-in-time delivery to patrons, rather than maintaining the old system of each library having its own copy of each book on the shelf. We are witnessing the Amazonificaton of libraries.
Digitization has meant that books - in their classic, bound format - aren't the only way to convey information. Patrons have more options than they use to.
Books are not dead; culture is not collapsing. There is no need to worry about the future of the book just yet. Books for many people remain a very good technology.

p. 251 The libraries of the future will also need the librarians of the future. Libraries will be staffed increasingly by those who can serve as guides to Digital Natives. At a fundamental level, the services provided by the library ought to adjust to the way that Digital Native are accessing information. There's never been a greater need for reference librarians than there is today, when Digital Native are relying so heavily on Google, Wikipedia, and the places to which those sites point them.
The job of the librarian of the future should in part be to help to create a self-service information environment that allows students to navigate the increasingly complex array of choices for getting the information they need. In addition to maintaining access to traditional pools of knowledge (such as books, journals, and case studies), librarians should help Digital Natives figure out how to manage the rivers of digital information that they encounter every day (RSS feeds of current information that is useful for a short window, but less so with the passage of time, for example). Right now, libraries are focused on the pools. Librarians could profitability help patrons have a greater access to the rivers, and to use them more effectively.

p. 253 The role of libraries is increasing, not decreasing. The job may take on different contours, but its importance is only rising as Digital Natives grow up saturated in the information environment of the digital age.
Schools and libraries should start by putting the learners first. Teachers and administrators need to get serious about figuring out how kids are learning, and they must build digital literacy skills into their core curricula. Librarians should embrace the crucial role that they can play in guiding Digital Natives through the increasingly complicated world of digital information.
Our children find information in digital formats and are processing it in ways that those who came before them could only have imagined. This information is sometimes surrounded with far less context than in the past, while at other times, it is surrounded with far more. Our challenge is to help them make sense of these new contexts and new meanings, and to think synthetically and critically, rather than letting them lose their way. Digital Natives may be able to lead us into these new environments and show us how they work, but parents, teachers, and librarians still need to teach children and students how to interpret the signals they pick up with such perception.
We find ourselves in a period of transition. Digital tools will find their place in schools and libraries. We have managed transition of this sort before. The hard part, during the transition, will be to discern what to preserve about traditional education and what to replace with new, digitally mediated processes and tools. Sometimes, this will mean teaching kids to use computers; sometimes, computers will have no place in the room. We need to get much better at telling the two apart. Only then can we exploit what we know about how kids are learning in the digital age.

Kaiser Family Foundation, News Release, "Media Multi-Tasking: Changing the Amount and Nature of Young People's Media Use," March 9, 2005, http://www.kff.org/entmedia/entmedia030905nr.cfm]

Libraries Today

tcstanley — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 12:12:48 CDT

Student Engagement and Information Literacy
Gibson, C. (2006). Student engagement and information literacy. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, American Library Association.

Using Interactive Technologies in Libraries
Hanson, K., & Cervone, H. F. (2007). Using interactive technologies in libraries. New York: Neal-Schuman.

PODetc

tcstanley — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 19:46:25 CDT

PODetc - Survey of Emerging Technologies	Learning 2.0 Sites
PODetc
PODetc - Faculty Room
PODetc - Blog

Learning 2.0 Sites

tcstanley — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 16:29:38 CDT

23 Things: Web 2.0 at Work and Home this site is a personal learning course where in 4 weeks you are introduced to various Web 2.0 apps

Learning 2.0, a site with PLCMC's staff are introduced to various Web 2.0 apps, while earning incentives

iPhone Apps

tcstanley — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:57:32 CST

These are some of my fav iPhone apps!

Can't live without...
Grocery IQ - I was using my notes, but this is much cooler!
Facebook - for me to stay in touch with all my friends. (and them with me)
Checks Please - great for tips and dividing up checks

Uniqueness...
Ocarina - wins hands down. Who doesn't want to play the flute on their iPhone!!
UrbanSpoon - I use it, but I usually don't use the restaurants it selects; but it gets me thinking outside of my usuals
LIghtsaber - for all you Star Wars fans
iSteam - is cool to look at, but really doesn't do much

Kid Friendly...
Mini Piano - great way to pass time with kids in the car.
Kids Math Fun - a favorite of my 6 year old granddaughter
Labyrinth LE - when the ball hits the wall, actually sounds like it is hitting wood. Very Cool.
DizzyBeeFree - maze like. This is the free version. (Most of my apps are free versions)

Games...
Bejeweled2 - need I say more
Enjoy Sudoku Daily - totally addicted
TapTap Revenge - for all those DDR fans out there. (Your fingers will get a workout with this)

Weather... (I am a weather addict)
Weather Underground - favorite all around; does animated radar and multiple locations
WeatherBug - good current temps page; map allows you to move it around (can move more east/west/north/south)
Accuweather - does animated radar
The Weather Channel - can do multiple locations; temps hourly/36 hour/10 day
(yes, I have 5 weather apps on my iphone - all on the front page)

Pima Community College

tcstanley — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:39:53 CST

Web Study Guides by Subject

When Hope and Fear Collide

tcstanley — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 16:50:44 CST

p. xv Most students say they work hard, but there is a tendency to confuse hard work with being intellectual. Either way, the payoff is ever recorded as grade inflation continues to rise. Yet this comes at a time when students require greater levels of remedial education than their predecessors did. There is also a growing mismatch between the ways in which faculty teach and student best learn.

p. 11-12 Current undergraduates come of age with the opening of a new era. Within the space of a century, the United States had moved from an agricultural to an industrial base and toward a new kind of economy that highlighted service, information, and technology. While current students were growing up, the agricultural sector of (p. 12) the economy continued to contract.

p. 16 [referring to the analogy of Rip van Winkle, the story of a man who awoke to a different world, and today's Today's college students grew up in a comparable time. As one observer put in, writing in Newsweek, "It wasn't until recently that I began to have some inkling of what poor Rip must have been feeling the day he finally opened his eyes and rejoined the world" (Janoff, 1995, p. 10). [Janoff, J. "A Gen-X Rip Van Winkle." Newsweek, Apr 24, 1995, p. 10]

p. 19 Every college generation is a product of its age. The momentous occurrences of its era - from the wars and economic shifts to the elections and inventions of its times - give meaning to the lives of the individuals who live through them. they also serve to knit those individuals together by creating a collective memory and a common historic or generational identity.

p. 49 Perhaps the largest change in higher education in recent years is who the students are. Between 1980 and 1994, the lion's share of college enrollment growth came from students who might be described as nontraditional (U.S. Department of Education, 1996b). By 1994, 44 percent of all college students were over twenty-five years old (U.S. Department of Education, 1996b), 54 percent were working (U.S. Department of Education, 1996e), 55 percent were female, and 43 percent were attending part-time (U.S. Department of Education, 1996e). Fewer than one in six of all current undergraduates fits the traditional stereotype of the American college student attending full-time, being eighteen to twenty-two years of age, and living on campus (U.S. Department of Education, 1996b). [U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. Digest of Education Statistics, 1996. (NCES-96-133). Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996b.] [U.S. Department of Education. National Center of Education Statistics. Youth Indicators, 1996: Trends in the Well-Being of American Youth. Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996e.]

p. 50 (talking about how students expect the "customer service" they get elsewhere from their college) In short, students are increasingly bringing to higher education exactly the same consumer expectations they have for every other commercial enterprise with which they deal. Their focus is on convenience, quality, service, and cost.

pp. 52-53 Initially, the changing mood of the nation also propelled consumerism. America was shifting in the 1970's from a progressive era, with a call for citizen responsibility, to a more conservative era, in (p. 53) which social activism waned and self-concern rose. Americans turned inward, focusing increasingly on "me." the gave further impetus to a s consumer mentality (Levine, 1980). [Levine, A. When Dreams and Heroes Died: A Portrait of Today's College Student. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1980)

p. 53 Also fueling the movement is the change in student demographics. With more and more students spending less and less time on campus owing to jobs, part-time attendance, and other responsibilities, there is a growing distance between students and their campuses. It is easier for undergraduates to perceive themselves as consumers rather than as members of a community.

p. 71 The 1990's produced an avalanche of front-page news articles, magazine cover stories, instant bestsellers, pop movies, and network exposes on multiculturalism, diversity, and political correctness. {I like how this reads - maybe start chapter 1 something like this.}

p. 122 Students are also asking for "relevance" in their studies. This is not relevance in the 1960s sense of "let's tie-dye T-shirts together." Rather, undergraduates see the whole world around them changing. They want their curriculum to be updated and to discuss the changes. As a junior at UC, Santa Barbara, told us, "Faculty can't just keep teaching the same old things. The whole world is changing. They can't ignore this."

pp. 123 - 124 Moreover, students told us almost universally that they worked hard, or thought they did. an overwhelming 87 percent said so, up from 81 percent in 1976 and only 49 percent in 1969. In almost equal proportion, 83 percent of students told us they considered themselves to be intellectuals as well, a jump of 19 percentage (p. 124) points since 1976 (Undergraduate Surveys, 1969, 1976, 1993). This is remarkable, since this is a generation that overwhelmingly rejects the notion of learning for learning's sake. their educational goals are clearly instrumental. So hard work equals an intellectual orientation. Time spent means achievement attained. There is no distinction between quantity and quality.

In the last thirty years, the gentleman's C has become the gentleman's A as the percentage of C's and A's given to students in college has reversed itself. In 1969, 7 percent of all students received grades of A- or hgiher; by 1976, this rose to 19 percent. In 1993, the proportion increased to 26 percent. In contrast, grades of C or lower decreased over the same period from 25 percent to 13 to 9 percent (Table 6.5).

pp. 127-128 Despite the ease with which students seem to attain good grades, many face high academic hurdles, which makes the good grades even more perplexing. Students are coming to college less well prepared (p. 128) than in the past. As a result, there is a growing need for remediation. Nearly three-fourths (73 percent) of student affairs officers reported an increase within the last decade in the proportion of students requiring remedial or developmental education at two-year (81 percent) and four-year (64 percent) colleges (Student Affairs Survey, 1997). Today, nearly one-third (32 percent) of all undergraduates reported having taken a basic skills or remedial course in reading, writing, or math, up from 29 percent in 1976 (Undergraduate Surveys, 1976, 1993). Despite high aspirations, a rising percentage of studnets are simply not prepared for teh rigors of acadme.

pp. 128-129 There is a another hurdle even more daunting than remediation: the widening gap between the ways in which students learn best and the ways in which faculty teach. According to research by Charles Schroeder of the University of Missouri-Columbia, more than half of today's students perform best in a learning situation characterized by "direct, concrete experience moderate-to-high degrees of structure, and a linear approach to learning. They value (p. 129) the practical and the immediate, and the focus on their perception is primarily on the physical world." Three-quarters of faculty, on the other hand, "prefer the global to the particular, are stimulated by the realm of concepts, ideas, and abstractions, and assume that students, like themselves, need a high degree of autonomy in their work," In short, students are more likely to prefer concrete subject and active methods of learning. By contrast, faculty are predisposed to abstract subjects and passive learning. The result, says Schroeder, is frustration on both sides and a tendency for faculty to interpret as deficiencies what may simply be "natural" differences in learning patterns of students (Schroeder, 1993, p. 25). [Schroeder, C. C. "New Students - New Learning Styles." Change, Sept-Oct. 1993, 25(4), pp. 21-26.]

p. 161 The enormous change in the world in which current students will live their lives also necessitates that they master what might be called transition skills. These skills could be named the three C's. Critical thinking is imperative in an age in which information is multiplying geometrically, ideologies masquerade as facts, and hard policy choices need to be faced. Continuous learning, the ability to learn independently throughout one's life, is also mandatory in an era in which the half-life of knowledge is declining precipitously and new learning technologies are burgeoning. Creativity is essential as well for a period in which the tried and true understandings of the past are quickly becoming aged and less useful.

p. 162 For this generation of students, finding context for pieces of information is more complex than it used to be. At a time when books and libraries once provided discrete context for the information they contained, the process of acquiring and using knowledge was much simpler. Today, the contexts, have changed or don't exist. For students of the 1990s, the process of acquiring pieces of information is like trying to fill a teacup with a fire hose. Using that information and knowledge effectively is the true challenge. Those who learn to think critically, learn continuously, and act creatively - those who have mastered the three C's and are able to put them to good use - have acquired techniques to enable them to convert the knoweledge they acquire into value.

About Me!

tcstanley — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 12:16:37 CST

Theresa C. Stanley ~ Librarian and Doctoral Student

Envision, Encourage, Experience, Empower

I am an academic librarian at Pima Community College's Downtown Campus Library, in Tucson. I enjoy working with adults, helping to meet their educational, as well as, personal, and recreational informational needs. I am a strong proponent of active learning, so I am always looking to make a presentation or research on a project more personal - believing if it's relevant to the student they are more likely to get something out of it by putting more into it!

I am also a doctoral candidate in Educational Technology at Pepperdine University. My dissertation is researching community college library websites for current and future trends. In my initial research I have found similar research on Colleges and Universities (mostly Research 1 schools), but none on community colleges. I believe this is because faculty, which includes librarians at Research 1 schools, must post research, whereas the faculty in community colleges does not have those requirements. (My initial findings is actually very little regarding libraries in community colleges, a void I hope to fill.) In looking at these library websites, I am interested to see how Web 2.0 is represented, if at all. I will be doing follow up surveys and will then look more in-depth in what their future plans may hold. This research is driven by my focus is on Web 2.0, social networking applications and how they can be used for student and staff development.

In January 2009, I began teaching as an adjunct instructor at University of Wisconsin - Green Bay, offering an online graduate level course Survey of Emerging Technologies. It is designed for K-12 educators, although I have other disciplines in the course, which makes it very interesting. (I am in the process of developing a course on Copyright/Fair Use; launch date unknown at this time.) (This course is offered through The Stephens Group's, PODetc, and can be taken through UW-GB for credit or directly through PODetc for non-credit.)

Besides this, I have been a reviewer/judge on several projects, most recently a judge for the 2009 CODIE awards. I have also been asked to be a reviewer for the U.S. Department of Education's 2009 Improving Literacy
Through School Libraries. I really enjoy being a reviewer as I can see what the future trends may be in education.

Last year, four of us from our cadre presented at two conferences - the Hawaii International Conference on Education (January 2008) and the Paris International Conference on Education, Economy and Society (July 2008). We presented on our experience in using wikis as a collaborative tool for distance students. For our two semester statistics course, we were to work in groups and our group used a wiki for our knowledge management and communication tool, as we were located throughout California and in Arizona.

So you know a little about me. Look through my site and let me know what you think. If you are into Web 2.0 and /or participatory/social media and want to share - email me @ stanleytc@gmail.com

Pepperdine University ~ Wavenet ~ Pima CC ~ MyPima ~Tucson Weather ~

cal's homepage ~ del.icio.us

Students Today

tcstanley — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 17:38:13 CST

When Hope and Fear Collide / Aurthur Levine & Jeanette S. Cureton
Levine, A., Cureton, J. S., & Levine, A. (1998). When hope and fear collide: A portrait of today's college student. The Jossey-Bass higher and adult education series. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Born Digital / John Palfrey and Urs Gasser
Palfrey, J. G., & Gasser, U. (2008). Born digital: Understanding the first generation of digital natives. New York: Basic Books.

For the Common Good: The Ethics of Leadership in the 21st Century

tcstanley — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 21:23:26 CST

From Chapter 1: "Scanning More Distant Horizons" / Erik R. Peterson
p. 4 In order to contemplate the requirements for leadership in the21st century, leadership that we hope and trust will lead to an improvement of the common good, a fundamental shift in culture will be necessary. to give effect to Gandhi's observation, in order for us to engage the more distant future, we need to think in ever more innovative terms about what kinds of forces are shaping our world and what we can be doing now to influence those forces.

p. 14 Progressively, we will reach the stage when it becomes fully possible for us to choose the information and knowledge "truth" we want to receive. With the proliferation of information sources across the world, without ever more robust filters to establish the veracity of information and rate the quality of opinion, the potential is for a drift into knowledge and information relativism in which no single source is any more authoritative than the next. here, I believe that academica has an espeically important function to fill. It can referee the massive flows of information such that we can judge the "truth" more effectively.

From Chapter 2: "The Three Elements of Good Leadership in Rapidly Changing Times" / Lynn Barendsen and Howard Gardner
p. 22 As we construe it, ethical work is socially responsible work, work that takes its consequences into account adn adjusts accordingly. Asked about leadership, Gardner responded in ethical terms. In his view, leadership goes hand-in-hand with thinking beyond oneself. (John Gardner, interview by William Damon, December 15, 1999.)

From chapter 9: Ethical Leadership in a Global Society: (How) Can University Lead? / Beheruz N. Sethna
[identifies Friedman's four categories of those with untouchable jobs (from his Flat World book)] p. 106 4. Really adaptable: This is the one that I personally really believein . As the world changes, Friedman says "adaptable people will always learn how to make some othe rpart of the sundae. Being adaptable in a flat world knowing how to 'learn how to learn,' will be one of the most important assets any worker can have, because job churn will come faster, because innovation will happen faster." This what the University of West Georgia and other similar instituations are all about. The objective of higher education goes far beyond technical knowledge - it teaches students to learn how to learn, so that, if or when their jobs become obsolete, they can shift gears and adapt to the new environment.

From Chapter 10: "Cross-Sector Collaboration in the Public Interest" / David J. Siegel and Michael J. Siegel
Collaboration, after all, is an ackowledgement of the basic fact that no one organization or class of organizations on its own has the resources, connections, expertise, or intellectual capital to solve intractable problems or seize emerging opportunities. References to the collaborative advantage*, and the alliance advantage** call attention to the immediate and long-term value that is created in partnership. Value can take the form of learning and special understandings, cooporative prolem solving, and cross-borndary flows that include money, people, ideas, practices, energy, attitudes and a host of other tangible and intanbible assests***. A strategy and philosophy of collaboration, then, is a means of tapping into specialized knowledge, networks, and capabilities that are useful for project-related purposes but can also be used to nurtuer a larger feeling of social trust among partners.
*R. M. Kanter, "Collaborative Advantage: the Art of Alliances," Harvard Business Review, 72, no. 4 (1994): 96-108.
**Yves L. Doz and Gary Hamel, Alliance Advantage: The Art of Creating Value through Partnering (Boston, MA:Harvard Business School Press, 1998).
***L.D. Brown, "Creating Social Capital: Nongovernmental Development Organizations and Intersectoral Problem Solving," in Private Action and the Public Good, ed. W.W. Powell and E.S. Clemens (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 228-41.

p. 133 David Chrislip and Carl Larson provide a useful look at the collaborative leadership process, essentially suggesting that collaborative leaders (1) inspire commitment and action, (2) lead as peer prolem solvers, (3) build broad-based involvement, and (4) sustain hope and participation. Among the more effective behaviors collaborative leaders employ include convening and energizing others; overcoming cynicism; reliquishing some element of control in the process; being inclusive of community and partner interests; sharing ownership and relying incremental goal attainment. (David D. Chrislip and Carl E. Larson, Collaborative Leadership: How Citizens and Civic Leaders can Make a Difference (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1994.)

Ethics/Free Speech

tcstanley — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 20:46:18 CST

On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
Mill, J. S., & Spitz, D. (1975). On liberty. New York: Norton. (apa)

For the Common Good: the ethics of leadership in the 21st Century
Knapp, J. C., & Carter, J. (2007). For the common good: The ethics of leadership in the 21st century. Westport, Conn: Praeger.

Play to Win!

tcstanley — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 16:38:53 CST

(p. 25) Playing to win is concerned with engaging with life, with the desire to thrive on the adventure. Emotional, spiritual, and intellectual growth are the game's payoff.

(p. 26) We choose to play not to lose because we believe our emotional survival is at stake. We choose to play to win in order to learn, grow, and thrive. Although it is not often that black and white, the critical moments of our lives and careers often come down to a choice between the tow: Am I going to play to win or am I going to play not to lose?
Playing to win is about making choices - especially the important ones - consciously rather than simply letting our early warning system direct us away from possibly difficult situations. As we will see, consciously choosing requires us to know what we want, to understand how we want our lives or particular decision to turn out. Consciously choosing requires us to think more clearly and objectively about how to get to the game's payoff. Being more conscious of our important choices also means that we are constantly asking ourselves: Are there real things here to fear (do I really need to fear embarrassment, for example), or am I just following the head by balking at another painted cattle guard?

(p.47) Many of us, when we screw up, fail, or are rejected, do two thingswithout thinking: first, we cover it up; second, we go right from the "failure" to "I'm worthless!" We rake it personally and the learning we take aware is to never, ever get caught in that kind of situation again. The lesson? Play not to lose.
The "game changers" cma e to the belief that the game was about learning. How they learned was by putting themselves at risk, "failing," learnign adn then trying again. They were successful because they allowed themselves to make mistakes and to learn quickly from those mistakes.

(p. 59) Certainly, good things, bad things, and tragic things happen to us. Life shows up. We cannot control events. What we can control to a great extent, is what we think about those events, how we interpret what happens to us. By controlling our thinking, we can better manage our emotions and better control how we respond to the events of our lives. Remember: Emotions are the fuel of behavior.

(p. 60) diagram of:
The Results Model...Event --> Interpretations --> Response in feelings and behavior --> Result

(p. 61) Growing up emotionally - handling and managing our feelings and our responses appropriately - begins by taking accountability for them. Emotionally mature people tend to understand that they can exert control over their feelings and responses by controlling their thinking. Emotionally mature people choose how to respond to whatever life hands them.

(p. 71) Making stuff up is not good or bad; it's how the brain works, it how perception works. The brain is designed to quickly make stuff up that is good enough to help us survive.

(p. 130) diagram of:
The Growth Model... Dependent --> Independent --> Interdependent

(p. 131) But the dragon that is our ego-centeredness will battle us all the way. Facing the dragon and taming it is often the most difficult part of the hero's journey. The ego-centered dragon fights - as all dragons do - because it is guarding a secret treasure with its life. It is guarding the answers to the two most important questions being asked of us: Who am I? Why am I here?
The dragon fiercely guards its treasure because, if we see through to who we are and why we are here, it is likely that we will pursue the answers (read treasure) with all our hearts. If that happens, all that our ego-centered self craves - to be comfortable, to be #1 - will fall away. We will no longer care about simply making "me" comfortable, because we will be in the pursuit of higher meaning.

(p. 227) What hit me was this: There is no such thing as bad weather, just unprepared people. The weather just happens; it is neither bad nor good, cruel nor pleasant; it just is. We interpret it as bad or good because of how it affects us, but in reality, weather is just weather. All we can really do is be prepared.