AACU - Investing in Equality - Michelle Asha Cooper - Th. Jan. 21, 2010

Michelle Asha Cooper spoke at teh AACU Women's Breakfast. She worked at Lumina for a while and is now President for Higher Ed Policy (IHEP)

At the table I met: Phoebe Dea - Occidental - Chemist, now in admin
Alma Clayton Peterson - AACU (knows Ken O'Donnell)
Ilana Kramer - NY Bronx but from Berkeley
Katheryn Campbell - co-author w/ AACU
Theo Kaikow - Main
Caryn McTyge -

M. Cooper: I am a leader. I am a follower. I can follow a good leader.
What is the status of your investment? Are you investing in equlaity.
Priorities - problem solving strategy - labor & workforce needs.

AACU Closing - Ed Ayers - January 23, 2010

Saturday closing - last session
David Huxelbe from Pomona College is the new AACU President - uncommonly gracious.

Ed Ayers - Univ of Richmond President - American Studies
Digital materials - eLincoln bridge for digital. for the commonwealth

Old: school is preparation for the real world - suppress/depress stimuli.
Now: school is the world.

2/3 of learning not in real class.
Fun- unregulated experience, transgressive experience.
experience - solidarity of how you feel.
Classroom = book, discussion - not looked at as experience. When, in fact this may gender more thought. A video or concert may diminish your experience of a rock song.
Is a lecture an experience?
IT'S ALL THE EXPERIENCE
He learned from professor: actual wine, with actual moderation, can actually be fun.
Humanities are not in trouble in major, elite universities. We only question them in public universities.
Most elite can major in humanities because they will go on to grad school. The know a 3.8 in History is worth more than a 2.6 in accounting.
We must have professions and liberal arts discussions earlier.
Efficiency, class size, take out humanities and degrade class experience.
Classroom, lab vs. experiences.
After being abroad, his students are asked: How do you see America differently now?
Protect/create - depth/breadth/transformation
Salable skills w/ purpose.
All races, colors, religions, genders come together at college to find out who they are, who they might be.
People in the middle engender change, ask: what are we enhancing.
ALL COLLEGE IS GOOD.
Action: ask what can we do in academics to give your students a better experience?
Action: ask what can you do for academics to help students have a better experience?
Can't afford to waste any part of education.
If people pay $50k for a 8:1 student/teacher ratio, shouldn't we give that to first generation college attendees ... the ones at risk.
Celebrate the classroom.
Re: grad school - it really narrows your focus while you're there, then you go back out to the world. Before tenure: they channel and stifle you, constraints are self-imposed by groupthink.
Classes are more valued if you withhold them, so GEs are first and often used as a hurdle to go through before you get to do what you want. What is wrong with Seniors in writing, or studying Shakespeare.

AACU - Inclusive Excellence- January 2010

Low budget/ high impact CC project w/ 85%+ going on to 4year.
Highline Community College Honors program.
www.flightline.highline.edu/honors/HONORS100/ToolKit/

Barbara Clinton bclinton@highline.edu

Mainly we need to teach the kids how to play the game. How to write a resume to get a promotion to not have to work nights ... how to make and use connections .... how to get a mentor....

Kids research schools, schools that fit their needs, and research scholarships.

Note: Washington has common course numbering... in my dreams!


Absolutely awesome presentation. Sent info on to DCremer, VSuter.

AACU - Women's Inclusive Leadership - January 23, 2010

Saturday - Women's Inclusive Leadership
Gertrude Fraser - U of Virginia
Rusty Barcelo - University of Minnesota
NOTE: AACU had staff distributed at tables, and when the tables started to fill, they retreated.

Leading from wherever you are-
Skills you bring to promote inclusion at the university
Promote staff
Council staff on career path, life goals, underlying politics.
What assets did you bring?
Gail Mellow - LaGuardia President - control people and money. They are hiring.
Peg Miller - said she is pig-headed and has to be. Ask strong questions.

AACU Opening Plenary - January 21, 2010

Martha Kanter (prev. Chanc. Foothill/DeAnza) now Under Secretary for the USDE.
Jamie Merisotis - Pres. Lumina
Ronald Crutcher - Pres. Wheaton College

Merisotis-
Business Roundtable - spring board addresses gap of education and workforce needs.
They want innovative technologies and lifelong learning.
Call for incentives to encourage increased college retention ratings.
Meet goals of liberal learning. Not just for a degree, but high quality college education.
Defining student learning outcomes. Defining Quality Assurance.
It takes all to meet: Business, k-12, policy, philanthropy.
Bologna Process - Tuning
Working with three states (including California CSU) Leave autonomy, but guarantee quality/relevance of degrees ... quality AND quantity.

Martha Kanter
Priorities: Access/Quality/Completion
25% of kids aren't ready for kindergarten. Should we be surprised when they aren't ready for the rest of their schooling experience?
Texas outreach - of students that quit after earning 100 units, 1/2 of the returned with outreach.
Most dropped due to $, family, jobs.
CAHSEE - Calif. exit exam - tests on 10th grade reading, 8th grade math. What we ask for is what we get.
We don't expect enough of our students.
Demand Quality, but provide support. (Push low quality English paper back to student, but tell them where to go for tutoring.)
Grant coming - Pres. Obama: access/ outcomes - higher ed/workforce.
Pres. Obama's 2020 goal will increase higher ed by more than 10m students.
We need to show quality, learning outcomes (what they are & how they change their lives)

Crutcher
Co-chair of LEAP initiative
Evolving consensus, first generation, narrow training. Faculty assessment, outcome synthesized.

AACU Opening Night -Jonah Lehrer- Wed. January 21, 2010

Jonah Lehrer - author "How We Decide"



Opening at the AACU.

What do we know? What do we do? What can we do?

What does it mean to cross to the sea in everyday moment?

See Jim Harris' "campus compact"- includes public-private two-year and four-year institutions.



Jonah Lehrer "leaving the palace is leaving the school", or leaving the college.

Emotions underlying most decisions.He told two stories about people behaving interestingly: a trolley is going down the tracks and can go left or right. If it goes left it will get one person if it goes right it will hit many people. Most people surveyed said they would go left to save the many. Another scenario is there is a large man watching the trolley from a bridge and you're standing on the bridge near him. You can push this large man over the bridge and stop the trolley from hitting anyone would you do that? Most people say no.

Students in 2/3 grade ... after getting a good grade on a test some were told they were smart, and some were told they tried hard. The "smart" ones stopped taking risk, and the "tried hard" group learned mistakes are part of learning. STUDY your mistakes.

(Story of monkeys loving apple juice/behavior and excitement changes if it comes regularly, then withheld and real excitement at the mere thought of getting it. Also, Parkinson's drug sometimes leads to gambling addiction, because of the release of dopamine. Loss Aversion: Loss=feel bad. Win = feel good.

Stocks- we'll sell when the are up. If we sell when they are down it locks in the loss and we feel bad.

Word problems with Buddhist Monk - release of Alpha Waves. Understanding poetry = understanding complex vague connections. That is why when we "don't think about it", the answer will often come. We turn in thoughts and close off outside world. In the shower..before sleep.. long walks (leave the cell phone behind). Don't focus on words - get the alpha waves going. This is why Google offices have ping-pong. The answers come when you don't think about it.

Walter at Stanford did an immediate/delayed gratification test with young kids. Called the Marshmallow Project. Kids were told they could have a marshmallow now, or wait and have two marshmallows. Later he found the immediate gratification kids seemed to have problems in high school. There are tools to help these kids with early intervention - even if they just watch a video of what other kids do to pass the time (sing, don't look a the treat, tie shoes, etc) it helps them learn to cope with temptation. We can teach time how to cool off the stimulus and delay gratification.

Meta cognition - tip of tongue - mental hiccup ... How do you know what you don't know.

AACU January 20, 2009 - ePortfolio Day

The Search for VALUE: Innovation, Economic Uncertainty, and ePortfolio Assessment
(This was a one day workshop preceding the Annual AACU meeting.)
Elizabeth Clark and Bret Eynon teamed up for the opening plenary.

Bret:
Other countries are ahead including India.
Showed Casey Green’s graph of ePort usage on the rise.
Five Types:

Career and Credential
Assessment
Course
Learning
Integrative

It’s a pedagogy, not a technology.

Over 9000 active ePortfolios at LaGuardia 2008-2009.
According to Bret, employers are ready for ePortfolios per surveys, focus groups, meetings w/ employers.

Elizabeth:
Keys to success
• Rigorous faculty development
o Course rerelease/stipend
• Pervasive elements of classroom pedagogy
• built-in general education
o disciplinary & curricula
• visible linkage between teaching and assessment
• tech support from IT staff and student mentors c
• college-wide leadership

But how do you know they are learning?

La Guardia’s ePortfolio is a “whole college” ePortfolio.
Meant to communicate evolution from course focused to capstone (major, personal, learning experiences)
Course >>> multi semester >>> capstone
Mentioned John Gardner and Greetchen Van Derin
ePortfolios: collection/reflection, then they added transition and closure

Faculty inquiry process
>what they teach
>re sequenced

What we ask them to do is who we ask them to be. Kathleen Blake Yancy

Gary Brown at Washington 2-3000 inquiry learning, presentation to faculty > students > professionals. Feeback/reflection/rubrics.

Dewey (Art & Experience)– The characteristic of artistic design is the intimacy of relations that hold the parts together.

Vertical integration at Queensborough College (Jean is here). Using in Freshman Composition. Students read and give ‘gifts’ quotes, paintings, youtube, cartoons … anything that relates, and they reflect on the relation between their gift and the reading. This reaches multiple intelligences, and then there is a presentation project using the ‘gifts’.

Susan Kahn - UIPUI
UIPUI undergrad research science has ePortfolio, also Engineering
English majors using Sakai and Open Portfolio – a course portfolio basically.
They developed PUL – Principals of Undergraduate Learning and have a PUL Matrix and Learning Matrix – they’ve adopted matrix thinking. Alverno Matrix on reflective thinking:
Provide questions/prompts for students to respond to (be explicit)
Teach students about reflection, using a rubric, set of criteria, or other guidance.
Give students opportunity to practice and peer review if possible.

Trudy Banta (UIPUI & studied ePortfolios forever)
Argument against assessment; canned tests only tested 20% of what the college prioritized. The connection to SAT and success was not high. Student motivation: pizza, cash, free whatever… will bring them in but won’t make them do the best work.
Challenges in using ePortfolios for assessment: reliability in rubrics, motivation, non-standardization.
900 people attended the UIPUI Assessment conference and 300 used ePortfolios. General skills required. We don’t believe standardized test improves student learning.

Wendy Morgaine – w/ AACU but used to be w/ Portland State
Polled audience – ½ new to ePort, ¼ uses eport, and ¾ here to find out how to use ePort for assessment.
VALUE Rubrics
LEAP – essential learning outcomes
Rubrics on AACU Website and they are free
OR there is a book you can buy: Tips and Tools for Using Rubrics, includes calibration. She’s available for consulting, too.

Melissa Peet – University of Michigan
She's currently their academic director integrated learning and in the portfolio initiative at University Michigan
program should grow by attraction not promotion
they believe that fact that their faculty is learning to teach differently
more people are knocking on their door than they have room for
Generative Knowledge Project
Office of Development shows off "The Michigan Difference" by sharing ePortfolios
she was often told that real researchers do not show passion but she shows a lot of passion


After lunch. They had Carousels where they had 10 minute summaries by five people

Nate Angell - rSmart ---- look at OpenedPractices.org
It is not about the technology it's about the philosophy.
Five categories
books
ad hoc - web tools form best user experiences
filing cabinet to the sky -- describe
most vendor products
stand-alone specifically dedicated for one purpose
assessment - tests, bullet
Integrated w/ LMS - not the best user experience, not the best for assessment, just not the best
government supported such as in Pennsylvania and Minnesota

Show of hands: quite a few folks in the room wanted institution-supported portfolio
Where can the technology stick? Where is practice already happening:
students inward looking, and outward for the world am in.
instructor >>students
institution
Pick an area where things can happen.
Small: Analogy small garden you put in an area where it will grow
Parasite: gloms on to something larger like an LMS
Rhizome model: foster many portfolio projects capture and recycle back

Gail Ring from Clemson (gring@clemson.edu)
previously used blackboard
they connect work to core competence
Google docs not 100% student acceptence and not 100% faculty buy in.
early on it was up to the student to tell a story
students live in the cloud with Facebook and YouTube
take to the technology pretty easily
online tutorials
connect to competencies
Introduced as freshman and use it right away then revisited in the junior or senior year for capstone Experience

Bret Eynon - In general, you need to be asking: what will happen when the grant runs out?

Closing was by Randall Bass
he opened with pictures of America and articles of Confederacy.
He talked about Sir Ken Robinson quote "We have mind our minds for one commodity".
Coins the phrase post-course era
Did some studies and found "a Georgetown education is different than the Georgetown degree" as it's the experience outside the class that makes it.
Look up NSSE - National survey of student engagement
We are in a place where courses and a formal curriculum does not dominate learning experience.
Life is bigger now.
See his "All of the above" slide when available.
Goals: make courses better - class learing is not just in the class; start using outside experiences more; more support.
Now:
what can we do with ePortfolios despite courses and faculty.
Courses are dead, they just don't know it.
Participitory culture - Henry Jenkins, et al.
High Impact Practices >>>> align w/ extra curricular experiences.
Heidi Elmendorf: Georgetown: Air your bafflement.
Jose Feito - St Mary's - theme of not knowing - acknowledge lack of understanding.
The process of "coming to know"
Grant Wiggins "Understanding by Design"
Our knowledge of learning exceeds our knowledge of assessment.
New thoughts: Yahoo Pipes - links blogs together by certain entries.
Queensland - Tim Kastella talks about Business Survival: aggregate, filter, connect.
Post-course era: shift in how we add value.
Aggregate/Filter - was the course era.
Filter/Connect - is the post-course era (in the hands of students)

Grant Workshop by Edutopia 8/28/09

Notes from Grant Workshop by Edutopia 8/28/09:

Needs assessment:

1. Clarify expectations, goals, objectives
2. Review current practices and thoughts
3. Collect and analyze data
4. Identify areas of need
5. Determine where to start

Divide and communicate

1. Abstract
2. Intro
3. Needs
4. Goals and objectives
5. Activities and personal stories
6. Timeline –detailed and tight
7. Evaluation – be exact
8. Budget – to the penny

Final steps

1. Double check requirements
2. Use and editor NOT from the team
3. Let grantmaker know your grant is on the way
4. Follow submission format exactly.
5. Send multiple copies if requested.
6. Be on time.
7. Request receipt if Faxed or Mailed.

Always –
· Give credit to grantor – any chance you get
· Communicate often with everyone
· Share Info – transparency
· Complete reports on time
· Thank partners and grantmakers – pictures/notes from those who benefited (students)
· Plan for sustainability

· Find grant info in many places – many publications (Edutopia) has areas with references.

stephen downes @ edmedia 062009

Complicated = you can get to it
Complex = you can’t get at it

Language logic learning = communication,

Learning about active engagement, not passive observation.

Thinking for yourself, free learning

Personal learning – increasing the connections in your brain.

Aggregate, remix, repurpose, feed forward. Tribute from downes to cogdog

PLE / VLE – are they dead? Scott Leslie http://www.downes.ca

Scott Wilson::: http://reload.ces.strath.ac.uk/plex

Economic advantage/roi – is sharing educational stuff equal to decorating your balcony?

People will share.

http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2007/02/what-connectivism-is.html

George seimans connectivism.

Goups vs. networks. Networks are open. Groups are closed.

www.w3.org/tr/widgets-land/

we are moving from website to widget based reality

browsers are webservers. The personal learinging environment becomes you manage you version of flicr,

it’s a mess, but it’s a neat mess

web, widgets, gadgets.

Plain Old web server. I hate passwords.

Personal learning center; valued different / network is connected and interactive, but not integrated. Small pieces loosely joined.

M. David Merrill @ EdMedia 062009

REAL WORLD TASKS.

“Show me!” 1,2,3x.
Students do not care what professor thinks but they do care what their fellow students think. Quality of work increased dramatically when invoking peer-to-peer review. MDMerrill #edmedia
ISD Instructional systems development
Who what how …
Who are your students?
What do you want to teach?
How do you want to teach it?

Get me the content first.
Reviewed details and generalities – used a letter to the kids as an example. Mom writes who/when news. Dad writes specific story of picture of the moose. Funny.
We teach formulas so they can plug and crank, but they don’t know what they’re doing. We need to show them an unusual result and have them find out why.
Course online – courses – suggestions by students: product / service/retail/restaurant/own
Based on reality but not all true.
Peer work more productive than competitive work.
When is the last time you wrote an essay? Why are you having your students write essays? M. D. Merrill #edmedia
On the fence . . . Merrill doesn’t believe students learn differently. @Downes says neural studies have shown . . .

CogDogBlog @ EdMedia 062009

One true media
Glogster. Go to educatior section
Oral history of route 66
Blabberize
Xtranormal
It’s not about the tools.
PowerPoint doesn’t kill presentations. People do.
Cool iris as a pres tool.
Voicethread
Slideshare
Talks about storyboard.Flikr to upload then upload to upload. You know what I mean.
Embedding – reusable media – is now cut and paste
Five card flickr story
Creative commons – on google now????
Tarheel reader
Cogdogroo.wikispaces.com.story
Googlemaps underused
One true media
Glogster.
Go to educator section
Oral history of route 66
Blabberize
Xtranormal
Message on his wiki site
Cogdogblog.com/stuff/50ways

NSBA FRN 2/1 - 3/2009

I went to Washington DC last week to take part in the NSBA's Federal Relations Network. It was exciting to be in Washington so closely after the inauguration - there were still bleachers and banners along the parade route. People were still excited.

I flew in on Saturday - there was a little snow on the ground. Sunday and Monday brought warmer weather - about sixty degrees. These days we were in meetings pretty much all day. I did duck out on Monday to tour the Capitol, and went into the Senate Chambers to watch the debate on the Stimulus package.

On Tuesday we visited our legislators - Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein had their aids meet with us, and we went over the effects of the budget on public education. Lynn Woolsey, herself, met with us after speaking at the luncheon about food in school. Because she was on welfare at one point the lunch program is very near and dear to her heart.

It's always a treat to visit that city, indulge in the beauty and be reminded of the incredible foresight of our forefathers.