This guide contains practical steps that will help public sector agencies and departments develop a social media strategy and policy to gain maximum value from social media efforts. It also outlines some smart records retention practices—so you’ll be better prepared to respond to open records requests or other e-discovery needs when they arise.
Technology is gradually replacing cursive instruction—but have we taken stock of what we’re losing?
Should cursive writing still be taught in our schools? The old debate is back with a vengeance as schools shift resources from the intricate, painstakingly rendered script to keyboard skills.
Throughout this past decade, scholars and higher education practitioners have asked: Who will lead the nation’s community colleges in the future? This question is especially critical today since at no previous time in the nation’s history have community colleges confronted such an array of monumental challenges. Presidents and key leaders are departing in droves; in a recent survey by the AACC (2012), as many as 40% of presidents plan to retire within the next five years. This phenomenon occurs at a time when our colleges are faced with a variety of previously unimagined threats, many resulting from the impact of conflicting socio-economic changes. Further, colleges must address the American education and skills gap in an effort to meet the emerging needs of the new knowledge economy, while simultaneously struggling with the task of educating those students with the greatest needs during a time of dwindling funds.
It is either ironic or absolutely unsurprising that while instructors love peer-review sessions for student writing, students mostly do not.
Having undergrads read and respond to each others' drafts is such a promising pedagogical idea: Students receive feedback on their writing, they get to see how others have tackled the same writing project, and the instructor doesn't have to do all the heavy lifting for once.
An in-class peer-review workshop is a part of the process for every major essay I assign. But I've made it a habit to ask my students about their previous experiences with such workshops, and their answers are almost uniformly negative. My students tell me these workshops are never useful and are a waste of time for both reader and writer. Through some combination of trial and error, dumb luck, and doing some reading on the subject, I think I've evolved some ways to ensure that peer-review sessions are helpful to students. I thought I'd share my advice here.
Can all the universities that claim to be “world-class” actually live up to the claim? If they could be, would that be desirable public policy? It could be that there are so many different meanings of “world-class” that the term in practical effect is an oxymoron: the defi nition of “world” is determined locally when conceptually it should be defi ned internationally. This paper discusses different kinds of institutional quality, how quality is formed and how it can be measured, particularly by comparison. It also discusses the subtle but fundamental differences between quality and reputation. The paper concludes with the suggestion that world-class comparisons of research quality and productivity are possible, but that any broader application to the “world-class” quality of universities will be at best futile and at worst misleading.
Becoming a new faculty member is seldom easy. Whether the instructor is simply transitioning to a new university or stepping into the classroom for the very first time, there are questions large and small that arise every day about policies, procedures, techniques, and technologies. For online instructors, many of whom teach only part-time, this sense of disorientation
is made even more difficult by their off-site location and the growing list of tools and technologies they need to learn in order to create a rich learning environment.
Since the 1960s, there has been growing and sustained interest in small-group learning approaches at the school level and in higher education. A voluminous body of literature in this area addresses theory, research, classroom practice, and faculty development. The approaches most highly represented in the literature are cooperative learning, collaborative learning, and problem-based learning (PBL). In this article, the authors compare and contrast these approaches through answering questions such as the following: What are the unique features of each approach? What do the three approaches have in common? How are they similar, and how are they different?
Brock University envisions itself as a dynamic postsecondary educational institution that:
1) Makes a difference in the lives of individuals in our Brock community, the Niagara Region,
Canada, and the world;
2) Demonstrates leadership and innovation in teaching and learning across disciplines; and 3) Extends knowledge through excellence in research, scholarship, and creativity.
Ontario's colleges of applied arts and technology (CAATs) were granted authority to offer degrees in 2000, and the first degree programs were offered in 2002. The rationale for granting colleges permission to offer degrees was threefold: first it was to meet the needs of a higher skilled workforce in a changing economic, social and political environment: second, it was to widen access to degrees for Ontarians overall, but particularly for students from disadvantaged backgrounds who are more likely to attend a college than a university; and third, it was anticipated that college degrees would be less expensive than university degrees for students and governments (Skolnik 2016b)
The highly volatile monthly job creation figures and an unemployment rate that sometimes masks more than it reveals get all the attention. But the real tale of the Canadian labour market is written far away from the spotlights, closer to where the details reside. And there, the emerging picture is of a job market that is fundamentally changing. Canadian employment dances
increasingly to the tune of structural forces and less to reversible cyclical dynamics. And it’s not only about demographics. Job market mismatches, sticky long-term unemployment, diverging bargaining power, rising entry barriers and increased job tenure and job stability for those who clear the bar, all suggest that monetary policy aimed at the cyclical component of employment slack is aiming at a shrinking target.
This qualitative research project explored the experiences of women who jug- gle the demands of family or parenthood while engaging in academic careers at a faculty of education. The researcher-participants consisted of 11 women; 9 women provided a written narrative, and all women participated in the data analysis. The data consisted of the personal, reflective narratives of 9
women who participated in a faculty writing group. Analysis of narratives uncovered 5 themes common to the researchers and participants in this study: gender- specific experiences surrounding parenting, second-career academics, pres- sure surrounding academic work, human costs, and commitment to work and family. Implications of the findings are discussed with particular emphasis on how a faculty writing group framed by a relational model of interaction can be used to support
untenured faculty who experience difficulty balancing the demands of family and academia.
Each year the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance releases its Habitats project: a series of case studies on municipal-level issues affecingundergraduate students. These case studies are written by OUSA campus researcher from our member institutions.
This project was designed to evaluate how an online social learning environment implemented within the disciplinarily-defined context of a university department might enhance academic engagement, research collaboration and the achievement of learning outcomes among undergraduate students. In developing this research, we were guided by the following research questions:
• How can social networking and progress-tracking technologies enhance academic engagement and student experience in a discipline-bounded environment?
• How can networked academic profiles create a more cohesive academic experience for students?
• Can use of networked academic profiles strengthen students’ academic orientation to new media and information literacy?
LAMBTON COLLEGE VISION/MANDATE
Lambton College fosters innovation and entrepreneurship among our faculty, staff, and students, and in the local and global communities we serve. As the sole provider of higher education in our region, and as a mobile learning college, we are committed to providing teaching and learning excellence in a broad range of program offerings, and a full range of credentials in alignment with our areas of specialization.
It should be noted that our Strategic Mandate was developed within the context of the Lambton College Strategic Plan, and was developed and received with and by the Lambton College of Applied Arts of Technology Board of Governors.
This article analyzes the topic of leadership from an evo-lutionary perspective and proposes three conclusions that are not part of mainstream theory. First, leading and following are strategies that evolved for solving social coordination problems in ancestral environments, includ-ing in particular the problems of group movement, intra-group peacekeeping, and intergroup competition. Second, the relationship between leaders and followers is inher-ently ambivalent because of the potential for exploitation of followers by leaders. Third, modern organizational struc-tures are sometimes inconsistent with aspects of our evolved leadership psychology, which might explain the alienation and frustration of many citizens and employees. The authors draw several implications of this evolutionary analysis for leadership theory, research, and practice.
Keywords: evolution, leadership, followership, game the-ory, mismatch hypothesis
Résumé
Les compétences et les acquis d’expérience des adultes sont méconnus et peu valorisées dans la société contemporaine axée sur l’écrit, les savoirs scolaires et les diplômes. En raison de leurs conditions de vie précaires, de leur difficulté d’accès au monde de l’écrit et de la faible reconnaissance de leurs acquis d’expériences, nombreux adultes non diplômés sont exclus des
décisions publiques et de la résolution des problèmes vécus dans leur communauté. Le but de la recherche était d’identifier et de comprendre les compétences et les pratiques des adultes non diplômés durant la résolution d'un problème environnemental. On voulait répondre aux questions suivantes : Quelles sont les ressources (cognitives, affectives, sociales…) et les pratiques que les adultes non diplômés mettent à profit durant la résolution d’un problème environnemental ? et Les adultes non diplômés, malgré leur faible niveau d’alphabétisme, sont-ils capables de proposer des solutions efficaces à un problème
environnemental ?
Within the span of 20 years, tuition as a source of operating revenue grew from 18 percent in 1988 to 37 percent in 2008.1 The most recent financial reports show tuition alone made up 45 percent of universities’ operating budgets in 2014—51 percent when fees are included—compared to the provincial government’s 43 percent contribution.2 As tuition continues to increase the affordability, accessibility, and accountability of a university education are put at risk. Our Tuition policy sets out students’ priorities for addressing their short and long term concerns with regards to the tuition framework and tuition payment processes.
Between June 2013 and June 2014, 11 graduates from the School of Education at Laurentian University, most teaching in smaller communities scattered across northern Ontario, were interviewed about their recent experiences. The purpose of these interviews was to determine how well the concurrent education program had prepared these graduates for the realities of teaching in First Nation, Métis and Inuit (FNMI) remote and rural communities in the province. Five of the graduates’
administrators or school principals were also interviewed to determine how thoroughly teacher training had prepared the graduates to work in the north and how the program could be improved.
Postsecondary education systems around the world are rapidly transforming in response to evolving economic, social, and student learning realities. A number of factors are converging to bring about this reconfiguration of higher learning economies and are adjusting to heightened competition and to increased labour market demand for great levers of knowledge and skills; increasingly diverse and mobile learners are expecting ever-increasingly high quality in return for what they pay; and the broader public is looking for concrete results from the investment of scarce public resources.
As the global marketplace becomes increasingly competitive and knowledge driven the potential social and economic benefits of education have increased. As a result, the past few decades have witnessed an unprecedented expansion in the demand for post-secondary education (PSE) worldwide.
The Canadian Council on Learning monograph series, Challenges in Canadian Post-secondary Education, was launched in November 2009 as a means of examining the impact of this expansion on the PSE sector.