(2010). iTESOL: Analogous Practices in the SLA Classroom. TESOL in Context, v20 n2 p42-51 Dec. Recent studies of emerging technologies have shown that mobile phone production now exceeds one billion devices globally per year (Johnson, Levine & Smith, 2008). With a level of production that signifies a shift in the ownership of "networked machines" from institutions to individuals, the broad appeal of portable technologies now offers individuals access and control over a growing range of electronic resources. This paper explores resource sharing and collaborative communications practices in the spaces of the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) classroom. From informal conversations with students and the writer's observations, the paper discusses the processes of language acquisition that can emerge through portable technologies such as handheld translators, smart phones, portable computer, and so on. It considers how these kinds of technologies orchestrate and influence student classroom interactions and experiences. In particular, the writing examines social… [PDF]
(2010). Campbell and Rubin: A Primer and Comparison of Their Approaches to Causal Inference in Field Settings. Psychological Methods, v15 n1 p3-17 Mar. This article compares Donald Campbell's and Donald Rubin's work on causal inference in field settings on issues of epistemology, theories of cause and effect, methodology, statistics, generalization, and terminology. The two approaches are quite different but compatible, differing mostly in matters of bandwidth versus fidelity. Campbell's work demonstrates broad narrative scope that covers a wide array of concepts related to causation, with a powerful appreciation for human fallibility in making causal judgments, with a more elaborate theory of cause and generalization, and with a preference for design over analysis. Rubin's approach is a more narrow and formal quantitative analysis of effect estimation, sharing a preference for design but best known for analysis, with compelling quantitative approaches to obtaining unbiased quantitative effect estimates from nonrandomized designs and with comparatively little to say about generalization. Much could be gained by joining the emphasis… [Direct]
(2010). Ebooks and the Retailization of Research: Peer to Peer Review. Library Journal, v135 n13 p24-25 Aug. Most recently, Amazon crowed that it is selling more ebooks than hardcovers. Interestingly, the most recent figures from the Association of American Publishers indicate that new adult hardcover sales in both April and May rose by more than 40 percent over the same months last year, a rebound from last year's shopping paralysis brought on by the financial collapse. Though ebook sales are growing fast, the author argues that they still represent a small percentage of total book sales. What to her is more significant is that they represent a new relationship readers have with their books. What academics need from ebooks is not less than what they can expect from print books, but more. The challenge they face is including ebooks in libraries without compromising their opposition to censorship, their defense of privacy as a condition of intellectual freedom, their support of sharing as a fundamental process of scholarly inquiry, and their underlying belief that access to information… [Direct]
(2010). What Is Affordable Community College Tuition?: Part I. Community College Journal of Research and Practice, v34 n8 p645-661. During the last 25 years, there has been a major shift in the way that state and federal governments fund financial aid to students attending colleges and universities. This shift has been characterized by the idea of \cost sharing\–a \high tuition, high aid\ model that requires students and their families to shoulder a greater percentage of the burden of the cost of higher education. Unfortunately, however, like much market-driven public policy that has been developed over the last 25 years, we are beginning to see that this policy works better in theory than in practice. This funding model is especially problematic for community college students because it has put higher education functionally out of reach for many Americans, especially the most financially disadvantaged within our communities. It is the argument of this article that we have reached the economic threshold where \open access\ is being fatally compromised by high tuition costs and by student aid being operationally… [Direct]
(2009). Educators Assess "Open Content" Movement. Education Digest: Essential Readings Condensed for Quick Review, v74 n6 p61-64 Feb. This article discusses the open-content movement in education. A small but growing movement of K-12 educators is latching on to educational resources that are "open," or free for others to use, change, and republish on web sites that promote sharing. The open-content movement is fueled partly by digital creation tools that make it easy to create "mash-ups," or digital medleys of content of various types. Educators and education-oriented groups advocating open content say it saves schools money by spreading the time and expense of developing curricular resources over many contributors. It also passes on the value that teachers add, when they adapt works originated by others, so other educators can benefit from it…. [Direct]
(2012). Aspen Competition Drives Innovative Ideas for Community Colleges. Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. When Valencia College became the first recipient of the Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence last month, an unsung sector earned uncommon recognition. Now that the speeches are over and the prize money has been awarded, the Aspen Institute is sharing early lessons from its yearlong effort to determine the top community college in the country. In a way, that is the real goal of the group's effort. Announced by President Obama last year during the White House Summit on Community Colleges, the competition was designed not only to spotlight the sector but also to galvanize and promote promising programs and policies to improve learning, completion rates, and employment outcomes. Valencia's victory was based in large part on its statistical measures of success: More than half of full-time students at the college, in Orlando, Fla., graduate or transfer within three years of enrolling, a rate significantly higher than the national average of 39 percent. The college also boasts a… [Direct]
(2014). 2013 State of States' Early Childhood Data Systems. #2014-06. Early Childhood Data Collaborative In July 2013, the Early Childhood Data Collaborative (ECDC) surveyed 50 states and the District of Columbia to assess state early childhood data systems. The survey, completed by state education, health, and social services staff, focused on these three key aspects of state data systems, taken from ECDC's 10 Fundamentals: (1) Do states have the ability to securely link child-level data across ECE programs and to other state data systems, including K-12, health, and social services?; (2) Do states collect developmental screening, assessment, and kindergarten entry data to examine children's developmental status and service needs?; and (3) Do states have an ECE data governance structure designated to support the development and use of a coordinated longitudinal ECE data system? The major findings from the survey include: (1) In 49 states and the District of Columbia, child-level data across different ECE programs are not all linked. Only one state–Pennsylvania–can link child-level… [PDF]
(2012). 3 to 1: That's the Best Ratio of Tenure-Track Faculty to Administrators, a Study Concludes. Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. In the long-running debate over how many administrators are too many, two economic researchers believe they have identified an ideal ratio. For colleges to operate most effectively, they say, each institution should employ three tenured or tenure-track faculty for every one full-time administrator. What the ratio is now is difficult to say, though most colleges probably would have to hire significantly more faculty or pare back on administrators if they wanted to meet a three-to-one goal. The numbers are fuzzy and inconsistent because universities report their own data. Different institutions categorize jobs differently, and the ways they choose to count positions that blend teaching and administrative duties further complicate the data. When researchers talk about \administrators,\ they can never be sure exactly which employees they are including. Sometimes colleges count librarians, for example, as administrators, and sometimes they do not. In their recent study, Robert E. Martin,… [Direct]
(2013). Privacy-Preserving and Usable Data Publishing and Analysis. ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, North Carolina State University. In the current digital world, data is becoming an increasingly valuable resource and the demand for sharing or releasing data has never been higher. Organizations need to make available versions of the data they collected for business or legal reasons and at the same time they are under strong obligation to protect sensitive information about individuals represented in the dataset. This has motivated fruitful research on data privacy over the past decade and various models have been proposed to address the problem of privacy-preserving data analysis. Initial efforts to ensure privacy of released data are based on syntactic definitions such as k-anonymity while subsequent efforts like differential privacy try to provide a more semantic guarantee. In this thesis we contribute to the research of data privacy from several perspectives. First, we address the issue of data usability by proposing a data model to work with anonymized data. This is based on the observation that data… [Direct]
(2016). A New Challenge for Special Education Teacher Training in Turkey: The Newest and Applied Master's Degree Program's Effects. Journal of Education and Practice, v7 n35 p1-8. After the new education reform made in Turkey in 2012 under the leadership of the Minister of National Education Prof. Dr. Omer DINCER, considerable steps have been taken in training teachers who will work in the field of special education. According to Sari (2013), it is known that 48% of approximately 5580 teachers in 2468 special education institutions in Turkey are the graduates from special education departments and 52% of these teachers are the graduates from other departments. Turkey is urgently in need of the appointment of 22000 teachers graduating from the department of special education in 2014 and afterwards. Within the scope of this need in Turkey, one of the steps taken in order to train teachers having required competence in this field is the Applied Master's Degree Program (AMDP). It is a program, which was suggested to the Council of Higher Education by the Minister of National Education Prof. Dr. Omer Dincer, who was on duty between 2012 and 2013, and Assoc. Prof…. [PDF]
(2009). The Prevalence of Stress-Related Disorders in BC School Districts. BCTF Research Report: Part of the BCTF Information Handbook. Section XII. 2009-WLC-01. British Columbia Teachers' Federation This paper presents British Columbia Teachers' Federation's (BCTF) research report that has produced tables which allow the BCTF and its locals to consider the prevalence of Salary Indemnity Plan (SIP) claims by school district. While the data shown in this report indicate high prevalence of stress in some school districts, they actually under-report the total prevalence of stress-related disorders in BC teachers. The tables show each district's teacher full-time equivalent (FTE) totals as a percentage of provincial FTEs, as well as their SIP claims as a percentage of provincial SIP claims. Using the 2003-08 data, 34 BC districts have more teachers above age 50 than the 39% provincial average while 26 have below average numbers. Eight districts have over 50% of their teachers over 50, yet only three of these (Sunshine Coast, Gulf Islands, Vancouver Island North) incur proportionately higher SIP claims than the provincial average. This report is a result of co-operation and… [PDF]
(2012). A Review of Teaching Methods–Lecturing and Facilitation in Higher Education (HE): A Summary of the Published Evidence. Journal of Effective Teaching, v12 n3 p61-76. Several studies have documented that teaching methods in HE (generally involves work towards a university or college level education), are the most important aspect of a curriculum. This is because they serve as an interface between the learners and the philosophy of the curriculum. It is, however, difficult to define how knowledge is conceptualized and in what way it influences the choice of effective teaching methods in HE. A literature search using the major databases–Medline, PubMed, EMBASE, CINAHL, JSTOR, PsycINF, and Web of Science–was carried out. This research aimed to focus on two important dimensions: lecturing and facilitation, within the same learning and education process, rather than challenging and demanding it, concerning their roles in teaching and learning. This paper shows that in many areas of teaching and learning, the positivist notions of knowledge are not always sufficient or appropriate. The latter has been conceptualized as a "banking" model of… [PDF]
(2012). Building Management Information Systems to Coordinate Citywide Afterschool Programs: A Toolkit for Cities. Executive Summary. National League of Cities Institute for Youth, Education and Families (NJ1) This executive summary describes highlights from the report, "Building Management Information Systems to Coordinate Citywide Afterschool Programs: A Toolkit for Cities." City-led efforts to build coordinated systems of afterschool programming are an important strategy for improving the health, safety and academic preparedness of children and youth. Over the past decade, municipal leaders, foundations, major nonprofit intermediaries, and school and community-based providers have increasingly come together to expand the number of high-quality programs available, increase youth participation, and improve outcomes for young people. Yet even cities with strong leadership and effective coordinating entities are often challenged by the lack of reliable information to answer basic questions about the scope and impact of afterschool programs in their communities. The decision to build or enhance a management information system (MIS) raises its own set of tough questions about what… [PDF]
(2012). Digital Humanities: Envisioning a Collaborative Tool for Mapping, Evaluating, and Sharing Reconstructed Colonial American Parcel Maps. ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The use of GIS technology for the humanities has opened up new avenues for visually exploring and asking questions of our nation's historical record. The potential to harness new knowledge with tools designed to capture and preserve geographic links to the artifacts of our past is within our grasp. This research explores the common information needs of a community of interest to achieve their goal of reconstructing the spatial circumstance of America's Colonial era and the information barriers they encounter. It envisions a suite of digital tools to help confidently join together the solitary efforts of dissimilar investigators to facilitate sharing, debate and long term preservation of their painstaking research. The study described in this work examined the common information use behaviors of researchers whose goal is to reconstruct the missing geographic picture of British Colonial settlement in America. The scope of the analysis focuses on the work of two investigators who had… [Direct]
(2012). Integrating Language Diversity into Teacher Education Curricula in a Rural Context: Candidates' Developmental Perspectives and Understandings. Teacher Education Quarterly, v39 n2 p63-85 Spr. This study took place at the University of Wyoming, located in the rural mountain West. The University of Wyoming, with approximately 13,000 students, is the only four-year university in the state. The teacher education population of the College of Education is about 600, and demographically, this population is about 90% White, predominately female, and from rural communities across the state and other states that border Wyoming. Likewise, most school districts in the state of Wyoming are less diverse (ethnically, racially, and linguistically) than the national averages. Given this context, the College of Education has tried to address issues of diversity at the program level over the last decade or so. This article provides an account of a curriculum development, integration, and implementation initiative in the educational studies department (EDST). The content to be integrated in the program focused on language acquisition, a critical need given the urgency for teachers to support… [PDF] [Direct]