I was at the Two Year College Association conference in Washington DC this month. What were the topics that were trending there in the presentations and conversations? BUZZ #1 ENROLLMENT Enrollment continues to surge at the state's public colleges and universities, thanks to a population bulge and a poor economy that has served as a catalyst for some to return to school. At my own Passaic County Community College enrollment has topped 10,000 as a 20-year growth trend continues. The number is 9 percent higher than last September.
BUZZ #2 WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT and TRAINING The community college growth is fueled, in part, by people looking to retrain for new careers in a tough economy. But it also reflects cost-conscious students who opt for bargain rates during their first two years of college.
BUZZ #3 DEVELOPMENTAL EDUCATION Record numbers of students are arriving on community college campuses this fall, but Education Week says that a majority of them—nearly 60 percent—aren’t academically prepared to handle the classwork.Call it developmental, basic skills or remedial, 3 out of every 5 community college students need at least one remedial course, and fewer than 25 percent of those students successfully earn a degree within eight years, according to the National Education Longitudinal Study. Colleges are having to look at ways to address the problems and lower the $2 billion-and-rising annual cost for remedial education.
BUZZ #4 RETENTION and GRADUATION The Obama administration has put a lot of money and attention towards community colleges. But two things that the administration wants to see improved are the the amount of time it takes to get a "two year" college degree, and the number of students who actually make it to a degree.
Some colleges are looking at where those concerns cross. For example, developmental education and graduation rates are connected. You can improve graduation rates if you use admissions standards. Don't let in the weakest students, and you will certainly increase your graduation rates in a few years. (Of course, you could also lower your standards and let more students get by, but that has pretty limited appeal to everyone from the federal government to employers.)
One counter-intuitive trend in dealing with these students is to push them through remedial work faster. (It reminds me of how ADHD patients are given drugs that speed up their system, when you might expect they needed something to slow them down.) Computer software that personalizes remediation and monitors it, more frequent class sessions and longer classes are all part of these programs. Early-intervention systems that identifies students who are failing and falling behind and can then provide support before they drop out are a hot trend. Grouping students into learning communities is another approach. These cohort communities move through developmental education together and then co-enroll in their first college-credit courses the next semester.
Long(ish) weekends are generally a good time to do a little Virtual preventative maintenance. If some of the articles appear to be in hiding, or if the rss feeds seem to be out-to-lunch for brief periods over the holiday weekend, you can still enjoy this classic song from Warner Brothers by way of Jimmie Lunceford.
You don't find many academic publications in favor of copying, but I came upon In Praise of Copying. Marcus Boon makes the case that “copying is an essential part of being human... that the ability to copy is worthy of celebration, and that, without recognizing how integral copying is to being human, we cannot understand ourselves or the world we live in.”
Marcus Boon is a writer, and Associate Professor in English Literature at York University, Toronto. He says that "the university is a place that is truly saturated with copies and copying." From students who dress in "well-defined subcultural fashions" to the way they move through the "maze of corporate branding which controls everything from drinking water to the bathroom walls."
Boon says that the book grew out of the observation that although copying is pervasive in contemporary culture, at the same time it is subject to laws, restrictions,
and attitudes that suggest that it is wrong.
We have music that samples other music, mashups, BitTorrent, tools like Google Earth or Photoshop, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter that make copying easy and encourage it in many ways. Still, when we use many sites or products we are confronted with copyright and
intellectual-property law in the form of notices, fine print and terms in small print that we usually don't read and click on AGREE and continue.
He notes that our ability to
make copies at the macro and even micro (via nanotechnology and replication from the atom up) levels is big business. Even the software and services online that push and pull your "personal data" (if there is such a thing anymore) from one place to another makes me wonder what “public domain” and "fair use" and other legal terms will mean in a few years. This blog post contains things copied from other web pages including the author's site.
Interesting reading and an interesting topic of discussion to have with your colleagues and students.
Choose your modality. That's a key idea behind School of One in the NY City school system. I heard about it on a Freakonomics Radio on an episode called "How is a Bad Radio Station Like the Public Schools?" that compared this pilot school program to using the the internet-based Pandora Radio that lets anyone customize the music he or she wants to hear. The NYC pilot program tries to do the same thing for education.
The connection? School of One attempts to provide students with "personalized, effective, and dynamic classroom instruction so that teachers have more time to focus on the quality of their instruction."
How? The program shifts from the classroom model of one teacher and 25-30 students in a classroom. Each student participates in multiple instructional modalities, including a combination of teacher-led instruction, one-on-one tutoring, independent learning, and work with virtual tutors.
Pandora Radio has an algorithm that creates a radio station for you based on the songs that you give a thumbs up, thumbs down or never-play-this-again rating. The school also uses an algorithm. Students take a test every day that analyzes what they have done, where they excel or fail, and what modalities are working best. The classroom instruction is customized to their particular academic needs, interests, and learning preferences.
According to the program brochure, to organize this type of learning, each student receives a unique daily schedule based on his or her academic strengths and needs. As a result, students within the school can receive profoundly different instruction. Each student’s schedule is tailored to ability and to the ways he or she learns best.
The teachers (who really are more "guides on the side" most of the time) get data about student achievement each day and then adapt their live instructional lessons accordingly. By leveraging technology to play a more essential role in planning instruction, teachers have more time to focus on delivering quality instruction and insuring that all students learn.
How did they build School of One? The team worked with each school’s leadership to select four program teachers for the after-school pilot. The team also identified two teacher-residents from local universities and three high school interns with a strong record of mathematics achievement. The group participated in professional development and planning sessions to prepare.
All sixth graders the three sites were invited to participate in the program. Of those, 260 across all three sites submitted permission forms and were selected into the program. Prior to starting the program, students receive an orientation to School of One. They learn how their daily schedule works, as well as how to use their logins and passwords, navigate the software, take daily online quizzes (the playlist update), and transition and work in the learning space.
When students start the program, they are assigned to one of four teams that serve as their home base. These teams compete with each other to earn points based on student attendance, academic performance, and organized team activities.
It's a pilot program and it's outside the normal school day, so good results have to be seen as additional schooling and not a change in the "regular" classroom instruction. Of course, you would assume if it works, this would become the regular school day.
At the NJEDge Conference, Brian Richards passed along some information to me about the Life on Earth digital textbook project.
Like myself, most of you used textbooks printed on paper to learn. Most of our current students are still using them. But it seems like that is less likely to be true in the next 10 years.
Electronic books (including open textbooks) are often just digitized print books. That means they are digital representations of the page - from a pdf version to many of the ones available on hot new eReader devices. Electronic ink on electronic paper.
But there are some truly digital books. Those "books" (We may change that word, although I still hear that a band has a new album out when there aren't any record albums in the classic sense, so maybe not....) have multimedia, hyperlinks, can be reconfigured, annotated, saved in other forms etc.
A new project that I think will have a big impact both on digital book acceptance in education and in opening up books more is being done by the E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundationcalled Life on Earth. It will get a lot of attention because E.O. Wilson is the man in this field.
It will be a full blown fully digital version full of interactive multimedia presentations, but that is not the real news. The real news is that it will be provided to anyone who wants it for free.
Some chapters are supposed to be made available this month.
I applaud the effort to make a good digital book and make it available for free for education. But I hope they also attempt to address HOW the books are used. Textbooks in any form are tools. Good ones increase the odd that a teacher will present the right information in an engaging way. But great teachers can teach well with or without textbooks.
The book project costs money. You do need a business plan. K-12 books will be available for no charge, while college level versions will be sold at 10% of traditional costs. This is important. What we do with it is even more important.
I'm doing a session today at the NJEDge.Net Annual Conference in New Jersey titled "It's an Open Book: Adopting Open Textbooks" in their Emerging Technologies track.
I have been working this past year as an advocate/trainer (http://opentextbookadvocatetrainers.ning.com). This is a nationwide movement to collect and promote the use of open textbooks and develop peer-reviewed repositories of digital textbooks in multiple media formats.
Open textbooks are complete electronic textbooks that, unlike commercial e-textbooks, are accessible online at no cost, and affordable to be purchased as a printed book. The material inside open textbooks is similar to traditional texts - the difference is that open textbooks are licensed to allow users to legally access and reformat copies of the text at no additional cost.
I did a brief presentation last spring at an NJEDge event that was about electronic books and readers. My hope is to use the networking of NJEDge to bring collaboration on open textbooks use amongst NJ colleges and high schools and on the creation of textbooks by faculty.
In the presentation, I will go through the adoption process and give resources for textbooks that any participant can immediately view and download.
The importance of this movement is that, especially in trying economic times, open textbooks offer schools entry opportunities to use open education resources (OER), deliver content via mobile devices, give faculty a way to integrate new technology delivery tools that meet today's student’s preferences, and allow for customized course materials while lowering student costs.
Open textbooks are not being widely used and I think they offer schools some entry opportunities to use open education resources, deliver content via mobile devices, and give faculty a way to integrate new technology delivery tools that meet today's student’s preferences. They can also allow for customized course materials while lowering student costs.
You can view and download the presentation slides and get more information on this presentation, eTextbooks, open textbooks, eReaders and related information at http://pccc.libguides.com/etextbooks
I clicked on a banner at the top of Wikipedia yesterday and made a donation to the Wikimedia Foundation to support that source of free knowledge that requires money to maintain.
As my Thank-You email said:
"The Wikimedia Foundation develops and improves the technology behind Wikipedia and nine other projects, and sustains the infrastructure that keeps them up and running. Your money supports technology and people. The Foundation has a staff of about fifty, which provides technical, administrative, legal and outreach support for the global community of volunteers who write and edit Wikipedia. Many people love Wikipedia, but a surprising number don't know it's run by a non-profit. Please help us spread the word by telling a few of your friends."
I have always admired that Wikipedia has not run ads on the site. I imagine that even if they just ran a few tiny Google text ads, they could generate some significant income. But that's not how they want to do it.
I'm telling a few friends to donate. There are about 100,000 people who land on this blog every month. And the posts get sent via RSS to Facebook and other social media sites. But, like voting, a lot fewer people participate than could participate. If you are a Wikipedia user or appreciate the efforts they have been making, then donate at http://donate.wikimedia.org.
No goods or services are provided, in whole or in part, for your contribution. The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a non-profit charitable corporation with 501(c)(3) tax exempt status in the United States.
Marcus Boon is a writer, and Associate Professor in English Literature at York University, Toronto. He says that "the university is a place that is truly saturated with copies and copying." From students who dress in "well-defined subcultural fashions" to the way they move through the "maze of corporate branding which controls everything from drinking water to the bathroom walls." 
