House Passes Student Aid Bill
by Doug Lederman
Sept. 18, 2009, Inside Higher Ed
“The House of Representatives on Thursday approved sweeping legislation to overhaul the student loan programs and redirect tens of billions of dollars to student aid and other education programs, brushing aside Republican opposition and handing President Obama a significant legislative victory. The House’s approval of the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2009, which had been a foregone conclusion for months, shifts the action to the Senate, where the outcome is slightly less predictable.”
“The student aid bill, a top domestic priority for the Obama administration, would cease all lending from the bank-based Family Federal Education Loan Program and use the savings the government derives from lending more cheaply for a wide array of purposes, only some of which, to the dismay of some college officials, are in higher education. Among other things, the legislation would:”
– Provide $40 billion over 10 years to increase the maximum Pell Grant to $5,550 and ensure that it would increase annually by the rise in the Consumer Price Index plus 1 percent.
– Greatly expand and alter the criteria for the Perkins Loan Program.
– Pour $10 billion into community colleges in support of President Obama’s American Graduation Initiative, designed to produce 5 million more two-year college graduates by 2020.
[including $50 million each year for ten years to the Department of Education ‘to make competitive grants to, or enter into contracts with, institutions of higher education, philanthropic organizations, and other appropriate entities to develop, evaluate, and disseminate freely-available high-quality online training, high school courses, and postsecondary education courses.’ See section 503 in the legislation http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/R?cp111:FLD010:@1(hr232) ]
– Spend $8 billion over 10 years to strengthen early childhood education.
– Create a College Access and Completion Fund that would give grants to states and institutions with innovative approaches to increasing college going and graduation.
– Provide $4.1 billion to modernize and repair school and college facilities, including those damaged by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
– Make the interest rates on federal student loans variable beginning in 2012, when they are set to rise back to 6.8 percent.
– Simplify the federal financial aid form.
Broadband BTOP and BIP Grant Applications – First Round
The RUS Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP) and the NTIA Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) have posted a searchable database of all applications received during the first funding round.
Dodging Swine Online
by Steve Kolowich
Sept. 18, 2009, Inside Higher Ed
. . . “While distance education is growing in popularity, learning how to use course-management tools might not be an intuitive part of preparing for a flu pandemic. But for many colleges and universities, it is as much part of the emergency plan as hand sanitizer.” . . .
“Hails said fact that many universities are encouraging their faculty members to familiarize themselves with available online teaching tools in anticipation of a swine flu outbreak might actually provide the push some reluctant professors might need to start using those tools. “They need a chance to get their toe in the water,” he said, “and for them maybe this would be a good way to get them some experience and not overwhelm them with things.”
Government Urges Changes to Google Books Deal
by Miguel Helft
Sept. 18, 2009, New York Times
“In the latest challenge to Google’s plan to establish the world’s largest digital library and bookstore, the Justice Department said late Friday that a proposed legal settlement between Google and book authors and publishers should not be approved by the court without modifications. The Justice Department said that while the agreement would provide many benefits to the public, it also raised significant issues regarding class-action, copyright and antitrust law.”
“The Justice Department described recent discussions with the parties as “productive,” however, and asked the court to encourage them to continue talks to modify the agreement and overcome its objections.” . . .
‘A Better Pencil’
by Serena Golden
Sept. 18, 2009
“In this electronic age, new writing technologies seem to proliferate and evolve with alarming speed — but of course, people have been coming up with new ways to communicate their thoughts for as long as language has existed at all. Writing itself — writes Dennis Baron — was once the object of much suspicion; Plato wrote that it could attenuate human memory, since writing things down would obviate the need to memorize them. In his new book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution (Oxford University Press), Baron looks at the history of writing implements and communication technologies, and explores the digital revolution’s impact on how we write, how we learn, and how we connect with one another.” . . .
Unweaving The Tangled Web
Sept. 16, 2009, MindHacks
. . . “You need to understand social network analysis because it is becoming one of the most powerful method to understand human behaviour. As we’ve discussed before, the fact that digital communications technology is so common means that we’re constantly creating data trails that can reveal surprising amounts of intimate information with relatively simple methods. For example, the BPS Research Digest just covered a study that could infer about 95% of friendships just from looking at location data from mobile phones – something that is one of the most basic information trails in the rich data stream automatically produced by social media.”
“This approach to understanding human networks is also likely to be increasingly important for human science. The last few decades have seen a massive increase in understanding on how genetics influences our minds and behaviour and social network analysis will see us increasingly linking individual discoveries from biology and cognitive science to the role of our relationships in our lives.”
“Are Your Friends Making You Fat?” by Clive Thompson, Sept. 10, 2009, New York Times
“The Buddy System: How Medical Data Revealed Secret to Health and Happiness,” by Jonah Lehrer, Sept. 12, 2009, Wired Magazine
Personal Learning Coaches for College Students
by Lanny Arvan
Sept. 17, 2009, Lanny on Learning Technology
. . . “I’ve written elsewhere of the Peter Drucker argument that we should all have two careers, one that is for pay and enables us to put food on the table and a roof over head, the other as a volunteer so we can express our sense of social responsibility. Instituting a program of personal learning coaches for students would be a way to enable that for faculty and encourage students to be reflective about their own learning in a way that is not tied to any particular course. I’m intrigued by this possibility.”
Educational Culture Clash
by Steve Kolowich
Sept. 16, 2009, Inside Higher Ed
“The 1992 Supreme Court case United States v. Fordice codified the idea that states should help their historically black colleges by blocking predominantly white institutions from setting up academic programs nearby that would compete with the those of the black colleges. The justices in the Fordice case worried that such duplication would prompt students to choose colleges — and states to allocate resources — along racial lines, effectively re-segregating higher education. The idea was that if only one of a region’s universities offered certain programs, students would integrate.”
“But in the age of booming online education, things are not nearly so black and white. Morgan State University has objected to a proposal by the University of Maryland University College to create a doctoral program in community college administration. That program, the historically black Morgan State claimed, would be too similar to one it already offers.” . . .
Implications of Online Learning for the Conceptual Development and Practice of Distance Education
by Randy Garrison
Fall 2009, The Journal of Distance Education
Abstract: The purpose of this article is to examine the foundational principles and practices of distance education in the context of recent developments in the areas of online learning. The point is made that online learning had its genesis apart from mainstream distance education. As a result, it is argued that distance education has not fully embraced the collaborative potential of online learning. The paper concludes with the question of whether or not the concepts and practices of distance education can be reformulated and aligned to incorporate the potential and possibilities of online learning.
Projections of Education Statistics to 2018
Sept. 15, 2009, National Center for Education Statistics
Postsecondary enrollment rose by 28 percent between 1993 and 2007, and is projected to increase a further 13 percent with an estimated 21 million students enrolled in colleges, universities and training programs by 2018, according to Projections of Education Statistics to 2018, released today by the National Center for Education Statistics. The Projections report — the 37th in a series first published in 1964 — provides national-level data on enrollment, teachers, high school graduates, and expenditures at the elementary and secondary school level. The report also provides data on enrollments in elementary and secondary schools and high school graduates for the 50 States and the District of Columbia. At the postsecondary level, it includes data on enrollment and earned degrees for the past 14 years and projections to the year 2018.
Google Releases News-Reading Service
by Miguel Helft
Sept. 14, 2009
. . . “On Monday, the company introduced an experimental news hub called Fast Flip that allows users to view news articles from dozens of major publishers and flip through them as quickly as they would the pages of a magazine. Google will place ads around the news articles and share resulting revenue with publishers.” . . .
Fast Flip – http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/
Students Borrow More Than Ever for College
by Anne Marie Chaker
Sept. 4, 2009, Wall Street Journal
“Students are borrowing dramatically more to pay for college, accelerating a trend that has wide-ranging implications for a generation of young people. New numbers from the U.S. Education Department show that federal student-loan disbursements — the total amount borrowed by students and received by schools — in the 2008-09 academic year grew about 25 percent over the previous year, to $75.1 billion. The amount of money students borrow has long been on the rise. But last year far surpassed past increases, which ranged from as low as 1.7 percent in the 1998-99 school year to almost 17 percent in 1994-95, according to figures used in President Barack Obama’s proposed 2010 budget.” . . .
“The new numbers highlight how debt has become commonplace in paying for higher education. Today, two-thirds of college students borrow to pay for college, and their average debt load is $23,186 by the time they graduate, according to an analysis of the government’s National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, conducted by financial-aid expert Mark Kantrowitz. Only a dozen years earlier, according to the study, 58 percent of students borrowed to pay for college, and the average amount borrowed was $13,172.”
American English Dialect Recordings
The Center for Applied Linguistics Collection
The American Memory Project
The Center for Applied Linguistics Collection contains 118 hours of recordings documenting North American English dialects. The recordings include speech samples, linguistic interviews, oral histories, conversations, and excerpts from public speeches. They were drawn from various archives, and from the private collections of fifty collectors, including linguists, dialectologists, and folklorists.
The survey’s documentation covers social aspects of English language usage in different regions of the United States. It reveals distinctions in speech related to gender, race, social class, education, age, literacy, ethnic background, and occupational group (including the specialized jargon or vocabulary of various occupations). The oral history interviews are a rich resource on many topics, such as storytelling and family histories; descriptions of holiday celebrations, traditional farming, schools, education, health care, and the uses of traditional medicines; and discussions of race relations, politics, and natural disasters such as floods.
ArtsConnectEd is an interactive Web site that provides access to works of art and educational resources from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Walker Art Center for K-12 educators, students, and scholars. There are over 100,000 images, texts, audio, video, and interactive resources available to visitors to the site. Art Finder, ArtsConnectEd’s searchable environment, is where users can browse the museums’ digitalized items including Works of Art, Texts, Audio and Video, and Interactive Resources. Art Collector empowers users to save, customize, present, and share items in Art Collector Sets. A newly added feature is “Ask an Educator”, which allows users to ask questions of the museum educators at both the Institute and the Walker Art Center.
From the award-winning PBS series American Experience comes We Shall Remain, a provocative multi-media project that establishes Native history as an essential part of American history. At the heart of the project is a five-part television series that shows how Native peoples valiantly resisted expulsion from their lands and fought the extinction of their culture — from the Wampanoags of New England in the 1600s who used their alliance with the English to weaken rival tribes, to the bold new leaders of the 1970s who harnessed the momentum of the civil rights movement to forge a pan-Indian identity. We Shall Remain represents an unprecedented collaboration between Native and non-Native filmmakers and involves Native advisors and scholars at all levels of the project.
“Virtual U is designed to foster better understanding of management practices in American colleges and universities. It affords students, teachers, and parents the unique opportunity to step into the decision-making shoes of a university president. Players are responsible for establishing and monitoring all the major components of an institution, including everything from faculty salaries to campus parking. As players move around the Virtual U campus, they gather information needed to make decisions such as decreasing faculty teaching time or increasing athletic scholarships. However, as in a real college or university, the complexity and potential effects of each decision must be carefully considered. And the Virtual U Board of Trustees is monitoring every move.”
ITC News 