Recommended book: Girls of Tender Age

Sandra Ward, Janet Jefford, and I strongly recommend Girls of Tender Age by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith. Smith's book is far and away the most in demand book on the Goodwin campus and generally across the greater Hartford area. Smith tells her story of growing up in low-income housing in Hartford just after WW II--a riveting family memoir like no other.

Call the library now--today. The Goodwin book club will meet to discuss this book in April.

Wikipedia's Growth

(The following is excerpted and condensed from an op-ed in the Washington Post earlier this year.)

"In the past year, Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that "anyone can edit," has been cited four times as often as the Encyclopedia Britannica in judicial opinions, and the number is rapidly growing. In just two years, YouTube has become a household word and one of the world's most successful Web sites. Such astounding growth and success demonstrate society's unstoppable movement toward shared production of information, as diverse groups of people in multiple fields pool their knowledge and draw from each other's resources." (College students are generally discouraged from using Wikipedia as an authoritative source in research papers.)

"Wikipedia is merely one of many experiments in aggregating knowledge and creativity, that have been made possible by new technology. The track record of the new collaborations suggests that they have immense potential. In just a few years, Wikipedia has become the most influential encyclopedia in the world, consulted by judges as well as those who cannot afford to buy books. If the past is prologue, we're seeing the tip of a very large iceberg."

Working Moms Find Time for Children

A new study finds that somehow, working mothers are spending the same amount of time with their children as stay-at-home moms did in the 1970s. They're giving up sleep, housework and time with the spouse. Listen to the broadcast online.
Source: National Public Radio Morning Edition March 21

For Sociology and Life Span Students

Here is a valuable site to find data for research in sociology and life span classes. The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), begun in 1968, studies a representative sample of U.S. individuals and their family units. The study emphasizes the dynamic aspects of economic and demographic behavior, but also includes other sociological and psychological measures.

The sample size has grown to more than 7,000 families. The PSID has collected information about more than 65,000 individuals spanning as much as 36 years of their lives. The study is conducted at the Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. The study includes a Child Development supplement.

The site includes tutorials that could be used in the classroom, a user guide, related sites of studies around the world, and updates. The PSID 2005 family, individual and family history files have been released recently been released.

Source: http://psidonline.isr.umich.edu/

Changing the Student-aid Application

"Congressional Democrats introduced legislation on Tuesday that would cut the basic federal student-aid application form in half by using financial information from income-tax returns.
College-access advocates and members of both political parties have long said that the complicated and slow process of applying for financial aid discourages thousands of low-income students from going to college or from receiving grants and loans. Cutting the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or Fafsa, would be a move toward simplifying the process."
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education March 21

Is the No Child Left Behind Act Working?

“President Bush says it is, pointing to student-achievement results from a single subsection of the National Assessment of Educational Progress and tentative Reading First data. But the evidence available to support his claim is questionable.

The data Mr. Bush cited at that event are from just the “long-term trend” NAEP in reading and math, researchers say. All available data, they add, show modest improvements that can’t be attributed to the 5-year-old law. Instead, progress in achievement is more likely a continuation of trends that predate the law.

“There’s not any evidence that shows anything has changed,” said Daniel M. Koretz, a professor of education at Harvard University’s graduate school of education.”
Source: Education Week March 9, 2007

This Week in the Chronicle's Brown Bag:

Are Accreditors the Education Department's Police Force?

Thursday, March 15, at 12 noon, U.S. Eastern Time

Live web chat with Judith S. Eaton

Even before the federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education delivered its final report last September, the secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, seems to have been leaning on accreditors to carry out some of the report's key recommendations on making colleges more accountable. She wants them to put more emphasis on "outputs," like graduation and employment rates, and on gauges of what students have learned. Join the Chronicle of Higher Education discussion on Thursday for a live Web chat at noon.

Judith S. Eaton, who represents the accreditors, has long championed a cooperative approach, even as she expresses accreditors' concerns that the Education Department has imposed new and arbitrary interpretations of the rules under which they operate. Ms. Eaton will take your questions about those and other issues, including new efforts in the fight against diploma mills.

Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, will take your questions about the changing role of accreditors, what the Bush administration wants accreditors to do, the fight against diploma mills, and other issues.
SEE http://chronicle.com/live/

Homeland Security: National Security Agencies

American military and intelligence agencies have increasingly been turning to anthropologists and other social scientists for "cultural knowledge" about actual and potential adversaries. But many anthropologists are deeply anxious about offering such assistance, fearing, among other things, that their insights might be used simply to help torture and kill people more effectively.

At a panel discussion that was Webcast from Brown University on Monday afternoon, several members of a temporary committee of the American Anthropological Association discussed how and where the discipline should draw ethical lines when anthropologists engage with national-security agencies. (An archive of the Webcast should be available later this week.)
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education

Histology Learning System Database

Histology learning System is for all histology students! It has been recommended by Zoe Durkin.

Success in a histology course depends on the student's understanding of the course objectives. These are:
To learn microscopic anatomy of the tissues and organs of the human body.
To learn histological terms and concepts for the purpose of identification and precise communication.
To develop a systematic thinking process as a means to identify histological preparations correctly.
To understand the relationship between microscopic structure and function.
To understand the preparative procedures used in histology and how they affect the visual image.

By methodically reviewing images in this database you will learn to identify cells, tissues, organs, and parts of organs correctly. You learn to do this, not by memorizing the images, rather, by learning how morphological features relate to function and by understanding which features are most diagnostic of organ systems and organs of the systems. In medicine, as in histology, this intellectual process involves art as well as science. The art lies in knowing which questions to ask, and in what order, in your systematic process of elimination!
http://www.bu.edu/histology/m/index.htm

Financial Management for Nonprofit Organizations

We have a new book in the library, Financial Management for Nonprofit Organizations: Policies and Practices by Zietlow, Hankin, and Seidner. Written in the light of increased scrutiny and accountability of nonprofits, this book weaves legal and ethical considerations into a comprehensive treatment of nonprofit strategy and finance, furnishing financial officers with a firm knowledge of ethical business management--indispensable for all types and sizes of organizations.

Is College Worth It? What do you Think?

The cover story for U.S. News and World Report (March 12) is titled "The Measure of Learning." Can we test what colleges teach? Academics are appalled that the government wants to try but the government is going to demand an accounting by assessing college learning with one or a number of standardized tests. "We're the best in the wolrd, give us money and leave us alone, " says Charles Miller, the chairman of the Commission on Higher Education. "The higher-ed community needs to fess up to the public's concerns."

What should a student learn in college? And whatever that is, which colleges teach it most effectively? With the average cost of private college soaring, it's a question being asked more and more. There are currently two major tools used to measure student learning. The Collegiate Learning Assessment measures critical thinking and analytical reasoning. Many school use it, but they keep the results confidential. Hundreds of schools also administer the National Survey of Student Engagement, which tracks how much time students spend on education and other activities.

In a few weeks, colleges will hear how U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings intends to move forward. Colleges, meanwhile, according to this article, "continue to search for that elusive value-added measure that can lead to better teaching."It is important that we read this.
Source: U.S. News and World Report article by Alex Kingsbury (available in the library)

ICONN Statistics

Since its inception, users, including members of the Goodwin Community, have conducted 65 million searchs in ICONN. In FY 206 alone, Connecticut residents and students searched 33.5 million times, 75% increase over the previous year. In addition, reQuest was searched 2.1 million times, a 22 % increase over last year. Over 200 libraries successfully lent more than 91,000 items through reQuest interlibrary loan, a 23% increase over the previous year. Holdings in reQuest increased to 21.2 million items. Three resources were recently added: Academic OneFile, LegalTrac, and WorldCat.org.

Under consideration for the coming fiscal year:
Career & testing resources
Science resources
Historical Hartford Courant
Online Encyclpedias
Literature resources
Current Issues resources
Source: The ICONN Times

Past, Present and Future of Food

Here is a webcast on the past, present, and future of food from the co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey. He then discusses these issues with Michael Pollan, author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma." Whole Foods Market is the largest organic and natural retailer in the world.
View the Webcast (Real Player. The program runs 124 minutes. )
Source: Graduate School of Journalism, UC Berkeley

Health Science: Management of Chronic Disease

“Our study showed that participating in a collaborative improved the processes of care related to prevention and screening and disease monitoring and treatment for diabetes and asthma, but participating in a collaborative did not improve these processes for hypertension. The study did not show improvements in intermediate outcomes of care. Whether these differences in diseases and outcomes are related to the nature of each targeted condition, aspects of the participating organizations, ease of patient adherence, or the specific collaborative under study is not known. Finally, improvements over time were seen in both intervention and control centers for almost every individual measure. Whether this broad improvement reflects general secular trends or the general quality-improvement environment at community health centers is not known.”
Source: New England Journal of Medicine

Early Child Education: Language Skills

Very Early Processing Skills as Predictors of Later Language Disorders

“First concerns that a child is not developing language as expected typically arise when a child is 2-3 years old, and children up to 4 constitute a substantial proportion of first referrals to speech and language therapy services. Long-term outcome for these children is a critical issue for all concerned: are they simply ‘late bloomers’, or will they have persisting problems with language and communication? This project aimed to identify predictors of outcome in 2- to 3-year-olds referred with concerns about language.”
+ Full Report (PDF; 2.1 MB)
Source: Economic & Social Research Council

Search Mash

"This is an unbranded Google site, where Google is trying out a new search engine interface. For starters, it sorts the results by web pages, images, blogs, videos, and Wikipedia entries, all on one screen. The first 20 web pages are displayed in a somewhat abbreviated format, but with a new way to drill down into any of the retrieved web sites. And Google finally has something close to MSN Live's "infinite scroll." When you click SearchMash's link for "More web results", the next 20 results are added at the end of the search results list; you can now scroll through 40 results at a time. Click "More web results" and another 20 are added at the end of the list, and so on." (Mary Ellen Bates)
http://www.searchmash.com

Featured Podcast This Week

Civil Liberties in War Time (MP3)Two of our nation's constitutional law experts, Judge Richard Posner and Professor Geoffrey Stone, debate the tension between civil liberties and national security when America is at war. You can listen to it online or download to an MP3 device.
Source: National Constitution Center

Research & Authority in an Online World

The English Journal article "Research and Authority in an Online World: Who Knows? Who Decides?" (G) is a must-read on the evolving role of Internet-based research (and the research paper) for teachers at all levels. Though the specific activities mentioned take place in a secondary classroom, the general discussion of Wikipedia and online research is significant for any classroom.
Source: English Journal

Critical Literacy: Teacher Learning

As we think about the Nation's Report Card (NAEP Results), we should worry that the scores of many high school students did not demonstrate the high critical literacy skills essential to their future success. What part do teachers play? We know teachers greatly impact student learning, so teachers' own learning is vital as well. The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Principles of Adolescent Literacy Reform and Principles of Professional Development describe how teacher learning can take place in schools to build the capacity to support students' 21st century learning.
Sources: NCTE

Overhaul No Child Left Behind

Critics of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) ask Congress to overhaul it. The Forum for Educational Accountability has called on Congress to scrap the accountability system under the current No Child Left Behind Act in favor of an accountability system that holds schools responsible for teacher training and parental involvement.
Source: Education Week, February 23, 2007