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Monday, 26 July 2010 18:46 |
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"Explore is a multimedia organization that documents individuals who have dedicated their lives to improving the human condition. They provide an online portal that archives non-profit work, including more than 250 original films and 30,000 photographs from around the world, to educate, entertain, and inspire people to “never stop learning.” A variety of educational resource in multimedia format encourages lifelong learning.
"Indeed, Explore features a wide range of topics—from animal rights, health and human services, and poverty to the environment, education, and spirituality. Delivered in short, digestible bites, explore films appeal to viewers of all ages, from children learning about other cultures for the first time to adults looking for a fresh perspective on the world around them.
"Among the Education section in Explore portal, you can find lesson plans along with multimedia resource written for use in the K-12 classroom and are connected to grade level national standards. Background information about the non-profit organizations is provided along with questions for guided discussion about the films. The questions are intended for students to connect to the people and issues profiled by exploring and developing their own viewpoints and opinions. Also, in the Minds section, you can find a collection of interviews with the non-profit leaders who contributed Explore’s rich library. Through Explore web portal, people share thoughts, engage in dialogue, view and email multimedia contents, and embed their favorites on blogs and social networking sites."
[Original Article from UNESCO] |
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Monday, 26 July 2010 18:44 |
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"The general perception is that developing an ICT in Education Master Plan is comparable to climbing Mt. Everest, in that it is a massive and daunting undertaking. However, this was bound to change for Nepali MOE officials after they attended a “National Seminar on Developing ICT in Education Master Plan”.
"The Seminar has two basic objectives. The first objective is to “raise awareness on the importance of developing a National ICT in Education Master Plan”. As the ultimate owner and user of the plan document, the government needs to appreciate the purpose and importance of this activity. Interestingly, high ranking government officials in Nepal were receptive to the seminar. Their presence during the key moments of the seminar sent a powerful message to all participants that this is high in Ministry of Education’s agenda.
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Monday, 26 July 2010 18:42 |
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"Hanoi National University of Education (HNUE) along with ten other universities and three teacher training colleges in Vietnam participated in the UNESCO Bangkok Curriculum Development Workshop. Thirty-six participants, mostly senior faculty members, received intensive training for five days, where they reviewed and updated ICT-related courses in their existing teacher education curricula.
"The workshop proved successful and highly relevant. Attendants agreed that it was useful and met most of their expectations. Several participants said they learned the “principles, models and steps to build an ICT-integrated curriculum” and the “relationship of technical skills, content and pedagogy in the curriculum development process”. For others, they have found the “roads to integrate ICT into the curriculum” or “how to develop the next generation curriculum”.
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Thursday, 15 July 2010 22:33 |
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" 'I'm interested in the topic of dreaming, and I'd like to find an article on it. I'm not a psychologist, so I don't want anything that is too technical. Where can I find some easy-to-read articles that discuss research and topics in this area of psychology?' "
"APA receives many requests from individuals looking for general information on psychological topics. These topics include a wide range of issues, from ability tests for employees to research on drugs and the brain, school violence, the impact of AIDS on family members, and the ways in which children learn. A variety of resources about psychology are available on the Internet or at any library, including books, journals, newspapers, pamphlets and electronic resources."
"Many library resources may be available without leaving your home or office. Your topic can be easily located using the online catalog and web-based indexes or subject guides and databases. The databases are generally listed by subject category and will help you find resources in a wide array of fields, including psychology."
Read full article at the APA website. |
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 William J. Furney
1 July 2010
[JAKARTA] The United States has allocated US$136 million for a partnership programme with Indonesia in the areas of science, environment, society and technology, as part of its continued diplomacy push in the country.
The announcement followed President Barack Obama's meeting with Indonesia's president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono last week (27 June) at the G20 summit in Toronto.
Continue reading article at the SciDevNet site
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Friday, 09 July 2010 12:15 |
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Kristopher Olds*
Why do we care so much about the actual and potential uses of bibliometrics (“the generic term for data about publications”, according to the OECD) and world university ranking methodologies, but care so little about the private sector firms, and their inter-firm relations, that drive the bibliometrics and global rankings agenda forward?
Full report on the University World News site |
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Friday, 09 July 2010 12:14 |
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Jim Côté
A common reaction to reports of student disengagement is that we all should get used to widespread disengagement because nothing better should be expected from a mass university system. A variety of excuses are made for students who are ‘too busy’ to put full effort into their studies. One way to approach this ‘inevitability question’ is to ask whether the levels of student disengagement observed in Canada and the US are also found in massified systems in other countries.
Full report on the University World News site |
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Friday, 09 July 2010 12:14 |
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Linda Nordling
Perhaps it is a fear that aid from the financially tumultuous North might be squeezed. Perhaps it is a growing frustration at rich countries’ failure to keep their promises to the world’s poor. Whatever the cause, a wave of idealism is sweeping through the innovation policy debate, accompanied by that idealist writ – the manifesto.
Full report on University World News Website |
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Friday, 09 July 2010 12:13 |
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Gilbert Nganga
Kenya’s universities are rolling out foreign language programmes as nations and investors, especially from Asia, increasingly turn to the East African country for resources to boost their industrial growth. In the past month Kenya’s biggest universities – Nairobi and Kenyatta – have announced new courses in Korean and Chinese respectively. They both host branches of China’s Confucius Institute.
Full report on the University World News site |
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Friday, 09 July 2010 12:12 |
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Yojana Sharma
The national referendum held in Kyrgyzstan last weekend in the wake of major unrest in mid-June will not halt the politicisation of universities, said a Kyrgyz opposition politician in exile who is familiar with the country’s universities.
Full report on University World News Website |
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Wednesday, 07 July 2010 12:16 |
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It will come as no surprise to readers of WorldWise that the flourishing of global higher education has led to worldwide conference proliferation. I haven’t, alas, been able to accept assorted invitations to recent and upcoming schmooze-fests in Poland, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, London, Paris, and Shanghai. But I did make it to a thought-provoking gathering in Washington, D.C., last week at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The panel of Asian and U.S. education leaders addressed many good questions, but one in particular lingers in my mind: In a high-tech era of radically democratized global learning, what will become of the traditional hierarchical relationship between professor and student?
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July 7, 2010, 10:39 AM ET
The French Twist on Affirmative Action
By Richard Kahlenberg
Last week, The New York Times featured a front page story on an emerging battle over admissions to France’s elite universities. The article, “Top French Schools, Asked to Diversify, Fear for Standards,” is on one level deeply reminiscent of the battles over affirmative action in the United States, but it also contained interesting twists that may offer lessons to American educators.
Familiar to American readers was the choice between meritocracy, as measured by test scores and the need to diversify the “overwhelmingly white”student population at the “grandes ecoles,” France’s most selective 220 schools. In February, Times reporter Seven Erlanger noted, the Conference des Grades Ecoles adopted a controversial “Charter for Equal Opportunity,” in which schools committed to having 30% of the student bodies consist of low-income scholarship students by 2012, up from less than 10% today. ...
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July 6, 2010, 07:05 PM ET
Money Isn't Everything
By Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson
The story Wes Davis told on The New York Times Op-Ed page on June 16 makes sobering reading for those of us (we include ourselves) who advocate investment in higher education in significant measure because of the economic benefits it provides. Davis describes a program created by AT&T, back in the 1950s when it was “the” Bell telephone company, to provide a heavy dose of liberal education (complete with literature, architecture, music, and other humanistic subjects) to some of its most promising leaders, whose education was mainly technological.
In inventing the program, Bell judged, as reported by the prominent sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, that these well-trained rising executives “knew how to answer questions,” while those who were liberally educated might better know “what questions were worth answering.” The ambitious program was, by those standards, a considerable success. By...
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July 1, 2010, 03:20 PM ET
The Administrator-Student Disconnect
By Richard Vedder
Legend has it that six score and eight years ago, railroad baron William Vanderbilt said, "The public be damned." That thought came back to me as I perused the information displayed on an interesting new (to me at least) Web site, MyPlan.com. Students evaluate some 592 schools on a variety of criteria, including a "bottom line" question 15 that asks student to indicate their overall satisfacation with their school. If, as McDonald's, Coca Cola and Apple Computer so clearly demonstrate, having satisfied customers is key to business success, you might expect the nation's "best" colleges to be the ones where students are, roughly speaking, the happiest.
It is interesting to compare the perceptions of college and university leaders of the "best" colleges, as indicated on the peer-assessment component of the 2009 US News & World Report rankings with student perceptions of what schools they...
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July 1, 2010, 02:00 PM ET
There's Something Good Happening in Texas
By Marybeth Gasman
As the majority of my research pertains to historically black colleges and universities, I constantly watch what's going on with these institutions. I have a Google alert on the term HBCU as well as the individual institutions so I can stay up to date. By and large, news stories tend to be negative when they are about HBCUs—a fact about which I have written a peer-reviewed article and about which I have spoken publicly. I think some of the media attention is a bit more balanced as of late—a bit—but it could still be better. That said, there are so many positive stories about HBCUs that we rarely hear because no one covers them. I thought I'd write today about an HBCU in Dallas, Texas, Paul Quinn College.
Most people wrote the institution off a couple years ago, but it, and its president Michael Sorrell, are survivors. The school is located in a low-income area of Dallas and has roughly ...
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June 29, 2010, 01:56 PM ET
Another Housing Bubble?
By Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson
Debates about the for-profit education industry and the borrowing and default patterns of their students are generating analogies between the subprime mortgage debacle and students loans. Some commentaries use the “bubble” terminology to make this comparison. Questions of whether there is a bubble in higher education that parallels the bubble in the housing market have been around for quite a while. But the earlier analogies were based on rising prices for college, as opposed to fears of loan default.
Without weighing in on the pros and cons of any particular new proposed regulations, we think it is important to clarify some of the issues. Let’s start with the loans. There are good reasons to compare the student loan market—or at least the private student loan market—to the subprime mortgage market. The private student loan market—through which any student (and frequently anyone claiming ...
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June 25, 2010, 11:23 AM ET
Student Financial-Aid Reform: It's All in a Footnote
By Richard Vedder
Someone once told me that the theory of imperfect competition, usually considered one of the major theoretical advances in economics dating from the 1930s, was actually pretty much laid out two generations earlier in a footnote in Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics. I was reminded of that reading a superb paper by my former student and Center for College Affordability and Productivity employee, Matthew Denhart. It seems that two giants in economics, Milton Friedman and Simon Kuznets, both winners of the Nobel Prize, wrote a footnote on page 90 of a 1945 monograph for the National Bureau of Economic Research that contains an alternative way to finance college education.
Friedman (better known in educational-reform circles as the founder of the voucher financing idea in K-12 education) and Kuznets (better known as the father of national income accounting) thought it was peculiar...
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June 24, 2010, 11:02 PM ET
A New Type of Minority-Serving Institution?
By Marybeth Gasman
In 2008, I co-edited a book with Benjamin Baez and Caroline Sotello Turner titled Understanding Minority Serving Institutions. One chapter in the book, authored by Robert Terenishi and Julie Park, focused on Asian American, Pacific Islander Serving Institutions. As a result of including this chapter, I was asked to serve as an adviser at a recent summit focused on these institutions. The summit took place this week in Washington.
One of the most interesting aspects of the conference was the diversity of the participants. The organizer, Neil Horikoshi, made sure to be inclusive when inviting speakers, advisers, and participants. He drew from the expertise of those who work with Hispanic Serving Institutions and Black Colleges and Universities. From my perspective, this was an important strategy. As there is much misunderstanding about the Asian-American student population and its needs, ...
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June 22, 2010, 12:49 AM ET
No Undergraduate Left Behind?
By Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson
The federal government contributes roughly the same share of the total revenues of elementary/secondary as of postsecondary education in the U.S.—somewhere near 10% in the recent past, pushed at least temporarily higher (especially in elementary/secondary education) by the current economic and budgetary conditions in the nation.
Yet the ambitions of the initiatives and the rhetoric of federal involvement have traced quite different paths over the last quarter century at these different levels of the system. As David Cohen and Susan Moffitt’s important new book, The Ordeal of Equality (Harvard University Press), shows, the federal government has persistently raised the demands it places on K-12 schools and has over time moved its declared ambitions from providing funding for schools serving disadvantaged students to improving the quality, even of “transforming,” American education. As...
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June 20, 2010, 10:39 PM ET
A Confession: I Like Facebook
By Marybeth Gasman
Sometimes we professors pride ourselves on not doing the things that "others" do. For a long time, many professors would brag that they didn't own a T.V. They were above that. I admit that I'm secretly proud that I own only one T.V. and I don't live and die by it. I'd much rather live life than watch it.
Sometimes professor-parents pride themselves on not letting their children do the things that "most" kids do or brag about providing their children with constant learning experiences that will make them smarter. Okay, I also admit that I like to expose my daughter to lots of cultural activities and travel. However, I'm happy to say that I don't pressure her to be a brainiac.
In the early 2000s, I remember some of my professor friends (okay, I was one of them) working very hard to avoid using a cell phone. We did not need to have cell phones because we didn't have them in the...
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June 19, 2010, 02:00 PM ET
Student Evaluations, Grade Inflation, and Declining Student Effort
By Richard Vedder
The Chronicle's Susannah Tully has brought my attention to a great article in the prestigious Journal of Political Economy by Scott Carrell and James West dealing with professorial approaches to teaching, student evaluations and student performance. It seems professors who do more than teach the basic bare-bones knowledge and are in some sense more rigorous tend to get poorer student evaluations (no surprise there). The less rigorous professors even get good performances out of their students in the courses taught but those students subsequently, in follow up courses, do poorer than the more rigorous professors who do more than teach to the standardized test. Sounds reasonable to me.
This got me thinking more about student evaluations and some other evidence. Specifically, I would note that student evaluations began to become popular during the 1960s and early 1970s as a common...
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Tuesday, 06 July 2010 14:07 |
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Paul Rigg
The adrenalin buzz among the professors and university students is palpable during the construction of futuristic structures that run exclusively on energy generated by the sun. But these are not mere models; they are real houses that can run everything from washing machines to air conditioning systems, all from solar power.
Full report on University World News Website |
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Tuesday, 06 July 2010 14:06 |
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Roisin Joyce
Emadeddin Baghi, Iranian scholar, journalist and human rights activist, was released on bail on 23 June. According to reports from Amnesty Internationalhe was released from Tehran’s Evin prison on bail of US$200,000 after 180 days in prison.
Full report on the University World News site |
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Tuesday, 06 July 2010 14:05 |
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The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Developments has presented its innovation strategy, focusing on human capital and education. The initiative was launched at a ministerial council meeting in May following a three-year multidisciplinary, multi-stakeholder effort, the organisation announced.
Full report on the University World News site |
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Tuesday, 06 July 2010 14:04 |
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From critiques of the Shanghai World Expo logo and the expo’s unsustainable aftermath, to how changing ideologies and economic regimes are positively transforming urban spaces, a Global Cities Research Institute at RMIT University in Melbourne is shining a spotlight on the impact of rapid urbanisation in China.
Full report on the University World News site |
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Tuesday, 06 July 2010 14:03 |
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Wagdy Sawahel
An Online Observatory for African Inventions and Discoveries has been launched, aimed at encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship to help meet the continent’s development challenges.
Full report on the University World News site |
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Tuesday, 06 July 2010 14:01 |
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Wagdy Sawahel
A number of international initiatives were launched in Africa recently to develop research and innovation across the continent, and to transform new ideas generated by higher education and research into improved products, processes and businesses. The projects include a technology development and transfer network, a continental research framework programme and a science-to-business challenge.
Full report on the University World News site |
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Tuesday, 06 July 2010 14:00 |
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Gilbert Nganga
Kenya has been selected as the East African host of the planned Pan-African University, a spec ialised institution comprising a network of universities that is being created to help supply the continent’s high-level human capital. This ends a five-month stalemate between countries in the region that had been squabbling over who the host would be.
Full report on the University World News site |
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Tuesday, 06 July 2010 13:57 |
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Jane Marshall
A new institute to strengthen the governance and management of African universities has been officially inaugurated in Yaoundé, Cameroon. The Pan-African Institute of University Governance aims to improve and modernise practices for the competent running of higher education institutions throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.
Full report on the University World News site |
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