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Anger Management is Good Business

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:33:41 +0000

So Serena Williams let the f-bombs hurl at the US Open and it cost her the championship title. For those of you who are not tennis fans, just Google it or go to You Tube and you’ll know what I’m talking about. She got a $10,000 fine which is small potatoes for her. What was so much worse for her was that she lost a coveted championship title. Don’t you lose your cool in business. It will cost you. I’ve seen it and you’ve got to take steps to avoid flying off the handle at work.

I have a client who works in a stress-filled working environment. The pressure is on to produce and emotions are high in many meetings. He has a boss who is mostly good to work for. The only aspect of his behavior that’s a problem is that he has a temper. The boss is nice most of the time. In fact, he goes out of his way to do things that are generous and thoughtful. If he gets a gift card for a restaurant for his kids, he’ll buy a few extra and give them away at the office. He does other nice things, too. If only that were the entire range of his behaviors at work!

Then there’s the black cloud he brings to the office. In meetings, if he disagrees he explodes. He’ll yell at his subordinates in a tone of voice and a volume that manages to rattle them and make them feel horrible. This is what happened to one of my clients. The yelling made him more and more depressed.

Even though he was a star performer, he began to seriously think about leaving the company. This is despite numerous raises, a great salary and feelings of friendship for all of his peers. If the manager knew this, do you think he would change his behavior? I’ve got to believe he would. When I talked with my client, I asked him if he planned on telling his boss about the effect the boss was having on him. He said, "I can’t." Wrong answer!

My biggest mistake in business was not standing up to bullies or bullying behavior at work. Don’t you make the same mistake that I did. People who are behaving badly sometimes don’t realize what they’re doing. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. They also can’t read minds. So how will they know that they’re causing all kinds of distractions and pain for so many people? They don’t. That’s why you have to tell them.

It gets dangerous to confront them when they’re flying off the handle. That’s why you have to tell them what they’re doing in a setting without the emotions. If you don’t, you may lose your cool, too.

Here’s what I suggested he say. Tell your boss you need to meet with him. Then at the meeting tell your boss that you value him as a leader. It’s just that when he starts yelling at you, your perception of him as a leader is diminished. What you’re doing is tapping in to the boss’s need to be seen as an effective leader. Knowing that his behavior is costing him his personal power and prestige should be enough of a wake up call that he realizes that his behavior has to change. I’ll let you know what happens.

You’ve got to be able to control your emotions at work. The best way is to speak up before you end up exploding. You can do it without profanity if you’ve planned for the meeting. Unless you exercise prevention and operate when you’re calm, I can promise you that it will cost you. Just ask Serena.

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Maura Schreier-Fleming is president of Best@Selling. She speaks internationally about persuasion, selling skills and strategies. She successfully worked for over 20 years in the male-dominated oil industry, starting at Mobil Oil and ending at Chevron Corp. She was Mobil Oil’s first female lubrication engineer in the U.S. and was one of Chevron’s top five salespeople in the U.S. Maura writes several selling columns including the selling column for Jobbers World and the Insurance Record. Her column “Customer Connections” appears in the Dallas, Houston, and Austin Business Journals. She’s been quoted in the New York Times, Selling Power, and Entrepreneur.

Read more from Maura Schreier-Fleming at Allbusiness.com

AllBusiness.com provides resources to help small and growing businesses start, manage, finance, and expand their business. The site contains forms and agreements, expert bloggers, business directories, articles, expert advice, videos, podcasts and other resources. Material copyrighted by AllBusiness.com.

Nurture Shock

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:56:07 +0000

Po Bronson's new book, which he penned with Ashley Merryman, is shockingly insightful. NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children walks through the latest research on parenting and education.

It reveals everything from how our fear of discussing race with kids makes race issues worse to how new pedagogies for pre-k and kindergarten have breakthrough results.

Taken on the whole and through a public policy lens, the book clearly lays out some major changes we could make to our education system that would have a tremendous impact. These suggestions, coupled with the learning from programs like KIPP that were described in Gladwell's Outliers, really start to create a clear picture of what our educational system should look like going forward.

It is incredibly encouraging to imagine the potential of our education system, but one worries that despite this knowledge, politics will prevent progress.

For example, NurtureShock points out that starting high school an hour later has a significant positive impact. This was reported at least ten years ago, yet many school districts haven't made the change. The reasons for this range from additional busing costs to teachers wanting to drive to work before rush hour.

As a father, the idea of my kids going to schools where the teachers and principal don't act on this knowledge is beyond frustrating. It feels like they are hurting my kids for no good reason.

The challenge is partially political and partly just a product of the change management process. We can't change all the schools as soon as a new study comes out.

Reason is no longer the basis for policy decisions. Since when is teaching science considered liberal?

Obama spoke to addressing this but it is not clear to what degree he will. Clinton once talked about how the solution to every social problem has been solved somewhere, we just need to find it and bring it to scale. Newt Gingrich even created a site to capture these ideas.

There needs to be a new media model that is a hybrid between the New York Times and Wikipedia. It would catalog 'what we know' about every issue that is related to public policy. It would be comprehensive and ever-green like Wikipedia but have the editorial oversight of a world class newspaper.

This new media model could serve as a database to help voters make informed decisions. It would leave room for differences of opinion but not of facts.

This new media would need to be bi-partisan and able to report facts that are not popular. It would also have to be heavily marketed to have any power.

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Aaron Hurst founded the Taproot Foundation in 2001, 40 years after his grandfather, Joseph E. Slater, wrote the original blueprint for the Peace Corps. Inspired by the Peace Corps’ model for getting people to work together, Aaron created the organization to engage millions of business professionals in pro bono work building the infrastructure of the nonprofit sector. The Taproot Foundation has become the national leader in pro bono work, serving over 300 nonprofits each year and setting the agenda for the development of the field. Aaron has been recognized as a leading social entrepreneur for his work in civic engagement, nonprofit management and corporate social responsibility. Awards include the Manhattan Institute Award for Social Entrepreneurship, Fast Company’s 2006 Rising Star Award, the Draper Richards Foundation’s Fellowship for Social Entrepreneurship, and the Ashoka Fellowship.

Teaching Aborad with the Peace Corps

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:32:48 +0000

In the late 1980s, when volunteer Keri Gelenian returned from his term in the Peace Corps, he brought home with him an expansive take on education—and life. Teaching in the far-off African country as a primer course for his career prepared him for his current vocation as a professor at Humboldt State University in California.

Gelenian’s path is becoming a popular one among recent college graduates and professionals that are setting their sites on the education field. The global Peace Corps plan is an attractive one, because it encompasses more geography than Teach For America (TFA), another non-profit organization that filled 3,700 educational positions in low-income communities countrywide last year.

“The Peace Corps was an invaluable experience for me as an educator, and I think that I did a good job teaching in Kenya,” Gelenian says. “My Peace Corps experience really prepared me for everything I’ve done since.”

According to Allison Price, the director of communications for the Peace Corps, the government-run, American volunteer program has served 200,000 citizens in 139 countries since 1961. By living and working in developing countries, educators have promoted AIDS research and environmental preservation and disseminated knowledge about information technology and business development.

Of all Peace Corps volunteers, 35 percent are educators, making them the largest group in the organization, Price says. Students, teachers, parents, and community members integrate health education and ecological awareness into English, math, and science classes. Volunteers work in curriculum and materials development and conduct teacher-training sessions in conversational English, methodology, and academic subjects.

In the Peace Corps’s online resource for teachers, some of the past luminaries are highlighted: Thomas Gouttierre, the dean of international studies and programs and director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha (who served in Afghanistan from 1965 to 1967); James Lyons Sr., Maryland secretary of higher education (an Ecuador volunteer from 1966 to 1967); and Joyce Neu, the team leader for a new United Nations standby team of mediation experts and the founding executive director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice (a teacher in Senegal, Africa, from 1972 to 1974).

Gelenian’s credentials have also burgeoned since his Peace Corps years. He became an early graduate of the Peace Corps’ Columbia University Teachers College Fellows/USA program, which placed returned volunteers in New York public schools as full-time teachers and gave them tuition breaks on master’s degrees.

“We were paid by the New York City Board of Education, and I taught at Taft High School in the Bronx and earned an M.A. in teaching English to speakers of other languages at the same time, over two years,” Gelenian says. “I was very lucky, and I couldn’t have done that had I not been in the Peace Corps.”

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COMMENTS

Is beginning a teaching career via the Peace Corps the key to becoming a well-rounded, worldly educator?
Leave your response in the comments below.

Teaching with Learning Objectives

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:18:38 +0000

It’s a simple premise: our students should know what they are learning and why. The best way to accomplish this is through having learning objectives for every lesson. Yet, teachers tend to make some common mistake around learning objectives. Knowing these common mistakes will help you maximize your practice of using learning objectives:

1) CLEARLY POST LEARNING OBJECTIVES.

Don’t make the students continually guess what they will be learning. It’s not fun for the students, and they will eventually give up trying. Your learning objective should never be a secret. Your learning objective should be written or placed in a prominent place in your classroom. Some teachers write it in PowerPoint, some use document cameras, and others have their learning objectives written in a dedicated space on their white board. Do what works best for you and your students, but the key is to consistently post it.

2) MAKE YOUR LEARNING OBJECTIVE RELEVANT.

Reference your learning objectives in the beginning of each lesson. If you continually talk about (give attention to) the learning objective students will come to understand that this is important and something they should pay attention to. Another way is to have the students do some activity around the learning objective. For instance, you may ask students to reflect on their progress in achieving the learning objective and what they need to meet it.

3) WRITE THE LEARNING OBJECTIVE IN SIMPLE, STUDENT-FRIENDLY LANGUAGE.

Avoid going crazy with a paragraph-long learning objective. Keep it simple, allowing the student to understand it. To ensure students understand the learning objective you can have students rewrite the learning objective in their own words.

4) DOUBLE-CHECK TO SEE IF IT IS REALLY AN OBJECTIVE OR ACTIVITY.

Examples of activities masked as learning objectives:
“Read Chapter 2 in the your textbook.”
“Summarize Chapter 2.”
Examples of a learning objectives:
Students will be able to
“Describe the author’s perspective in Chapter 2″
“Compare and contrast between current author and a past author’s perspective”

5) ENSURE YOUR LEARNING OBJECTIVES DRIVE THE LESSON.

Every activity and assessment must be connected to your learning objectives. Often teachers have great activities, but they have nothing to do with the learning objective.

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Eric Hougan started his career in business and eventually did a career change into education, merging his two passions: business and teaching. It was during this transition, while a preservice and student teacher, that Eric realized the significant gap of resources and support for student teachers. Ever since, Eric has worked extremely hard collecting tips, strategies, and resources to address the sometimes mystifying process of becoming a teacher, addressing such topics as certification, and ways to develop a beneficial relationship with one’s cooperating teacher and university supervisor. Eric hopes this on-line community will address the hiring process by offering interviewing techniques and posting potential teacher interview questions. Overall, the purpose of this website is to provide a supportive network with wonderful resources for individuals pursuing a career in education.

Hougan completed his Master of Arts in Teaching from National-Louis University in Chicago, IL. Currently, he is a secondary-level teacher in Washington. Eric is involved in many school improvement initiatives and is a club adviser for Future Business Leaders of America. Seeking further professional development, Eric completed his National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. In the community, Eric is a Board Officer for the King County Bar Association’s Future of the Law Institute. Eric is also an author, recently writing Road to Teaching: A Guide to Teacher Training, Student Teaching, and Finding a Job. For his school and community efforts, Eric was recently recognized as a 2008-9 Phi Delta Kappa (PDK) Emerging Leader.

Teacher of the Year Pamela Harman: Teacher, Mentor, Marine

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:09:00 +0000

Walden University is proud to have more than 20 state teachers of the year—including Pamela Harman—currently working toward advanced degrees at its Richard W. Riley College of Education and Leadership.

Name: Pamela Harman
Award: 2008 Alabama Teacher of the Year
Teaches: Earth science
Teaching Since: 1998
Studying at Walden: Doctor of Education (Ed.D.)

“There's nothing better than science!” says Pamela Harman, an earth science teacher at Spain Park High School in Hoover, Alabama. “It's constantly changing, and you're constantly learning new things. You can go outside and observe it, live it, touch it, and love it. ... It's the best thing.”

A big believer in the importance of engaging various types of learners by making science something that happens outside of a textbook, Harman is always showing her students samples of rocks she's collected from around the country or high-tech weather recording devices. Often, she conveys scientific ideas using basic household objects. One of her favorite demonstrations involves simply making popcorn. “There are three main ways that heat transfers—radiation, conduction, and convection,” she says. “We take a JiffyPop maker and see how long it takes to cook. They see that conduction is nothing but popcorn touching the surface of the plate. In the air popper, they see the kernels are moving, and that's convection. In the microwave, they're heated by the waves.”

Whenever she goes to a national conference, Harman presents a lab like this to other teachers in order to show them simple ways that they can make science relevant to students without having to invest in fancy instruments or tools. Her favorite thing is learning, she says. A fervent desire to get a good education was what drove her to enlist in the Marines after junior college—to get on the GI Bill. “If you can be a Marine, you feel like you can be anything,” she says.

Next to learning, her favorite thing is teaching. And her third favorite? That would have to be mentoring other teachers in an effort to affect the system and further inspire students. As a teacher of the year, Harman often had to travel, and says one of the best parts of her experience was the opportunity to work with and mentor a young teacher who assisted with her classes.

“The teacher that I am today is because of all the mentors that I have had,” she says. “Sir Isaac Newton said, 'If I have seen further than others, it's because I stood on the shoulders of giants,' and that's really how I feel that I have achieved any level of excellence—it's because people have helped me get to that place. It's so important to have great mentors, not just in those first couple of years of teaching, but to have somebody that you can continue to talk to.”

Of course, a good teacher can only do so much without a classroom full of students—a lack of attendance, says Harman, is one of the key problems plaguing schools today.

If she could change the system, Harman believes this is a problem that could be solved.

“I would start charter schools run by national board certified teachers where students have to come to school,” she says. “They'd be contractually obligated and would have to sign an agreement that says they will come and do their homework and that their parents will be involved. If they miss assignments or are tardy or get busted for drugs or anything, then they're out. The most disheartening thing is that every student is not given the opportunity to learn. There are areas where students aren't pushed to give one hundred percent, and that just breaks my heart.”

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COMMENTS

Do you think that having students sign “contracts” is a way to make them into more engaged learners?
Leave your response in the comments below.

Making Room for the Self in School

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:17:12 +0000

(This piece originally was published by the National Association of Independent Schools as an online feature of Independent Schools Magazine.)

It was cold, a November evening, and I was the administrator on duty, so I was walking around the campus shortly after dinner on my way to the athletic center to lock the building. The last coach to leave after practice was supposed to lock up but never did.

My mood was not good. The sun had set at about 4:15, and the hours of darkness and gloom seemed to move in and out of me with each frosty breath. As usual, I was thinking about my English class, trying to come up with ideas to engage this group of pleasant, not very motivated juniors. Like most of my colleagues, I was frustrated — feeling guilty over my inability to transfer my enthusiasm for literature and writing to my students. Wasn't that my job, to motivate my students?

As I approached the athletic center, the building looked deserted, just the glow of the night lights seeping weakly into the darkness. I yanked on the door handle, and it opened; the building was unlocked. I'd have to walk through the whole place to see if anyone remained inside.

As I climbed the stairs to the second floor to check the weight room, I heard the thumping of a basketball muffled in the cinderblock walls of the stairwell. It grew louder as I walked down the hall toward a window overlooking the basketball court, and I saw Pharaoh, a junior who wanted to make the varsity, dribbling and shooting, first with his right hand and then with his left. He moved in and out of the shadows, intent on his drills, perfecting his game — running, jumping, turning, pounding the ball, sweating, and completely unaware of me.

Pharaoh wasn't much of a student. In fact, he was at that moment on academic probation, so I should have gone down to the court and suggested that he use this time between dinner and study hours to study. But I couldn't do that. It was wonderful to watch him, to see his enthusiasm for the game and his work ethic as he repeated drill after drill. Although I didn't share his passion for basketball, I could certainly see and appreciate it.

I wondered if, perhaps, the students in my English class could see my passion for literature and simply didn't share it. We are so accustomed to bromides about teachers' passions igniting student motivation. Quite reasonably, we want teachers who model a love of learning, but although we can cite occasions when such models have inspired students, these seem more the exception than the rule.

The truth is that motivation is both simpler and more complicated than we tend to acknowledge in schools. Too often, motivation is confused with happiness, with the result that teachers worry about keeping their students happy. Teachers struggle to become entertainers and stand-up comics — learning must be amusing and undemanding; they inflate grades and maintain sufficiently low standards to avoid student discomfort; and they lavish praise on the most mediocre achievement.

Yet there was Pharaoh that night sweating on the dimly lit court, doing the tedious drills over and over, alone — no one telling him what to do, no assignment, no judgment, no encouragement, no coach. He was the embodiment of motivation. Though he wasn't amused, wasn't diverted, if I had stopped him and asked, my bet is that he would have said he was having fun — the sort of fun that comes with intense, hard work doing something you love to do, something that matters to you, something you want to master, rather like the painful fun some of us have when we immerse ourselves in creating a new course or an exciting lesson — all that intellectual sweat of reading and thinking and writing and imagining and rethinking and rewriting.

And it is here that we teachers and administrators so often lose sight of the simplicity and complexity of motivation because we forget about a fundamental difference between teachers and students. Why are teachers in school? Why are students in school?

Teachers are in school because we love literature or math or Spanish or history, just as Pharaoh is in the gym because he loves basketball. Somehow, for reasons that differ for everyone, this thing we love matters to us. It touches the core of who we are, our sense of self — that bundle of emotions, experiences, needs and knowledge that we recognize as self, the source of meaning and our sense of truth as we live it. It really doesn't make any difference whether our passion emerges from positive, healthy reasons or from unhealthy reasons; the passion and the self are fused into a need that we experience as motivation. And, despite its frustrations, school seems to satisfy teachers' needs.

Students, on the other hand, are in school because they have to be — before they have any idea what they might want from school. Their studies, generally, don't matter much to them. Their academic choices are either made for them by various adults or are selected by them from options determined by adults — the limited options of a prison. What does matter to them is the social life of school — their friends and enemies and surviving the sociocultural jungle of hallways, dining rooms and locker rooms — which is the reason their social lives consume so much more energy than do their studies. Some students, like Pharaoh, discover another dimension to school. They find meaning in basketball; others find meaning in math or art or science. While the majority appear simply to serve their time until released into the relative freedom of college, these lucky few enjoy a successful fusion of self and endeavor.

Another of our bromides is that success in one area breeds success in other areas, and although there is some truth to this lullaby, Pharaoh's passion for and success in basketball never inspired passion or success in his studies, beyond the need to get the grades that would keep him eligible to play. English and history never touched his sense of self. He was happier in the classroom when he played basketball; he would have been miserable without it. But his studies didn't matter to him, nor did he become a scholar as a result of basketball anymore than I became a math whiz because I loved literature.

So students are in school because they have to be, and teachers are in school because they choose to be. And we choose to be because, regardless of whether our reasons for being there are noble or rather sad, school fulfills fundamental needs of our self. In schools, teachers are the meaning-makers; students are the receivers of the meaning we have made. Making meaning is an intimate expression of the self, the source of our engagement and our willingness to do the hard work of thinking and studying that our subject, our passion, demands — and to put up with the more tedious ancillary activities like attending meetings and making sure the athletic center is locked. For Pharaoh, meaning comes from basketball, and he is engaged and willing to work hard and think in his domain — and to put up with the tedium of the classroom.

The key to the sort of positive motivation we long to see in our students, Pharaoh's motivation for basketball or our own passion for history or science, is this fusion of self and endeavor. Years of working with students and teachers, along with studying some of the current research into how the brain learns, have convinced me that we need to rethink school structures and teaching methods so that we find ways to tap into and involve the students' self in their education. Despite the claims in our glossy catalogs and our conviction that our schools are "student-centered," they remain largely teacher-centered.

During the many years I chaired a department and then served as assistant head of school, I interviewed hundreds of teacher candidates, and whenever I asked them why they wanted to teach, EVERY ONE OF THEM responded with some variation on the theme that they wanted to pass their knowledge on to students. Not one said, "Because I want to help students learn how to make sense of their life. I want to help students develop their own sense of meaning." Sure, they wanted their students to care deeply about science or whatever they taught, but their strategy was to model their own passion and dazzle their students with the meaning they had created. It was not to help students find science or literature or history within themselves, perhaps even to discover how Latin or math might satisfy the deeper needs of the self. Little wonder that schools are structured and designed to include not the students' selves but the teachers' selves.

We have this idea that learning is a rational, logical, and linear process and that we can summon students' rational functions, cut them free from the emotions and the body, and teach them to think what we think, value what we value, care about what we care about. We insist on our ability to separate reason from emotion even though our own thinking and caring are rooted in an integrated self in which, although we might pretend otherwise, mind and body and emotion are linked. While Pharaoh's experience with basketball might be like my experience with literature, the experience of school for most students differs from the experience of school for most teachers.

Recently, I spoke with a colleague, a 30-year veteran of Spanish and ESL classrooms, about her frustration with her Spanish 3 students. She had just corrected their latest test, and she felt discouraged by their lack of progress and their apparent indifference to learning — indifference not to the grades but to learning. Earlier in the term, she had suggested to them various strategies to improve their Spanish. So, now, she decided to develop that conversation further and to see if, together, she and her students could reduce the frustration both felt — she because her students learned so slowly and reluctantly, and they because their grades were so poor. Below is a compressed, redacted version of that conversation, which I videotaped. What is evident in the conversation is the difference between the assumptions and context of the teacher's point of view and those of the students' point of view.

TEACHER: Before you see the results of the tests, I want to know if you did anything different to prepare for this test as opposed to the last test, which you remember we talked about individually to pinpoint some things you might do.

STUDENT A: I spent a lot of time studying, but when it came to test time, I had a kind of memory lapse.

STUDENT B: Yeah, it was totally a bling. I spent like such a long time studying.

STUDENT C: We should have smaller quizzes on each part of what will be on the test so that it's all more in your memory.

STUDENT D: And the book goes really, really fast. And there's only one practice exercise for each new thing.

TEACHER: Does anyone remember a suggestion I made to deal with that problem?

STUDENT E: Yeah, I did try the websites and did some practice, but practice quizzes would help more. If we have more practice quizzes, maybe you don't even have to put them in the grade book. They would be more like just for us, for our practice. Or maybe it would be a really small grade that would count like a homework.

TEACHER: Let me ask this. What's the difference between me doing that and you doing that on your own?

STUDENT A: It would be your format. We might make a practice quiz in a completely different way, and then we would be unprepared for your test because your way is different.

STUDENT E: Also, on the day of the test, I had to memorize a map for my history class, and there were two other courses I had to memorize things for. And even in this class we had something else due on the same day as the test.

STUDENT A: I usually have an easier time talking about a thing than I do with writing it. Like with show and tell, I can probably get up there and use the command form of the verb, but when I have to write it, it's something completely different. Speaking and writing are two different things for me. Speaking Spanish and writing Spanish are completely separate for me.

TEACHER: So what can you do as a student to work on the one you feel less confident about?

STUDENT A: I would appreciate some ideas.

STUDENT F: It takes time to learn the preterit. You have to keep going over it and practicing, and that gets back to the speed issue, how fast we cover this material. I know this must be frustrating for you because this should be more review for us.

TEACHER: Well, but my job is to take you where you are and move you forward. But what's frustrating for me is that I don't think at the third year level I should be taking class time to conjugate verbs with you or memorize verbs with you. However, if you need that, what can we work out together? If you are feeling that the verbs are a problem and there's just so much to memorize, we have to deal with that problem or neither of us is going to accomplish what we need to.

STUDENT A: The problem with every homework assignment is that you just look at the previous page for the answer and write it in. You have the answer right there to get it right, and you've done the homework.

TEACHER: So what's the next step? The next step is actually knowing it, and that's where we are stuck. If you don't have all the little pieces in your working memory, you struggle when asked to apply it. Whose job is it to get you to know it?

STUDENT G: Another teacher last year had us applying the stuff more. We wrote stories using the preterit. Or after each weekend, she asked us what we had done over the weekend, and we used the tense to tell her. It wasn't something that was graded. It was just practice to help us know.

TEACHER: OK, so you're talking about contextualizing it without the penalty of the grade. And the other idea I'm hearing is the smaller practice quizzes. What about the issue of whether the smaller quizzes should count or not count?

STUDENT G: I think it should count less than a test grade. But we need to feel the pressure so we must study for it. TEACHER: So is it the grade that puts the pressure on? What about just wanting to know it? Am I being totally unrealistic? It almost seems that I have to be punitive to get the kind of behaviors that I think will make you successful. There's something about that that bothers me.

STUDENT A: Well, we are teenagers. We know that colleges look at grades. Thirty years from now, I'm not going to need what I learn in history class, but right now, I need to know it for the grades. That's the drive behind everything — needing the grades.

STUDENT B: It's like he said. If we have homework and we can flip the pages back and forth and get the answer, we are going to do it. We get hours of homework every night, and we want to get done what we can fast. So if we know we have a quiz coming and we won't be able to look up the answer, we'll spend more time on that that night memorizing so that we can get the grade. If we can short-change something else, get it done quicker, we're going to do it.

TEACHER: What I want is for your skills and knowledge to improve, and I can facilitate that, but there's a big part that has to come from you. And the key is doing a little each day. You can't short-change the work as you go along and then cram for the test. Each topic builds on the previous one. What I would like you to consider is what you want to get out of all the time you put into this course. Maybe we could try a sort of scientific study to see if we can get a better result — try different strategies for studying and preparation to see if they result in improvement.

[The students mumble some assent to this general idea. The teacher pulls the tests from her folder and prepares to return them to the students.]

Don't let this test, this grade, define you. It is just an indication of a point in time. Success is determined by what you do with this information, how you respond. I know it's not fun to put in a lot of time and then not get a good result. That's why we're talking about this. We want to try to do some things — you and me — to produce better results.

This teacher cares about her students and struggles to find ways to motivate them to learn. She also loves the language and the study of Spanish cultures and fears that the combination of poor grades and her prodding them to take more responsibility will defeat her students. "I hate the thought that I might make them hate language when it's really their approach to learning that needs adjustment." Despite having "always felt it was [her] job to motivate them," she has discovered that learning must be a partnership between teacher and student with each sharing the responsibility for motivation. "I think I try to do a lot to motivate them, but it doesn't always work, and then I get very frustrated or discouraged. Maybe it would help the learning if we all had some input into motivation. Maybe this is something we need to do together. Maybe making this more transparent will enable them to move away from the cookbook approach or from their just giving up when they meet an obstacle. The teacher and the student have to be motivated, and maybe we need to be emotionally involved in the process together. I think, without realizing it, I have been setting up the emotional context based on what I think will motivate them instead of hearing from them."

Yet, despite these significant discoveries, the class discussion between this teacher and her students suggests that their differing assumptions and interests will continue to generate frustration. The teacher, whose interest includes getting the students to learn Spanish well enough to be able to enjoy communicating in it, assumes that in helping the students understand the nature of learning, she can bring them to a new level of consciousness. She hopes that consciousness will result in change. Ideally, her students will embrace the need to do the daily work to fix the basics of vocabulary and grammar in long-term memory and will accept personal responsibility for this work. But even as she gently pushes them toward the notion that a good part of the responsibility for learning falls on the learner, they push back and reveal their very different assumptions and interests.

Their honesty in articulating the reality of school for teenagers is instructive. They have too much to do and too little time to do it and feel rushed to get it all done. They must triage and find short-cuts in order to manage the load. As a result of the messages they receive from parents and teachers and the way the whole system is constructed, they assume what matters are the grades, which are the currency of colleges. The issue for them is not speaking Spanish but getting into college. Spanish really doesn't fulfill any deep need arising from the self; it has no deep meaning for them. But getting into college does, regardless of whether the need emerges from healthy or unhealthy sources. Each time the teacher pushes the students to accept responsibility for their learning and for their test grades, they push back. "Here is what you can do," the teacher suggests. "Here is what we need you to do," the students counter. "And here are the reasons we can't do what you suggest."

In terms of how school is currently structured — as an institution reflecting the passions and needs of teachers — it doesn't seem particularly surprising that some of the issues for students are grades, homework, quantity, pace and coverage. We need to look at these issues to see how they affect motivation, learning, and responsibility. The concerns and values reflected in their conversation with their Spanish teacher and their resistance to becoming as involved in the classroom as she wanted are reactions to a system that has always pretty much ignored students' selves.

Occasionally, a few brave teachers and administrators create alternatives to the status quo. The most rewarding teaching of my career happened in one of these ventures — a school-within-a-school that allowed a few students to have what was frequently a powerful and transforming educational experience. The Independent Immersion Program (IIP) had only two criteria for admission: a passion to study a specific area and the ability to work independently. Prior grades and standardized test scores were irrelevant. In fact, many of the most successful students in this program had done poorly in more traditional schooling. For students in the IIP, the usual distribution requirements for graduation were waived, replaced by a web of courses they chose or created because the courses were related to interests that mattered deeply to them. The IIP was an invitation for the students' self to guide and participate in their education.

Individual students over the years came to the program with interests in astronomy, painting, writing, music, genetics, architecture, medicine, international studies, film- making, mathematics, environmental science, computer science, marine biology. They built their curriculum around these centers of interest, which led them to a mixture of some traditional courses at the school, some courses at colleges or at other schools, some independent studies with professional mentors, and internships. These students created their own schedules, which usually involved work in their program not just during the regular class day but in the afternoon and evening, as well. And there were no grades. All assessments were narrative and included extensive narrative self-assessments by the students. The focus was on learning and on the students' development, not on grades. The students made decisions and choices for themselves. They were guided by advisors and professional mentors, but their choices determined the direction of their studies. Any mistakes in their decisions were theirs, as were the successes.

Freed from the fear and loathing of grades, students in IIP learned to make their own decisions and developed the sort of confidence we all need. Two of the IIP graduates spoke for many others in the self-evaluations they wrote. The first was written by a visual artist, a painter:

This year I let go of a lot. I let go of having to mimic reality directly on my canvas. I let go of painting and drawing from photographs, a tool useful when beginning to paint and draw, but a tool that also hinders one's form of expression. I began painting from my mind and emotions. I let go of caring how so-and-so would react to a painting and started painting for myself. I gained self-confidence and realized that not everyone is always going to like my paintings . . . the clothes I wear . . . or even me.

The second was written by a dancer:

Beyond all of the skills and knowledge I've gained and beyond all the work I've accomplished, there is one thing I have gained this year that I only dreamed of last year and even this fall: self-confidence. I'm naturally a shy and easily intimidated person. I often have no confidence in myself and think the worst of everything I do. Often, I'm embarrassed to share my work with others in fear they will not like it and think I'm not good enough.

I felt I needed someone else to decide what was good so that I wouldn't be wrong. It was as if I couldn't think for myself. I didn't trust myself. I guess I've always had this issue; I was so hung up on acceptance from others because I never accepted myself. I had it backward for the longest time. I thought acceptance from others would bring self- acceptance. Something was only good if others said it was.

Somewhere in the middle of my [IIP] program, I found confidence. I stopped caring about the opinions of others and realized they wouldn't be able to accept me or like my work until I do. You and only you have the power to make yourself happy. This has been the ending of a three-year search for myself here at the Academy.

You can't let someone tell you to have confidence and then have it. I had everyone from teachers to friends to therapists telling me I just needed to be confident in what I did. No matter how many times they told me, it wasn't enough. Compliments, good grades, long sincere one-on-one talks, no amount of positive reinforcement from other people could boost my confidence. You have to find it yourself. That's what [this school] has been trying to teach me. I need to discover things on my own, and it starts from within.

These are persuasive testimonies to the power of bringing the students' self into the classroom. These students become the sort that teachers long to teach: motivated, able to make meaning, skillful, knowledgeable, confident.

Several years ago, I taught a student named Angela in honors junior English. We struggled together. I tried to teach her how to write, but I failed. The grade always stood between us. She was afraid of the grade and tried to please me so that I'd give her a good grade. Then, in her senior year, she became a music student in the IIP. Like many students who are given the freedom to design their own program of study, Angela followed paths connected to her central interest in music, though perhaps connections not immediately obvious to an outside observer. For example, she felt she needed to improve her writing; it was important to the future she envisioned for herself, which included writing lyrics. So she asked me to teach her an independent course in writing. I can't describe how much I enjoyed, I think we both enjoyed, that experience. We felt liberated from the tyranny and oppression of the grade. We focused on writing. She experimented. She wrote for herself about things that mattered to her. She read the work of good writers and became a stronger reader and thinker, and her writing improved dramatically. She became a scholar.

The partnerships that characterize education in the IIP represent an ideal; not all high school students have discovered an area of real interest, though it might be revealing to examine whether this lack of deep interest is a function of American adolescence or the result of years of schooling that excludes the self of the student. But the fact remains: IIP isn't for everyone. (No single approach works for everyone, another truth we too easily and typically forget.) As a result, some of my colleagues continue to insist that the majority of adolescents need the schools we have created for them, and our job is to expose them to a variety of possible areas of study and to motivate them. My colleagues are both right and wrong. They are correct that adolescents benefit from experiencing the array of possibilities for study and careers, but the schools we have created, schools structured to coerce or cajole students to become passionate about the things that matter to teachers, are the reason we have so few motivated students. Each of us thinks our course — our passion — is the most important, the most meaningful, and most of us assign homework as though our course were the only one in which the students were enrolled. Those Spanish 3 students voiced the sorry results of the schools we have created for them.

We can do better if we recognize that just as our passion became the source of our motivation, so their passion, once discovered, will be the source of their motivation. And since motivation is rooted in the needs, interests and emotions of the self, the key to tapping adolescent motivation is to create classrooms that welcome the emerging self of our young students. That is our job — not to motivate our students but to create circumstances and conditions that allow motivation and discovery to occur, to invent different ways to increase the likelihood that school will be emotionally relevant to students so that their studies begin to matter to them as much as what goes on in the halls and gym matters to them.

In the last two decades, we have begun to learn more about how the brain works. And the more we learn, the more reasonable becomes the notion that students' emotions, past experiences, psychology, beliefs, knowledge — the amalgam we call the self — affect learning. Although it is too soon to draw definitive conclusions, some of the current research, particularly that of Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a neuroscientist with a doctorate in education who works at USC with Antonio Damasio, is provocative. Contrary to the traditional view that reason can be separated from emotion, Immordino-Yang and Damasio (and others) have found compelling evidence that, for the most part, they are inseparable. Meaningful learning may be the result of "emotional thinking." Their hypothesis is, "that emotion-related [neurological] processes are required for skills and knowledge to be transferred from the structured school environment to real-world decision making because they provide an emotional rudder to guide judgment and action." They go on to suggest,

First, neither learning nor recall happen in a purely rational domain, divorced from emotion, even though some of our knowledge will eventually distill into a moderately rational, unemotional form. Second, in teaching students to minimize the emotional aspects of their academic curriculum and function as much as possible in the rational domain, educators may be encouraging students to develop the sorts of knowledge that inherently do not transfer well to real-world situations. . . . [K]nowledge and reasoning divorced from emotional implications and learning lack meaning and motivation and are little use in the real world. (1)

Emotion fuels the brain; we engage in endeavors that are emotionally relevant to us. For our primitive ancestors, these endeavors — like finding food and shelter and eluding predators — involved physical survival. Today, though the jungle may be a more sophisticated sociocultural world and though survival may have a more prominent social aspect, the neural mechanisms remain the same. So adolescents, like the students in the Spanish class, master emotionally relevant knowledge that they can use, for example, to fit into a clique or protect themselves from the alpha bullies. And they learn emotionally relevant skills to manage massive amounts of emotionally irrelevant exercises so that they can achieve grades that will gain them admission to college. But the Spanish itself remains largely emotionally irrelevant, distant from the needs of the self. Some students, like Angela, find themselves: they discover a connection between a need emerging from the self and a school-sanctioned endeavor, at which point their education becomes emotionally relevant. The real world and the world of the self unite.

Even students who, unlike Angela, haven't discovered a passion that focuses their education can experience moments when the self and classroom material meet. I recall one such moment in my classroom. We were studying Hamlet, and a student named Will was struggling to talk about what the play meant to him. He fumbled with words and made little sense trying to use the standard English-class-speak about tragedy and tragic flaws that had been stuffed into him for years. So I and the other students kept asking him what he meant. Finally, there was a moment when his face flushed and he broke through a sort of mental constipation, and he said, ìYou know what this play is about? It's about this guy who worshipped his father, and his father was this distant, demanding perfectionist — this ‘Hyperion.' And Hamlet could never please his father, so he was probably closer to his mother, who was a lot warmer and approachable. And then his father dies and his mother turns all her attention to Claudius, and Hamlet has no one.î On and on he went, flipping through the pages of the text, reading lines that supported the emotional logic he had made of the play. He became excited and engaged for the first time in classroom literature. He was talking about the play, but the play was also a mirror in which he saw much of his own life. It was the emotional logic of his own experiences that made the play meaningful to him. Will's self had entered the classroom.

Another important aspect of the self is the individual way that we perceive and understand the world and the problems that confront us. Not only must the problems be emotionally relevant to the self in order to motivate us to solve them but our perception of them, what they mean to us, influences or even creates their emotional relevance.

In her research on two children, Nico, who had the right hemisphere of his brain removed, and Brooke, who had his left hemisphere removed, Immordino-Yang (2007) has suggested that people have differing profiles of cognitive strengths and weaknesses and that we tend to recruit our strengths and compensate for our weaknesses to understand and solve problems. As a result, a teacher and her students might understand and, therefore, attack a problem in subtly to widely differing ways, depending on their individual profiles:

. . . [E]ducators should think seriously about the problems they put to their students and the various neuropsychological ways that these problems could actually be interpreted and processed. What we intend as a simple math exercise, for example, could in essence be a verbal problem to one child, a spatial problem to another, and even an affective or social problem to a third, who may be thinking of the emotional implications of, say, the solution to a mathematics word problem.(2)

This theory could have important implications for the interactions between the teachers' and students' selves in the making of meaning. In its suggestion that teachers become more aware of the differing ways individuals understand the problems and explanations we present, it also provides insight into what might be the causes of the many communication problems that arise between teachers and students. 

In his book Successful Intelligence, Robert Sternberg tells a personal story that seems to illustrate the importance of understanding our students' ability to transform problems so that they can solve them. Sternberg describes the difficulty he had as a boy with spatial problems:

By the time I was in high school, though, a strange thing had happened. My scores on tests of spatial ability improved radically. . . Or so it seemed. Had my spatial ability improved? Not really. It was no better than it had been years before. But I had come to realize that many spatial-ability problems on these tests can be solved verbally rather than visually. In other words, instead of trying to visualize what, say, a set of forms would look like in another spatial position, I tried to talk the problems through to myself. I would describe the figures verbally and then try to match that description with the answer options.(3)

In Sternberg's description, I hear echoes of the student in the Spanish class who said that for him, "Speaking and writing are two different things. Speaking Spanish and writing Spanish are completely separate for me." Teachers with good spatial intelligence and teachers who cannot appreciate the difference between speaking and writing frequently tend not to understand students like Sternberg or that Spanish student. We become frustrated by students who fail to understand our "obvious" or "easy" assignments. If we don't understand how a student perceives a problem and dismiss her attempts to solve it, we only succeed in making the problem emotionally irrelevant and in alienating her self from the classroom.

These illustrations reinforce my belief that we need to design schools that intentionally include the students' self in their education — include their experiences, their emotions, their profile of cognitive strengths, their perceptions of the world and of problems, their evolving sense of who they are and what they believe. The old days of assuming that schools can isolate and address a rational portion of the whole and transform it into an echo of the teachers who lecture it may at last be finished.

In her essay on Nico and Brooke, Immordino-Yang also observed that "their families and teachers may have played a major role in their recoveries [from their hemispherectomies], through allowing these boys the freedom to actively engage in their own learning, without restricting them to preconceived notions about how they would function or recover after surgery." We teachers typically approach students with preconceived notions, derived from our sense of self (how we function, what we need, what we understand). Too infrequently do we allow the freedom for students to engage in their own learning, even though we think we do. Watching Nico and Brooke approach problems, attempting to understand their perceptions, listening and responding to their needs allowed the teachers to become partners with the boys in meaningful and successful learning — an approach very similar to the relationship between teacher and student in the IIP. Students and teachers, self-serving partners in learning — seems like a slam-dunk.

Notes

1. Immordino-Yang, Mary Helen and Antonio Damasio (2007). ìWe Feel, Therefore We Learn: The Relevance of Affective and Social Neuroscience to Education.î Mind, Brain, and Education 1 (1), 3-10.
2. Immordino-Yang, Mary Helen (2007). "A Tale of Two Cases: Lessons for Education From the Study of Two Boys Living With Half Their Brains." Mind, Brain, and Education 1 (2), 66-83.
3. Sternberg, Robert. Successful Intelligence, Plume (1997).

______________________________

Alden (Denny) Blodget (BA, MFA) is director of Sustainable Teaching, offering online professional development and support to teachers in their first four years of teaching. He was a teacher and administrator for 38 years. He taught theatre and English, created and chaired the arts department at Taft School (Connecticut), chaired the arts department at Packer Collegiate Institute (New York) and was assistant head of school for 18 years at Lawrence Academy (Massachusetts). Since 2000, he has worked with Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang creating workshops for teachers to explore the implications of her research for the classroom. He has written several articles for Independent School magazine (National Association of Independent Schools publication) and other publications.

Denny has spent his life in the educational reform movement and led the transformation of Lawrence Academy’s curriculum and teaching methods that resulted in innovations that attracted national attention from other schools. He serves on the Board of Trustees for The Long Trail School in Vermont and is a guardian ad litem for the Family and District Courts of Rutland County (Vermont), representing abused and delinquent children.

Do Teacher Induction Programs Work?

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:00:16 +0000

The first few years as a teacher can be rough—an estimated one-in-three newcomers leaves the profession within five years.

Teacher induction programs are designed to ease that transition, to promote teacher retention and improve classroom efficacy. But the amount and types of support new teachers get varies widely, from informal buddy systems to comprehensive—and expensive—structured induction programs.

The question is: Are those comprehensive programs better, and are they worth the cost?

 The good news is, few schools espouse the sink-or-swim approach anymore, says Dr. Richard Ingersoll, professor of education and sociology at University of Pennsylvania who has analyzed national survey data on first-year teachers for correlations between induction programs and teacher retention.

"Only five percent of teachers get nothing," he says, "but what the rest get really varies." Various induction efforts include mentors with common planning time, orientations, reduced course or lesson-planning loads, observation, and feedback.

 So which of those methods work? "What we found is: The more you get, the more you get, so to speak," Ingersoll says. "But the two factors that seemed to have the strongest positive effect were having a mentor from the same field and having structured, common planning time with a mentor."

Those elements are included in some mandatory induction plans instituted on the state level, as in California’s Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment (BTSA) or Texas’ Beginning Teacher Induction and Mentoring. Other programs are implemented by school districts, and still others are managed by nonprofits like ETS.

The New Haven Unified School District outside San Francisco offers a two-year BTSA program that teachers must complete to become fully credentialed. Each new teacher works with a BTSA specialist and two supporting teachers: one in the same field with common planning times and a consulting teacher in charge of observation and assessment. The extensive program costs around $4,100 per teacher, says Jodie Schwartzfarb, secondary BTSA specialist for the district. But, she says, "I’ve had teachers say, ‘We wouldn’t have made it without the program.'"

Still, Institute of Education Sciences (IES) recently published a major study on teacher induction, finding no difference in teacher retention rates or overall student achievement between comprehensive induction programs and the supports schools already had in place.

But induction advocates point out that may simply be because induction programs have in many schools become, de facto, fairly comprehensive already.

"The teachers in the control group often had a lot more support than they were expecting—three-quarters of them had an assigned mentor," says Dr. Michael Strong, a researcher at University of California-Santa Cruz and former research director at the New Teacher Center (NTC), one of the programs IES studied.

NTC’s own research on comprehensive teacher induction has found a great deal of support for the NTC model, which employs fulltime mentors, each with a maximum caseload of 15 teachers. In one study, Strong calculated that the program cost $6,600 per new teacher—but brought a return on investment of $1.66 on the dollar after five years, with 88 percent of teachers still in the classroom after six years.

"There's a lot of support for this kind of approach on the front lines," he says, "yet there isn't a lot of scientific evidence to prove it."

______________________________

COMMENTS

What kinds of support do beginning teachers need most—and which efforts are just a waste of time and money?
Leave your response in the comments below.

There's Gambling in Our Ed Assessment Casablanca?

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:11:36 +0000

Yesterday's release of the National Center for Education Statistics' report Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto National Assessment of Education Progress Scales: 2005-2007 seemed like it was almost lifted from the movie Casablanca. We are shocked, shocked to learn that many states' "standards" are hardly standards at all. For years, we've been reading about how student proficiency on state exams has been on the rise, while NAEP scores have remained virtually stagnant. Now, NCES paints a grim picture of the situation, demonstrating that most states are below or only meet the basic learning standards established by NAEP.

How can that be? The cynic in us says that states have been downgrading their state assessments to meet NCLB and AYP expectations. As they need to demonstrate year-on-year gains in math and reading, they've had to readjust their tests and their scoring scales to demonstrate such gains. It is why we hear that, according to state data, students in Alabama beat students in Massachusetts when it comes to reading proficiency. Of course, there is no telling what those numbers would look like if Bay Staters were taking Alabama's state test instead of their own MCAS. The full NCES study can be found here.

Perhaps the strongest statement on the NCES report came from Congressman George Miller, the chairman of the House Education Committee. In response to the latest data comparisons, Miller said: "The quality of a child's education should not be determined by their zip code. It is unacceptable that many states have chosen to lower the bar rather than strive for excellence. This means that many students aren't even expected to rise to meet rigorous standards — they are allowed to linger in a system that doesn't challenge them to do better and doesn't help them to develop the complex skills and knowledge needed to succeed in the jobs of the future."

These are strong words from the man who is in charge of managing reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act next year, the Congressman who will ultimately decide the future of AYP, the adoption of core standards, and the development of the assessments and data systems to track against those standards. And they are right on the money. Effective assessment has hardly been a strong suit in U.S. public education, particularly considering the rough patchwork that has long made up our testing systems. That's why so many people are providing a big bear hug to the notion of common core standards. In the pursuit of a better mousetrap, we hope that core standards provide a common baseline for all assessment, regardless of the state administering the exam. If we accept the concept of core standards, it means that fourth grade reading proficiency means the same thing in Alabama as it does in Massachusetts, the same in Texas as it is in Oregon. And if the we are all working off the same standards, in theory, we should all have similar benchmarks by which to measure proficiency. Proficient is proficient.

But if we are moving from the promise of core standards to the realization of common expectations, we can't overlook some of the core realities that underly the data. Yes, we should be appalled that proficiency percentages on state exams don't track well with NAEP proficiencies. But we should be equally appalled (if not more so) by what NAEP itself tells us.

As Eduflack has discussed before, the eighth grade reading NAEP has long been considered the best measure of true student achievement. It provides a strong longitudinal approach to learning (as kids have been taught reading four eight years), and those reading skills are essential to success in other academic subjects. We look at Massachusetts, with the highest eighth grade NAEP scores, and see it as the gold standard in reading proficiency. But only 43 percent of Massachusetts eighth graders score proficient or better on the reading NAEP. Is that really the bar we want to set, where nearly six in 10 students are scoring below proficient? Is that the best we can do, or the best to which we aspire?

Core standards will only take us so far. At some point, we have to raise our game when it comes to both teaching and learning, ensuring that all students are gaining the skills and knowledge necessary to both hit the mark on the requisite assessments and achieve when it comes to both college and career opportunities. Standards only mean so much if we aren't achieving the goals they set forth.

______________________________

Patrick R. Riccards is CEO of Exemplar Strategic Communications, an education reform and organizational positioning consultancy working with partners such as American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, International Society for Technology in Education, KnowledgeWorks Foundation, the Pennsylvania STEM Initiative, and Stanford University. Patrick is also author of Eduflack, an online commentary about effective education communications.

New Ph.D. in Counselor Education and Supervision

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Program prepares leaders for careers in clinical, community, nonprofit, academic or research settings.

How Biometrics Is Changing Corporate Security

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:34:05 +0000

Almost immediately after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, huge expectations were place on the technology of biometrics: Political pundits, security experts, and seemingly every variety of talking head called for using computers more intensively to automatically recognize individuals and identify those who were potentially dangerous - at arrivals terminals in airports, at the entrances of baseball stadiums, and at the doorways of data centers, scientific laboratories, and other such sensitive installations.

Biometrics - a collection of techniques for identifying people according to physical and behavorial traits such as fingerprints, speaking voices, and the way they walk - promised to help secure America against even the most cunning of enemies.

But guess what? While the use of biometrics in many high-profile government applications has languished since the 9/11 attacks, Corporate America, driven by the need to cut costs and boost profits, has been slowly but surely embracing biometrics for all sorts of new applications. In 2009, according to Acuity Market Intelligence, in Louisville, Colo., public sector use accounted for 60% of the total global biometric market, leaving 40% to enterprises. But by 2017, the commercial sector will account for 55% of the market. Some of the driving factors: a highly mobile population, an ongoing decentralization of the workforce, and increasing usage of cloud-based computing. In 2009, Acuity estimates, global biometric revenues will amount to slightly less than $2.6 billion, growing to $11 billion in 2017 - a 20% compound annual growth rate.

Some but not all of these are directly related to securing facilities. As visitors enter Disney World, for instance, computers scan their fingerprints to make sure that only authorized purchasers are making use of discounted multi-day tickets. In scores of corporate data centers, hand-geometry readers work alongside card-keys, badge readers, and passcodes to authenticate workers trying to enter the most secure areas. Voice authentication techniques are helping banks such as ABN AMRO, in the Netherlands, to identify customers before they’re enabled to execute transactions over the telephone.

Clocking in
Arguably the most popular corporate uses of biometrics are in non-security applications, says C. Maxine Most, principal at Acuity. One of the most compelling of these, she points out, is in tracking employees’ time and attendance on the job. “This is a real bright spot,” Most says. “It’s an unsexy app but it provides definite ROI in 12 to 18 months, sometimes in just 6 months.”

By linking each worker directly to his or her labor record, aka time-sheet, employers can enjoy a host of significant cost-savings, market researcher Most says. Traditional methods of punching into a job, with a piece of paper and time-clock, easily lend themselves to fraud. Workers can enlist colleagues to punch them in and out hours after they actually enter or leave the workplace. But by identifying each worker through a fingerprint or hand-scan, for instance, this kind of “buddy punching” can virtually be eliminated.

“The cost savings are real,” Most says, including fewer conflicts between management and workers, less payroll processing, dramatic reductions in wages for overtime, and reduced administration effort. In a recent white paper, Most estimates that intentional and error-driven “time theft” ranges as high as 10% of gross payroll and costs Corporate America hundreds of billions of dollars a year. “Biometrics consistently deliver accurate, reliable, and auditable real-time labor data,” she says, and that’s “the foundation of effective labor management.”

The great advantage of using biometrics to confirm identity is that the technique does not require any special effort on the part of individuals. It’s not what a person has in their possession - a key or electronic token, for instance - or what he or she knows, as in a secret passcode, that distinguishes them from other persons. Those items are easy to forget or misplace. Instead, authenticating the person depends on some unique aspect of their physical being that can be measured or analyzed directly by a computer and accurately matched against previously-stored records.

The measure of man
Fingerprints were the first such characteristic to submit to computer analysis and matching, starting as early as the 1960s at the FBI, but since then, the field of biometrics has broadened to include almost a dozen other techniques. It turns out that there are unique patterns to be identified in the shapes of people’s hands, in the coloring that makes up their eyes’ irises, in the blood vessels of their retinas, and in the shapes and arrangement of their facial features. With the right equipment, unique patterns can be recorded even in the veins within fingers and hands. In addition, each person’s DNA, or genetic code, is unique.

Each individual also displays four unique behavioral characteristics that can be used for biometric purposes: the frequency characteristics of their voice, as shaped by their vocal tranct; pen pressure and speed while writing by hand; the timing of fingers typing on a keyboard; and the dynamics of their body and limbs while walking.

Choosing which of these various biometrics to use in a particular application is matter of weighing such factors as the cost of equipment, error rates, and susceptibility to fraud. Even DNA, thought to be as immutable and definitive as possible, is now suspect. The New York Times in August reported that an Israeli firm called Nucleix has shown that it is possible - indeed, easy, for “any biology undergraduate” - to fabricate DNA evidence at crime scenes. Quite likely, this has implications for using DNA as a biometric for security and other applications.

Permanence over time is another important factor. If a certain bodily characteristic changes as a person ages, it can’t be used without periodic refreshing of the master database holding biometric records. This is exactly the case with retinal blood vessels, which for some reason has become a particularly popular biometirc in sci-fi movies.

Biometrician beware
Experts warn that as unique and powerful as they are, biometrics should not be adopted as substitutes for traditional security measures. Because fooling biometric systems can be as easy as tricking a facial recognition system by showing it a photograph of a face it “knows,” these technologies must be used only in conjunction with other techniques. If people are required to provide a secret passcode or secure pass-key in addition to a fingerprint, the rates of false negatives - mistaking Joe for Bob - and false positives - identifying a photo of Joe as Joe himself - may be reduced to an extremely small number.

And because biometric records are not secrets, writes Bruce Schneier, a leading security expert and blogger, they need special attention when being captured and stored. First, there must be a way to make sure that, say, the voiceprint originally associated with Mary has actually been generated by Mary. And then, once digitized, that voiceprint must be stored in a higly secure way, because a purloined copy of its data could be used - by hacking into a remote terminal, for instance - to trick the biometirc system set up to check it. Equally important, Mary can never change her voiceprint or any other biometric, as she might a pass-key or other assigned credential, and that means that once a biometric is compromised, it is compromised for good and therefore unuseable.

For now, the industry sectors most heavily committed to using biometrics are health care and financial services, both of which are highly regulated. for instance, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, or HIPAA, sets out a strict set of rules governing the protection and privacy of medical records. Penalties for breaking these rules are quite stiff, so hospitals tend to pay special attention to securing their IT systems. Yet, they also need to make those systems especially easy for doctors to use, especially when it comes to logging in and out of different workstations as they make their rounds. Too many passwords to remember or fiddling to log in to these systems and doctors will move on to another hospital. Biometrics, though, and so-called proximity badges, make it possible to quickly log in to a hospital application - and perhaps even have it “follow” the physician from terminal to terminal.

Looking to the future, Acuity’s Most sees biometrics finding widespread use with mobile devices. With a technology called Near-Field Communications (NFC), cellphones can be used as electronic wallets to make purchases of soft drinks, for instance, or theater and transportation tickets. Without some form of biometrics to help associate each cellphone with its proper owner, however, the risks of losing the device would be so high that this scenario would likely remain more dream than reality. “Near-field is the application that will finally drive biometrics into corporate use in a big way,” Most says.

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An introduction to biometric security

From fingerprints to biometrics

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COMMENTS

How is your business dealing with data storage issues in an age of rapidly changing technology?
Leave your response in the comments below.

Calming Classrooms With Movement

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:50:04 +0000

With physical education classes being cut from curriculum due to budget troubles and classroom time being reallocated to increase focus on standardized test performance, American students are spending more school time stationary.

Some teachers like Jeanne Trainum in Williamsburg, Virginia, though, are asking students to get up and move throughout the day, without sacrificing their lesson plans. Trainum teaches math problems with the help of a beach ball. Students partner up and are given a beach ball that has math problems written on it. Students throw the ball back and forth, answering aloud each question that is closest to their catching hand. The activity is still controlled – no running allowed – but it gives students a break from desk time that they look forward to, Trainum said in her submission of the activity to the National Association for Sport and Physical Education's Teacher Toolbox.

"Teacher Toolbox is one of our most popular web site sections," said 23-year veteran teacher Francesca Zavacky, now a senior program manager for NASPE, which recommends that children spend at least 60 minutes each day in physical activity. The toolbox highlights activities for students of all ages K-12 and family fun activities to encourage the movement to continue at home outside of school.

Other top “energizer” suggestions from teachers around the country include:

• Science: Playing a version of “Monkey in the Middle” to demonstrate how free radicals operate around stable molecules and electrons (a soccer ball).

• Geography: Having students organize themselves in the positions of the 50 states.

• Language: Each letter of the alphabet is given a spot on a half basketball court. Students must shoot a ball from the letters that spell out a given word.

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COMMENTS

How has physical education programming changed during your time as a teaching professional?
Leave your response in the comments below.

Walden Authors

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:00:00 +0000

From strategic planning for health professionals to teaching children to read, Walden faculty and alumni are sharing their expertise in new books.

Managerial Malpractices

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 20:49:30 +0000

The modern workplace is filled with stress, constant change, rampant conflict and employee disgruntlement. But managers frequently assume it can be remedied with a simple, even obvious, quick fix that will make everything alright.

But this assumes management can and will apply appropriate solutions to problems they themselves might or might not create. And the assumption that management can do this; that it is indeed the source of the solution and not the problem, is the first mistake.

A good deal of the malaise facing our workplaces is a direct result of managerial malpractices and the organizations’ inadequacy in dealing with them. Last month I wrote about employee malpractices, but we rarely hear much about their managers’ behavior. A sure sign that managers may be part of the problem and not the solution is their lack of knowledge about the vast management literature. Perhaps even more damaging is their unwillingness to involve their employees, many of whom are motivated and knowledgeable, in seeking solutions to the problems they face.

It is because of the importance of the managerial role in the social system of the workplace that the following managerial malpractices are such heartbreakers. So much potential is lost. So much energy squandered. So many successes deferred.

You may detect a tinge of anger coursing through the following descriptions of these all too common malpractices. That is because of the great deal of pain these practices cause for so many people. Indeed, managers behaving in these ways are doing more damage than if they did nothing at all.

First, An Inappropriate Attitude

There are a variety of ways incompetent managers destroy the potential of tens, hundreds, even thousands of individuals. First, we must understand an attitude that permeates the thinking and behavior of many of the malpracticing managers. The attitude is of “superiority over” without “responsibility to” the “subordinate” or colleague. Like governance, parenting, doctoring, and teaching, managers have a sacred responsibility to execute their duties without doing harm and in a way that enriches and enlivens those they touch as well as the organization in which they work.

While great pains were taken to cautiously assign powers to our political leaders to guard against what was believed to be the inevitable corruption of those in office, we have totally ignored these principles as they apply to power holders (managers) in the workplace. They are virtual dictators over all they supervise. The job of manager is thought to be a simple one-person affair which is unforgivable when, by so doing, he or she ignores the contributions and potential of their own organization and their workpartners – “colleagues and subordinates” – just because, given the power, they assume they are more knowledgeable, more creative, and more capable than others. This attitude is archaic and just an act of ego-gratification. Yet, this behavior is encouraged since tradition has created the mindset that the vast majority of the labor are virtual wage-slavers disempowered from making decisions regarding their work and their lives in the workplace.

Management As A Fringe Benefit

It is sad, to say the least, that while democracy and entrepreneurship are breaking out in some of the unlikeliest places on Earth, workers in the most open economies willingly subjugate themselves to unelected, virtually unaccountable bosses who tyrannize them daily. And, as Shorris (1984) reminded us long ago: “In business, [people] do not arrive at totalitarian methods because they are evil, but because they wish to do the good in what seems to them the most efficient way, or because they wish merely to survive, or with no more evil intent than the desire to prosper” (p.16).

As Scott Adams shows us each day in his syndicated Dilbert cartoon strip, managers are all too frequently malicious, bull-headed, unresponsive, ignorant, fearful and even violent. While the organization often survives such managers, the waste of human talent is a dreadful commentary on the system. Surely such organizations suffer more than they know.

Managerial abuse has become a form of acceptable corrupt practice – legal but unethical – especially when the manager sees the appointment to the position as anointment. These managers perceive themselves as masters of a fiefdom. Direct reports become servants expected to follow through and carry out every conceivable whim thrust upon them and to routinely be given assignments late Friday that are due on Monday, or to be sent to corporate Siberia for the pleasure of uprooting families just to test their loyalty. The truly disturbing feature of this behavior is that such managers are just modeling their own manager’s behavior and in so doing give the impression to the next generation that that is the way effective management is practiced.

Managerial Incompetence By Ignorance

Most managers have never formally learned how to manage people (to lead, coach, be with constructively, support, encourage, inspire). Unless they received training in the armed services or through extracurricular activities in school or, perhaps, in self-financed training programs, the people-management aspects of collegiate business studies programs and on-the-job opportunities are simply too trivial to matter.

This is the frightening and demoralizing fact of work life that is creating a tragedy of untold consequences for thousands of people in the workforce subject to the desperate trial and error methods used by most managers. The helter-skelter adoption of various strategies and techniques to lead and motivate, to communicate and inspire – in actuality, to cajole, control and intimidate others to perform for the good of the manager, the company and distant stockholders – have left professionals and union members fed up.

The constant process of reorganizing and instituting and reinstating short-lived “motivational” or “quality” or “efficiency” or “customer first” campaigns no longer fools anyone. Most managers using this helter-skelter approach only demonstrate their ignorance and whether or not they fail miserably their followers will be suspect of them and any “program” they try to implement.

Managers believing that management is their “right” will, of course, eventually destroy their credibility. And as this practice becomes widespread it destroys the credibility of the entire system. How long will it be before the many who have been subject to the capriciousness, arbitrariness and ineptness of incompetent “bosses” cry “enough!”

Raw Personal Power

(The “Bottom Line” Is Just The Excuse)

It is easy to understand an individual’s lack of skill to practice sound people-management. But, for some managers there is a deliberate, gratuitously malicious disregard of solid management principles simply because these do not reflect their personal preferences and inclinations. In few professional realms can an individual’s prerogative be so arrogantly exercised.

An accountant cannot choose to disregard the GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) no matter how personally objectionable the principles may be. Engineers cannot ignore the appropriate mixture of materials comprising concrete and expect to escape professional and legal sanctions. A lawyer cannot disregard court procedure when conducting a case. Yet anyone holding the position of manager can virtually do as they please in terms of the treatment of “subordinates.” If a manager believes it is “motivational” to threaten the workforce with dismissal, so be it.

Indeed, because we are increasingly subject to a system that unashamedly espouses the profit motive as the basis for all action, each decision is justified simply because it is thought to be the most profitable. Thus, the system itself encourages managers to disregard sound interpersonal behaviors and people-management processes.

The literature is replete with research support for the value of creativity and participation, of ownership and empowerment. The literature is also abundantly clear about the requirements for our collective satisfaction and survival. Resistance to practicing our knowledge is not due to the intellectual difficulty in understanding the concepts. It is due to the exercise of personal prerogatives, the expression of individual personality and the personal responses crafted (intentionally or otherwise) by individuals who do not practice valuing the collective and who choose to blame the constraints imposed by the system itself to substantiate this behavior.

For example, time pressure alone discourages, if not denies, many managers the means with which to practice what they know to be good interpersonal relations. This is so appalling to some people that the greatest pain suffered on the job is the knowledge that they are not living their values; they are caught up in a system which feels beyond their control. They live a demanding way of life requiring a sacrifice of part of their humanity just to “put food on the table.”

The Joy of Exercising Power

Over the last fifty years, actually since the Industrial Revolution began, there have been coops, self-managing organizations and a variety of participative management styles that proved successful on any and all empirical measures. Yet they are rare. It seems the need to crush change, even when it is demonstrably best for profits, is due to management’s attachment to the powers and perks of office. It is the rare manager who can turn away from the seductive trappings of power and privilege for which they have vied throughout their professional careers. Without a change in the structures of the workplace, the re-design of internal relationships, and the reformulation of assumptions about one’s appropriate role in the workplace, real reform and power sharing will likely remain an elusive goal.

Trial and Error Management Leads to a Fad Frenzy

Trial and error management embraces each new change-management fad with a fervor unknown outside cult circles. Even the most inglorious examples of the fads enter the bestiary of management techniques with only the slightest critical examination. A sure indication of nascent fad fever is hearing the refrain, “What’s the latest?” at professional gatherings. These events result in thoughtless incantations of current buzzwords rather than real understanding and implementation of management change strategies with intentionality.

Lack of attention to the system is the reason managers experience so many and varied symptoms driving them in a frenzied search for panaceas. Even managers who are capable, sincere and willing to treat breakdowns simply have not become aware that the locus of most problems is in the system itself or due to the inadequacy of their people management skills.

The Bully

A case comes to mind of the CEO wanting to make a quick, powerful first impression. A family brewery turned to an outside individual to become its CEO. His first two acts almost caused a revolution. After the company had devoted a long time instituting teams, he unilaterally declared that there was “no time for that anymore.” Attention first had to be placed on “improving the profitability picture” as if teamwork and profitability are unrelated! Second, to get new ideas he believed it was necessary to “churn up the organization.” His plan was to fire the “bottom ten percent” of performers each year even if the entire workforce was exceptional. It was this particularly nasty and misguided effort that the brewery owners refused to agree with, “After all, we have been like a family for generations.” While his second act was reversed by the family, the CEO remains at the helm, and the efforts of the organization development department to build self-managing, high-performing teams was obliterated over night.

Not long after that adjustment the CEO was successful in disbanding the entire organization development (OD) department because it was no longer justified in light of the streamlining policy – “to do only those activities directly related to brewing and selling beer.” This act generated doubts in the workplace spawning questions like, “when is the accounting department going to be laid off?” Here we have a combination of bullying behavior and managerial incompetence by ignorance. These actions represent a failure to understand the role and value of the OD department. Disbanding the OD department without discussion, sent a message that the new CEO planned to “motivate” his staff solely through fear. These events created a massive morale problem and the psychological on-the-job withdrawal of hundreds of people from the workplace.

Finally: It Is Really About Character

It is not taught in business schools and seemingly not taught at home anymore either, but the lack of character exemplified by the low integrity in organizational relationships (“Sorry, but this is a business decision, nothing personal. You’re sacked. You have ten minutes to clear out your desk.”), declining respect for others and a studied unwillingness to communicate authentically: (“If I tell people what I really think, they’ll use it against me.”), are the underlying reasons for the widespread demonstration of managerial malpractices. There is widespread disregard for, or blindness to, building reciprocal, balanced relationships.

These malpractices can be dealt with and eliminated from organizations willing to act with integrity, intentionally and for the good of each person involved. But it takes courage and that is another omission of the business schools and doesn’t count much in business.

Shorris, E. (1984). Scenes From Corporate Life. New York: Penguin, p. 16.

What Can U.S. Educators Do to Improve Math Skills?

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:06:15 +0000

As U.S. students continue to lag in their math skills, when compared to students from across the globe, the long-term economic stability of the United States may be in jeopardy.

In a special 2009 supplement to The Condition of Education, it was reported that in math, U.S. 15-year-olds’ scores now lag behind those of 31 countries.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan responded to the report by saying, “These results show that for us to stay competitive and move forward we have to get our students ready for global competition.”

The Final Report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel from the U.S. Department of Education noted that an individual’s success in math provides additional college and career options as well as increased prospects for future income.

While careers in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields are “plentiful, well-paying, challenging,” according to a report in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the explanations for the continuing math achievement gap are varied. The AMS report notes, for instance, that many U.S. students do not participate in mathematics because of the social stigma attached.

Another difficulty highlighted in the report is the mathematics preparation of teachers, which The Final Report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel concluded must be strengthened to improve teacher’s effectiveness in the classroom.

Innovation adding up
But even before these latest findings, educators around the country have been working to help students achieve in math.

Math Circles is an outreach initiative, backed by the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), that brings mathematicians and mathematical scientists into contact with students and teachers after school or on weekends to work on interesting problems or topics in mathematics. The goal is to get the students excited about mathematics as they participate in real-world problem-solving.

Dr. David Auckly, an associate director at MSRI who also works on the organization’s outreach programs, including Math Circles, said that in Eastern Europe, for example, students practice math as an after-school activity as they would band or football. He sees Math Circles as one way to encourage that sort of interest and enthusiasm.

The 2008–09 San Francisco Math Circle (SFMC) included 41 teachers and 365 students, with an average of 96 students and 17 teachers attending the program weekly. And the effects are exponential—the 41 teachers who attended SFMC, for example, influenced at least 2,200 students when they returned to the classroom.

Dr. Brandy Wiegers, coordinator for the National Association of Math Circles, explained that SFMC exemplifies how Math Circles can support teachers in helping students with their math skills/achievement. There are at least 60 other programs across the country in 20 different states that are striving to meet this same goal.

In an external evaluation of SFMC, one teacher-participant commented that Math Circles provided an extracurricular program that gave access to math enrichment activities for students at any level. And on the other side of the equation: One student interviewed said that Math Circles made math fun and provided new ways of learning.

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COMMENTS

Is it student enthusiasm or teacher preparation that is most closely linked with U.S. students’ lagging math skills?
Leave your response in the comments below.

Community News

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Walden's students, faculty and staff are contributing to their disciplines through publications, presentations and other professional activities.

The Connection Between Life and Death

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:36:43 +0000

A disturbance over the Rockies a few days ago resulted in a storm developing over us in the next few hours.

A 23 pound striped bass just ate some sand eels a few hours ago--she's hungry, and she knows she's about to make a long journey south. She knows nothing of North Carolina, but she will spend the winter off its coast.

In another universe, the weather would be grand tomorrow, and the 1st Annual Doyle Striped Ass Bass Bash would go on as scheduled, and the she-bass above would be caught, clubbed, bled, then eaten with much joy and beer.

But she will live.

And because she lives, a few thousand more sand eels will die while wriggling in her belly.

That's how it works. Really.
***

Yesterday I mentioned Hansel and Gretel in class--a lot of my lambs did not know the story.

Today I mentioned Tithonus--he was granted immortality, but forgot to ask for youth. I was messing around with the class, talking about some technological "advancement" that was likely to occur after I die. I welcome death. Not today, but someday.

Hey, it's biology class.

I have to be careful--I do not want to frighten children. I do not want them to cower in a corner. Still, this is biology. Organisms live. Organisms die. We have plenty of people selling immortality. I'd be remiss if I failed to mention death in a class studying life.

We are afraid of what we know to be true.
***

Getting older is weird--I am shocked every time I look in a mirror.

As strange as it is, though, the biology is fascinating. Death is fascinating. It's scary when you focus on the "you" in you, less so when you focus on life in general. Still scary, though.

I am charged by the state of New Jersey to teach biology, the study of life. Our culture assumes immortality.

Religion has no place in the science classroom, but I think death does, at least in biology class. Death cannot be approached without religion in its most basic sense.

What to do, what to do? Do what's in the best interests of the children.

So I teach death.
***

So a sand eel survives. On Sunday, a day it does not recognize as the Sabbath, it will eat plankton. Or rather, it will eat thousands of tiny, individual organisms lumped as "plankton" because we, humans, see tiny organisms in the sea as insignificant.

Each organism matters, or it does not. Life matters, or it does not. Pure logic.

That we, humans, choose to lump individual organisms in a category such as "plankton" or "algae" or "animal" to reduce groups to something less than us may be one of the characteristics that defines what we are.

I have no idea why we are here or why, but I spend most of my moments in bliss, happy to be alive.

Two days ago, as I was walking to school, I was steaming about some hypothetical situation, and a crow flew overhead.

It cawed. In joy. (My evidence? Little, I know, but I recognize joy--if you cannot recognize joy, you'd have stop reading my words long ago.)

A mid-October morning, about 65 degrees Fahrenheit, and I get a needed kick in the ass from a crow.
***

You are not special. You will die, too.

So live.

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Michael Doyle was very briefly a longshoreman, briefly a lab tech in a booze plant, more recently a pediatrician in the projects, now a high school biology teacher. Keep up with him on his blog, Science Teacher.

Teacher of the Year Eric Kincaid: Always Learning

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:40:01 +0000

Walden University is proud to have more than 20 state teachers of the year—including Eric Kincaid—currently working toward advanced degrees at its Richard W. Riley College of Education and Leadership.

Name: Eric Kincaid
Award: 2008 West Virginia Teacher of the Year
Teaches: Biology
Teaching Since: 1995
Studying at Walden: Doctor of Education (Ed.D.)

For some students, science education begins and ends in high school. For others, however, it's a course of study that knows no beginning or end.

For 2008 West Virginia Teacher of the Year Eric Kincaid, science was something that was part of his earliest days, even if he didn't use that word for it. “I was always collecting specimens in middle school,” says Kincaid, a biology teacher at Morgantown High School in Morgantown, West Virginia. “'Specimens' is what my mother called them. I'd come home with little bugs and rocks and stuff like that in my pocket.”

Early on, this helped him see that education was something larger than just what happened at school. Learning could clearly take place anywhere, at anytime—something Kincaid says he learned from his grandfather who, although he had to drop out of school at age 13 to work, continued to educate himself. “He read everything he could and learned everything he could,” says Kincaid, noting his admiration. “His knowledge really blows me away even though he only has an eighth grade education.”

In his classes, Kincaid tries to help students see that education isn't always about a scholastic context. He works to show them that scientists are doing research outside of the classroom walls all the time. What's more, they're often doing research that looks a lot like the genetic work he does with his AP kids—analyzing DNA, trying to diagnose genetic disorders, and even manipulating the genome.

“I like finding new articles or videos, because the kids really like getting those news stories. I like showing the kids what the potential is. A couple of times I've found things that were published the day I showed it to them, so they can see it's not just coming from their text books—this is information that is coming up all the time,” he says. “I also want to try to get kids to get the information on their own—to teach them how to use the tools that we have that will allow them to get information, and remember it, and use it, and apply it. If I can do that, then I'm pretty happy, because the amount of information we're getting now is amazing. There is no way you can actually remember it all. If we can give them the tools to get information on their own, then they have a better chance of being successful.”

Of course, there's also the learning that goes on for students after they leave his class—that's the kind of learning that may end up taking students much deeper into science than their teacher will ever go. For Kincaid, a student who can outdo him is a dream come true.

One of his favorite memories of teaching involves a very reserved pupil who had just lost her father and didn't seem engaged in class. “It was amazing what her academic ability was, but she was very quiet—never said a whole lot,” he says. “That was just as I was starting to try to teach genes and different genome studies, and she ended up taking what I taught her and going into that research on her own.”

Today, that shy, reserved student is working on a combined M.D./Ph.D. at Harvard University. “She is doing cancer research—she wanted to fight the cancer that killed her dad,” says Kincaid. And now, she's the one offering words of encouragement: “She writes, 'Keep up those genomic studies, keep looking at those techniques and all that, because that's what enabled me to get ahead,'” he says. “That's why I'm here now.”

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COMMENTS

How do you demonstrate to students that what they are learning in the classroom has practical applications in life?
Leave your response in the comments below.

Should we ban private schools to improve education?

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:33:07 +0000

Outlaw private schools now to save U.S. education.

Reentering the Classroom Following Retirement

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:10:29 +0000

Every teacher knows the value of doing your homework, and if a retried teacher is considering reentering the workforce, the situation is no different. Whether changing financial conditions or renewed passion for teaching is the driving force to get back into the classroom, there are important tips that can help smooth the transition for a teacher who is planning to come out of retirement.

Megan Hookey, vice president of the National Retired Teacher’s Association, which is the American Association of Retired Persons’ (AARP) educator community, says the key for any retired teacher who wants to reenter the professional education arena is flexibility. “Across the board we are certainly seeing an increase in people who are returning to the classroom because of financial reasons,” she says. “If they operate within what is available within the school system, they can usually find some work.”

Hookey adds that often, retired teachers find themselves in an ideal position to market what they have to offer as an experienced educator. “He or she has walked in the shoes of an active educator, and there is no doubt that this is valued.” She suggests that even with years of experience, a returning retiree can expect a much smoother transition if first ensuring the full support of administration—and cautions there can be a few challenges awaiting someone getting back into the classroom after years outside of it.

Hookey also recommends that teachers try to reenter a school district where they have previously worked. “A returning educator is also in a good position to address areas of need and how their skills can fulfill that need,” she says.

When approaching administrators or trying to get hired, Hookey acknowledges the possibility of discrimination against older job candidates. “There are certainly times where people might make judgments on a person’s capabilities based on their age,” she says.

“One of the problems people often run into is an assumption they cannot work with the new technology.” She recommends teachers be armed with knowledge, even if that means taking a computer course. “Actually, studies have shown that one of the fastest groups to adapt are people over the age of 50,” she notes. “When trained, these individuals have the ability to perform at the level of people decades younger.”

A positive mental boost can be for retired teachers to remember they are not alone. According to the AARP, by 2010, one in three workers will be over the age of 50. Hookey adds, wisdom and age often yield more respect in teaching than in other professions. “Generally, in the world of education, people who have taught before are valued. That is perhaps a unique experience,” she says.

In addition, reentering the education workforce might mean other things besides just traditional teaching. Hookey recommends retired teachers consider becoming a mentor or coach to new teachers.

Hookey directs retired educators to the AARP’s Worksearch tool, which provides tips for retired persons who are back on the job hunt. The site not only includes tips such as how to avoid the “overqualified” label, but also resumé advice and links to Web sites that list jobs exclusively for the retired population.

Essentially, retired teachers have a priceless edge reminds Hookey. “They have not burned out, and they still possess a desire to turn on those light bulbs in the minds of their students,” she says. Keeping that passion close at mind will inevitably be one of the most invaluable tools for any teacher who returns to the workplace.

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COMMENTS

If you are retired or just generally feeling like it is time for a career change, try reevaluating your job skills at AARP’s Worksearch page.
Leave your response in the comments below.

Online Teachers and Online Training of Teachers

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:01:18 +0000

According to an article in eSchool News, online programs are seeing a dramatic spike in teaching applications.

Specifically, K12, Inc. and Connections Academy are reporting massive spikes in applications, and the article theorizes that it’s because of the layoffs in the traditional brick-and-mortar schools. There are some other contributors as well—such as specialists like mathematicians wanting to share their knowledge and teachers who are seeking a change.

I can’t say I’m all that surprised. As online learning continues to grow rapidly even as there is contraction in the traditional system, there will be more jobs available in online, and for certain people—although certainly not all—online teaching presents a more attractive career path for a variety of reasons (the ones cited above, flexibility, etc.).

Additionally, there is an interesting piece in Education Week that is an interview with Chris Dede, a professor of learning technology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. When Professor Dede speaks, I make it a matter of habit to try and listen (or read in this case!), and this interview doesn’t disappoint as he talks about both the current state of and the future of online professional development in a short piece.

As I’ve noted before, professional development is in fact a big area of nonconsumption in many districts and presents an exciting place to provide potentially much more useful, just-in-time training to teachers that matches with the need they have in a format that will be most effective for them.

Professor Dede paints a richer, more nuanced picture—from the current challenges facing online professional development and why simply converting face-to-face professional development to an online format doesn’t make sense to the types of customization, interaction, and reflection that are possible in this world. In addition, he sees that, in this case, the market seems to be working and pushing online professional development to improve. He also believes that two factors—the need for scale in professional development and the need for fundamentally more affordable models—as a big drive for why online professional development will evolve and grow rapidly in the years ahead.

Also, one note — watch the video of Professor Dede where he talks about our book. I actually don’t see this as a disagreement at all, as readers of this blog will know. We don’t say in the book that schools will go out of business in the book as Professor Dede asserts. That’s why it’s called Disrupting Class–not Disrupting Schools.

______________________________

This post originally appeared on Innosight Institute's Web site. The author, Michael B. Horn, is the Executive Director of Education at Innosight Institute and the coauthor of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change The Way the World Learns along with Harvard Business School Professor Clayton M. Christensen and Curtis W. Johnson, president of the Citistates Group.

Ph.D. Survival Tips: How to Successfully Complete Your Dissertation

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Learn one Ph.D. graduate's secrets for thriving throughout the dissertation process.

Why Web 2.0 Teaching Is Hard

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:25:50 +0000

This blog post is for Gerry Paille from British Columbia (http://twitter.com/tuchodi) who asked me on Twitter to explain a tweet about that Web 2.0 teaching is not easy. Here, Gerry, I Hope this is something you can use.

When you play basketball yourself - you work on your shot and you practice. You're in your own mind - your own head.

But then, one day you grow older and become a coach. Now, you have to get in the minds of other people. You have to not only understand basketball but psychology and team dynamics, motivational speaking, and the technical aspects of equipment. You have to not only see a player for what he/she is today but for what he/she could be. (Like how much are they going to grow in 3 years.) You have to put people in the best place that suits the team and not necessarily the person. It is a much more complex task than just managing yourself.

This particular example embodies why using Web 2 in teaching can be more challenging than the traditional test and lecture because you are moving from just speaking and giving a lecture and having them memorize and take a test to methods that require much more individualization and personalization as well as more collaboration. Each person has to ENGAGE. They have to JOIN. They have to WRITE.

They are moving to a more active tense which quite honestly, can make the teacher TENSE.

"Mrs. Vicki, I cannot join the space? Mrs. Vicki, I cannot find anything? Mrs. Vicki, what do I do? Mrs. Vicki, I am lost? Mrs. Vicki Mrs. Vicki?"

(Most teachers have nightmares where their name is called over and over and they don't know why.)

You are evolving into a coach.

Now, good teachers can be coaches and not use Web 2.0 tools, however, if you are using Web 2.0 in the classroom you HAVE to be a coach.

You cannot do it for them (the golden rule is that I never touch the mouse) - you have to teach THEM how to do it. (Isn't that what we are supposed to do anyway?)

This, my friends, is why I tweeted the other day that if anyone thinks using Web 2.0 in teaching is easy is not doing Web 2.0 teaching. Web 2.0 teaching gets past the tools (signing up and USING the tools for the sake of the tools) and allows the tools to mash together to create learning experiences.

This is not something any of us have perfected, I think. (For example, I fell flat on my face trying to work out with my students using some of the Skype extras this week and wasted at least 20 minutes!) However, this is something we aspire to!

So, using Web 2.0 tools in teaching is not easy but it is worth it.

It is worth it in engagement and thinking skills and the polish that comes from being buffed and buffeted by the sandpaper of the problems we face any time technology is involved.

The world we live in is full of change, technology, problems, frustration, and lots and lots of people and these are things you cannot condense to words and put in a textbook but are only written upon the textbook of experience when you engage students in positive learning experiences online.

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Vicki Davis is a teacher and the IT director at Westwood Schools in Camilla, Georgia. Vicki co-created three award winning international wiki-centric projects, the Flat Classroom project, the Horizon project, and Digiteen with teacher Julie Lindsay, currently at Qatar Academy. These projects have linked more than 500 students from both public and private schools in such countries as Austria, Australia, Bangladesh, China, Japan, Spain, Qatar and the US. These collaborative projects harnessing the most powerful Web 2.0 tools available including wikis, blogs, digital storytelling, podcasts, social bookmarking, and more. Vicki is a cofounder of the Women of Web 2 and has been featured in various media including Thomas Friedman's book, The World is Flat, the Wall Street Journal, and the Boston Globe.

Vicki blogs at the Cool Cat Teacher blog, which has been an edublog award finalist for Best Teacher blog for the last two years and is currently ranked the top teacher blog in the world according to Technorati. Vicki is a Google Certified Teacher and Discovery S.T.A.R. Educator. She lives in Camilla, Georgia with her three children and husband, Kip.

Vicki published her first book in Fall of 2008 entitled ClickSmart about the holistic method of teaching software that she uses in her classroom. This method enables her to teach a wide variety of software programs and build technical fluency and digital savvy that continues to distinguish her students in their global projects. Vicki is also a freelance writer and conference presenter.

Biodiesel Moves from Backyard to Mainstream

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:07:17 +0000

Long gone are the days when biodiesel was something your granola-eating neighbor brewed in his backyard using recycled cooking oil. Rather, biodiesel is fast-becoming a mainstream alternative to traditional petroleum-based motor fuel—and a prime business opportunity for entrepreneurs with an eye on renewable fuels.

According to Emerging Markets Online, a global energy and utilities market research firm, in the year 2007, there were only 20 oil-producing nations supplying the needs of the rest of the world. By the year 2010, most countries will be biodiesel producers.

In the U.S., biodiesel is powering more and more cars and trucks. For example, the city of Mesa, Arizona, switched its entire fleet of more than 1,000 diesel-powered vehicles—from high-performance fire trucks to lowly street sweepers—to biodiesel last summer.

Fueling demand
The appeal of biodiesel is easy to understand. Both biodegradable and non-toxic, biodiesel is a clean-burning alternative fuel derived from natural oils from plants like soybeans as well as other renewable botanical resources. Because it contains no petroleum, biodiesel is better for the environment and has lower emissions compared to petroleum diesel.

In fact, according to the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), a 100 percent soybean-based biodiesel can reduce global warming carbon dioxide pollution by more than half relative to conventional petroleum-based diesel. The emissions benefits are even higher for biodiesel produced from canola oil. In the future, non-conventional sources like algae may have the potential to provide nearly 90 percent reductions in global warming carbon dioxide pollution.

Josh Tickell has long recognized the benefits of biodiesel. Tickell is an environmentalist whose film FUEL won the 2008 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award for Best Documentary. He is also the author of From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank—The Complete Guide to Using Vegetable Oil as an Alternative Fuel. “Biodiesel is energy positive, so no matter what you do, it contains more energy than it takes to make it,” he says. “It’s an efficient converter of solar energy into hydrocarbons so the promise is … that biodiesel will become the basis for a new generation of biofuels that can run in both gasoline and diesel engines.”

Better yet, the U.S. Department of Energy reports that some biofuels are less expensive per gallon than gasoline—slashing the average cost of gas by 20 to 35 cents per gallon. That’s good news to penny-pinching car owners: An average American family can save up to $300 per year by using pure ethanol.

Business is booming
Such eco-friendly and cost-conscious perks are opening the doors for entrepreneurs with an interest in alternative fuels. “The opportunity for entrepreneurs is a trillion-dollar-a-year industry in the U.S. alone,” says Tickell. “We’re talking about a world-wide multi-trillion-dollar-a-year industry, representing the largest single conversion of cash into jobs and infrastructure that we will see within a hundred years.”

Bob Schildgen agrees. The environmentalist behind Sierra magazine’s “Hey Mr. Green” environmental advice column, Schildgen says, “Everyone is looking for an alternative to fossil fuel. Anytime you have a new technology, you’re going to have people thinking about making money off of it.”

The promises—and pitfalls
But winning the race to bring biodiesel to the masses is tougher than many think. Because while “anything from hemp oil to soy beans to coconuts to rendering fats in meat processing” can be refined into biodiesel, finding just the right formula can be a difficult undertaking, according to Tickell.

“Biodiesel has been dismaying because it has large quality issues,” says Tickell. “There are so many different ways of making it, it has so many different producers, you never know what you’re going to get out of that pump.”

Another obstacle facing entrepreneurs is sourcing materials. After all, some critics argue that growing enough crops to meet the demand for soybean-based biodiesel may require diverting large amounts of soy crops from food use to biodiesel production and converting millions of acres of forests to agricultural land.

“If we took all the soybean acreage now and made it into biodiesel, we’d still get far less than we’d need—a fraction of the 160 billion gallons of fuel we consume,” says Schildgen. “Plus, the price of soybean oil is $3 or $4 a gallon, so it’s not economically feasible at this point.”

Even the much-ballyhooed approach of converting algae oil into biodiesel fuel has been hampered by high processing and water disposal costs. Says Schildgen, “Many times when a technology or a new idea is launched, investors put a lot of money into it, but it doesn’t necessarily pan out or fulfill its big promises.”

Even Tickell, who is driving the first algae-powered car across the U.S. for a nationwide tour promoting his film FUEL, admits that biodiesel fuel from algae “is still cutting-edge technology. It’s not as if you’re going to go up to the pump in two weeks and pump it. But it will be available for both gasoline and diesel cars within a 5–10 year period of time.”

Researchers have been hard at work making algae-based biodiesel easier on the pocketbook. Chemists at United Environment and Energy in New York have developed what they termed the first economical, eco-friendly process to convert algae oil into biodiesel fuel. Researchers say their process is at least 40 percent less expensive than that of others now being used.

The playing field
Innovations aside, there’s still stiff competition to consider. Earlier this summer, oil giant ExxonMobil announced that it would invest at least $600 million in algae-to-fuel research and development deals with biotech company Synthetic Genomics. Such deep pockets can make it tough for budding entrepreneurs to have any impact on the biodiesel industry.

But Tickell says heavily-funded research and development partnerships shouldn’t discourage entrepreneurs from vying for a slice of the renewable-energy pie. “As good as a large company’s research and development is, it has always been the entrepreneurs who have put forth all of the little solutions that lead to the big solutions,” he says. “There were other car manufacturers at the time that Henry Ford put the Model T on the road. He wasn’t educated; he had no engineering background; he wasn’t backed by the steel industry at that time. He was a man with a vision to put a car on the road.”

However, Schildgen says it’s important for entrepreneurs to continue looking outside the box for biodiesel opportunities. “If I were an entrepreneur, I’d put my eggs in the energy audit and conservation basket because I think that’s where you can make money the quickest,” he advises. “The real, most immediate, cheapest and lucrative solution is in conservation and efficiency. Not that we shouldn’t be looking at alternatives, too, but for the immediate future, we need to be tightening up our efficiencies to the point where we don’t need to be so concerned about developing [fuel] sources.”

In the meantime, the race continues to bring yesterday’s backyard biodiesel to the mainstream masses. “This is a wide open playing field,” says Tickell. “There will be leaders and there will be losers.” Let the games begin.

______________________________

The chemistry of biodiesel

Fueling change: A biodiesel documentary

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COMMENTS

Biodiesel is a buzzword-du-jour but can it really become a mainstream alternative to conventional petroleum-based motor fuel?
Leave your response in the comments below.

Flat Classroom Project Expands Its Reach

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:29:32 +0000

Vicki Davis came to national attention in 2005 when New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman included details about her online wiki teaching program in his bestselling book about technology and globalization, The World is Flat.

Such widespread attention for a young teacher just four years into her career could have beckoned complacency, but Davis has continued to try to find new ways to expand the reach of her “Flat Classroom,” in Camilla, Georgia.

“I've slowly added one to two major components a year to my courses so that everything could be done well,” says Davis. “It was my personal commitment to explore new tools three times a week for 15 minutes at a time that was the true transformational practice for me.”

This school year Davis will take eight students to the Flat Classroom Conference in Mumbai. There, the students will use Skype to connect the students in India with those back in her United States classrooms. Davis and Julie Lindsay, co-planner of the Flat Classroom Project, are also merging their ninth grade classrooms for the entire year on an Edublog, and Davis' junior and senior students will connect with graduate students at the University of Michigan for an Arab-Israeli Conflict/ Middle East simulation project.

“My ultimate goal is that every class will be ‘flattened’ this year and will link up and interact in meaningful ways with a variety of audiences from a variety of locations,” says Davis.

The important thing to remember about using technology in the classroom, cautions Davis, is that the lesson isn't about the technology, but what that technology lets you do.

 “It always starts with the curriculum and what you're trying to accomplish. Then you add in the interests of your class and their learning styles,” Davis said. “Effective teachers should have a bit of ‘teacherpreneurship’ in them so that they can select the appropriate tools for the curriculum and the unique students that they teach.”

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COMMENTS

How have you incorporated technology in the classroom to expand the learning experience?
Leave your response in the comments below.

Faculty Receive Research Grants from Walden

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:00:00 +0000

From predictors of prejudice to prenatal care barriers, see what Walden's Faculty Research Initiative Grant recipients will be investigating.

BSR (Business for Social Responsibility) 2009: Sustainable Consumption

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 03:12:36 +0000

The title of the last session of the BSR conference presented an oxymoron in the shape of a conundrum: sustainable consumption. Sustainable consumption is a phrase suitable for The George Orwell Dictionary of New Speak. Clearly there is an internal contradiction – there isn’t any way we are going to consume ourselves into a sustainable world. At this point the only sustainable consumption is declining consumption. Anything else is misleading – even when factoring in cradle to cradle recycling, reusing, repurposing. Here’s why: we are told that if we were to create a universal standard of living equal to how the average American lives, we would need at least seven Earths of resources to do so. But the world is on an inexorable march to demand just that. China alone builds 20 new cities a year and each city will hold at least one million people. India is following suit, as is Brazil, and every rise in the standard of living anywhere in the world propels more people into the more comfortable, but resource-demanding, middle class. And that is unsustainable.

But look at it this way; even if this growing middle class can be built on recycled, repurposed and reusable materials, the population of the world is expected to rise by 50% by mid-century. Under current conditions there just doesn’t seem to be any reasonable way to meet everyone’s basic needs from sanitation and potable water to clean, safe and economically viable habitats let alone limitless consumer wants. Thus, to talk about sustainable consumption just doesn’t make sense – no matter how you spin it.

But there is always hope – new technology, new processes, maybe even a new lifestyle choice that reduces materialism as a defining force in our lives will sweep over the world and reduce demand for “stuff.” But it’s not going to happen in the short term and it’s doubtful that market forces alone will provide the solution in any event. Talk of eco-friendly products, new design, conservation, and shifting demand to renewable materials will help, but the magnitude is just too big for these efforts to result in anything more than a short term palliative at best.

New thinking is necessary if any of these efforts, or others, will do more than make the business community look like it is just being less bad instead of being part of real solutions. The challenge is great, the current state of our resources is tenuous, the rate of change is spinning out of control, and it is time for systems thinking among business, government, international bodies, and NGOs, but it must result in bold new ideas, long term commitments to address the issues, and media support to educate and enlist viewers about the need for personal as well as institutional efforts. Ultimately, we’ll all need to take part in this effort.

Teaching Fourth Grade: A Day in the Life

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:56:23 +0000

By fourth grade, students are preparing for state writing tests, learning to differentiate between narrative and expository journaling, and expressing themselves through the written word.

It is the juncture just before middle school that determines a student’s ability to succeed as a scholar, which presents a slew of challenges for instructors.

“Dealing with students’ organization skills can be perilous because the students are expected to meet deadlines for journalism class at our school, complete projects at home, and write down what they owe in their agendas,” says fourth grade teacher Victoria Jasztal. “They are expected to know on their own whether they have work that needs to be turned in, and sometimes, it’s a great challenge.”

Jasztal is in her sixth year of teaching fourth grade at Moton Elementary School in Brooksville, Florida, and runs a personal Web site for educators. She is an advisor to students in grades three to five at Scholastic.com and has been a member of the School Advisory Council for the past two years.

In Jasztal’s Florida school district, third-graders are tested on their reading and math skills. When students enter fourth grade, they shift their focus to the verbal and literary sphere and are trained to become sophisticated, descriptive writers. Teachers often find assistance with these intricate lesson plans at the U.S. National Park Services resource.

One method Jasztal employs to further her students’ grasp on reading and writing, as well as cultural affairs, is instituting a pen pal program.

“The program has thrived for five years, and my students’ excitement grew when they were able to meet their pen pals on a field trip to St. Augustine,” Jasztal says. “The greatest thing though was knowing my students were able to ask thought-provoking questions to their tour guides at the lighthouse and on the trolley, because they were interested in what they’d studied in class.”

Jasztal organizes family tree projects to stimulate her students’ interest in genealogy and uses podcasts to deepen their understanding of science and social studies. She keeps a classroom library of 1,500 books on-hand and stages afternoon literary circles.

Katie Jensen, an elementary educator who is currently based at St. Timothy School in Los Angeles, California, believes that fourth grade is a major turning point in a student’s academic life. Jensen regularly shares her perspective on her award-wining Web site.

“Students at this age are just beginning to come into their own. Their personalities are developing and they are beginning to become more aware of people around them,” Jensen says. “In the beginning of the year, it tends to be more difficult for parents to release their control and allow their kids to make their own mistakes. But by the end of the year, students are ready for the responsibility of middle school and beyond.”

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COMMENTS

What can fourth grade teachers do to promote learning independence as their students inch toward middle school?
Leave your response in the comments below.

Alumnus Named President of NACCHO

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Ph.D. in Health Services graduate leads national health organization.

BSR (Business for Social Responsibility) 2009: Ethics in Business

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 03:46:09 +0000

Say you are GE Healthcare and sell ultrasound machines in India. Say that your machines are so good (they are easy to use, priced right, portable) that you capture 51% of the market. But then you get wind of how your machines are routinely being used in inappropriate ways that could land you in criminal court, as well as challenge your values at a fundamental level. In this particular case, GE learned that female feticide was rising and that its machines were being used to discover the gender of the fetus. Even though purchasers of the machines were trained and certified and were aware of the laws prohibiting its use in this way, the problem has grown. Under the law, all manufacturers were potentially culpable in the crime, though no charges have been filed as yet. What do you do? This is the kind of conundrum routinely faced as globalization marches on and, as companies cross borders, managers find themselves in a new and unfamiliar environment. Their role involves more than doing business as it has been done “at home” but includes dealing with vast cultural differences that challenge their underlying values and assumptions. In this case, how much shall you get involved? You scrupulously obey the law, you train your sales staff to insist that new users obey the law, you assure all technicians are certified, but what else can you be expected to do? What else must you do? Remember, this product is not only legal; it is a valuable technology that helps detect irregularities in a pregnancy, the kidneys, and the heart and is often used in physical therapy.

Not so easy; at least not if you want to stay in business and support a useful product performing a useful service in the society.

This is a real case and GE hasn’t determined how best to limit its product’s use in inappropriate and illegal ways. It has participated in a publicity campaign in support of the anti-feticide movement but feels that isn’t enough.

It seems natural to want to do something, yet there is also an argument that it isn’t the responsibility of GE or anyone else except the government and people of India. Yet, according to the International Humanist and Ethical Union, “Female fetuses are selectively aborted after pre-natal sex determination, thus avoiding the birth of girls. As a result of selective abortion, between 35 and 40 million girls and women are missing from the Indian population.” Add your comments below. Suggest possible actions GE can take that are appropriate to the situation and culturally appropriate.

This is the kind of case, the 1,000 attendees at the 2009 Business for Social Responsibility conference grappled with in an effort to understand the dynamics of responsible business and behaving appropriately while living and working abroad.

Teacher of the Year Deborah Fogg: Let's Do Lunch

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:40:25 +0000

Walden University is proud to have more than 20 state teachers of the year—including Deborah Fogg—currently working toward advanced degrees at its Richard W. Riley College of Education and Leadership.

Name: Deborah Fogg
Award: 2009 New Hampshire Teacher of the Year
Teaches: Language Arts
Teaching Since: 1998
Studying at Walden: Doctor of Education (Ed.D.)

Five days a week, Deborah Fogg, a seventh grade Language Arts teacher at the Lancaster School in Lancaster, New Hampshire, takes a long lunch.

Normally, teachers at her school eat in the first five minutes of the 25-minute lunch period so they can take care of other things during the remaining time. For the last eight years, however, Fogg has devoted the entirety of lunch period to her students. Her pupils, both past and present, flock each day to a sign up to be one of the four kids to eat with her.

“It lets me feel the pulse of what's going on with the kids,” says Fogg. “It's been a great way to build relationships with them. We talk about whatever they want to talk about—basketball, school, home life. Middle school kids are like that. They will pour their hearts out if you just give them the opportunity.”

In all aspects of her teaching, Fogg strives to take advantage of the unabashed enthusiasm that can start to disappear as kids slip into adolescence. “They're not too cool yet. They'll get up and act, and they'll write reams of stuff. They're little enough so they'll still be goofy for you,” she says. She also recognizes that her students are at a malleable age where a little patience and kindness can go a long way—especially at a moment when many kids and parents leave school and work only to go home and stare at a computer some more.

“It's not just Language Arts they're getting. I'm trying to teach them about being a good citizen and being a role model. And it's about building relationships,” she says. “As [kids], we sat at the dining room table and ate together, all of us. Nowadays, kids are isolated. They go into their bedrooms and don't interact. I think they're missing out. So I try to make my classroom like a living room. I want them to come in and feel like they're coming into their home. Once I build those relationships and establish that sense of community, my kids will do anything for me.”

Fogg, who is studying curriculum education at Walden University, always dreamed of teaching. Both her parents were teachers, and she grew up listening to her mother's “Three F” teaching mantra: Be Firm, Fair, and Friendly. Her father taught science and often came home with stories about the classes he had taught that day. “Dinner conversation was always about education and lessons plans,” she said.

In the 1970s, Fogg put that dream on hold, leaving college to help put her husband through law school. Over the next many years, she stayed home to raise their two children. Then, at age 42, and after testing the waters as a substitute teacher for a few years, Fogg returned to get her bachelor’s in education.

But school wasn’t where Fogg got the charisma that keeps students coming to her lunch table every day. That, she says, comes from years of watching her father teach.

“When I would walk down the hall with him, [his students] would run up to him and say, ‘Guess what I just did?' In his classroom, he was always smiling and laughing and joking,” Fogg recalls. “He had this demeanor in the classroom that made me feel like, 'When I grow up, I wanna be a teacher just like that.'”

Fogg's daughter must have had a similar feeling watching her mother: She, too, became a seventh grade Language Arts teacher recently. “She and I are always calling each other talking about an idea or something she tried or something I tried. I'm sure we drive everyone around us nuts.”

______________________________

COMMENTS

What other ways are there to make sure you connect with students on a personal level each and every day?
Leave your response in the comments below.

Finally, Some Motivation That Works

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:26:00 +0000

I think I have finally struck upon some valid motivation for one of my super-low kids!!

Let me explain the back-story. This kid is heavy-set, academically low, a talker, a player, a does-not-pay-attentioner, and generally all-around "slug." On the first math test, this kid got a 20-something. On the second math test, he got a 17. And these were not hard math tests, or unfair tests. He just was not trying at all, and it showed.

Conversely, a lot of my other kids HAVE been picking it up and trying harder. I am finally starting to get through to them that paying attention and doing their work the way we practice in class really CAN help them get the right answers and get better grades.

In my morning class, every single one of my kids who had scored low on the first test dramatically improved their grade on the second test, and the kids who had done well on the first test, also did well on the second.

In my afternoon class, which contains the "slug" (and several others), there wasn't quite the same dramatic results, but there were a few kids who improved and several others who passed both tests.

So I decided to make a really big deal about this. At the very beginning of school, I had gotten stacks of "Buy one adult meal, get a kid's meal free" cards from Denny's, Golden Corral, and Popeye's. So I took the time to fill them out with the kids' names, my name, our school name, etc along with the phrase "Math Improvement!" if they had improved their score, or "Math Skills!" if they had passed both tests.

I gave these out on Tuesday. Everybody in my first class got one, and they loved it. Somewhere around 60% of my second class got one, as there were still several kids with very poor grades.

On Wednesday, my "slug" started paying attention. He was raising his hand to answer questions. Correctly!! He brought the homework in on Thursday morning with work shown and completed. The kids took the 6-weeks cumulative assessment on Thursday, and this kid, while not having everything correct, had work shown for every question. He had labeled his coins, he had shown me his addition when he needed to, he had drawn place value charts.

When I graded the tests, I found that this "slug" -- who had made a 20-something on his first test, and a 17 on the second -- had scored an 80 on the 6-weeks test. An EIGHTY!!

Now maybe the planets aligned just right for him to finally get with the program. Maybe something I said about effort finally seeped through.

But I have a feeling it was the idea of free food that finally jump-started his engine.

And you know what, I'm ok with that.

Somebody will definitely be getting a Golden Corral coupon come Monday morning.

_____________________________

About John Pearson

I used to be a design engineer. Now I'm a 3rd grade math teacher. Conference calls have been replaced with parent conferences. Product testing has given way to standardized testing. Instead of business cards, I now pass out report cards. The only thing that hasn’t changed noticeably is the maturity level of the people surrounding me all day.

Read more from John at his blog, Learn Me Good.

Social Media Will Not Save You

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:48:47 +0000

I would be remiss if I did not share one of the best presentations (all done without powerpoint or a mic, BTW) of the year. On Thursday, I attended a local event co-sponsored by our own RAMA and PRSA (public relations and marketing, to be exact) at which Peter Shankman (of HARO) spoke to a room of about 200 local people. Local is a relative term - I saw at least one person from out of town.

Peter admits to being ADD -but, he was quick to note that his condition is much worse, "Me," he said, "I have ADOS - that's, Attention Deficit - ohlook, shiny thing!" Quite the joker. But, his fast-paced talk proved him right - he spoke non-stop for almost an hour, and shared some gems that will stay with me, forever. Gems I will share with you.

Here's what I took away that I think is so valuable - "Don't get behind a brand," he said. "Get behind a concept."

"Everything is personal," he said. "Everything you put online is part of your personal brand." That means, not only website content, blog posts, and white papers, but also tweets, Facebook updates, interviews, and anything anyone writes about you. We have become a society of "micro-journalists" - and we are held accountable only by understanding that everything we do is part of our personal brand. If you have "bad stuff" out there, create the good stuff to rise to the surface. Never be afraid to say you messed up. Apologize.

Donna DeClemente, a writer here on Lip-sticking, did an overview of Peter's 4 Basic Rulse of Common Sense and I invite you to hop over to her blog to read them.

In closing, he recommended, no, he admonished us to "make your customers addicts." Be unique, be relevant, create something that is not easily copied.

And, short is better. Write short, to the point, focused, relevant, engaging content. (the teachers/professors in the room just about cheered like schoolgirls) I'm going to have to work on that one. As you see, this is probably already too long.

So, are you ready? Are you ready to admit social media will not save you? Are you ready to differentiate? Are you ready to stop relying on social media and save yourself? I am.

______________________________

Yvonne DiVita is the author of Dick*less Marketing: Smart Marketing to Women Online, a book about getting those baby boomer icons Dick and Jane to buy at your website.

Following publication of her book, she founded Windsor Media Enterprises, LLC. all about Books, Blogs and Beyond. Yvonne maintains a blog at http://www.lipsticking.com supporting her work in the women’s market online.

Yvonne is the VP of Web Communications at the Rochester Chapter of the American Marketing Association. She is quoted throughout the net on marketing to women, blogging for business, and publishing.

Don't Mention ROI for Social Media

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:32:53 +0000

One is often told that getting the buy-in for a Social Media initiative requires some solid ROI calculation. One would have to weigh the pros and cons, how much it costs, try and evaluate the effort which is required, measure it and translate it into pounds, shillings and pence. And profit should also come into play, since it is deemed inappropriate for a new project to be set up without a clear definition of how much revenue it brings.

It is indeed a well known fact of Corporate culture that no IT project has ever been implemented without delivering great benefits… well, maybe not. And another well known fact is that, similarly, all systems which have led to losses in productivity should be banned… well, maybe not either.

Let’s take email as an example. We have already described at length the pitfalls in which many corporate email users are falling and how to preserve your productivity and lifestyle by better using email. Yet, email is also responsible for stress, and waste of time and money and effort. On average, Managers spend 40% of their time doing email according to the authors of the Hamster Revolution. I’m not mentioning examples of those who spend 100% of their time on this but I know a few who do. Yet, despite all these productivity issues, the requirement for email is not questioned, barring a few exceptions such as IBM’s 2.0 expert Luis Suarez who declared war on e-mail and almost succeeded (lucky him!).

So is ROI a valid way of showing how useful Social Media can be?

My take is the following:

1. One doesn’t engage in a Social Media project because it brings profit but because it enables one to do things in different ways and that these ways – listening, adapting, innovation – are beneficial to the brand, to your ecosystem, your image, and above all, the well-being of your clients, partners etc.

2. One doesn’t need to spend too much time on understanding how much Social Media will cost because the fact is that it doesn’t cost that much, and it may even cost too little (I have seen many a project valued because of the cash it sank, not the one it never generated),

3. It is very difficult to measure precisely what tangible profits can be achieved from using Social Media, although there has been examples with many SMBC members,

4. User generated content is also a major source of production of high quality content which can then be used in many instances such as client-facing meetings and lead generation. And God knows content is expensive. Any one video could cost from €1,000 to €15,000 but I have seen some instances in which a very talented consultant generated 8 videos worth at least €6,000 each for… nothing. Thousands of views later, he helped the company save approximately €50,000. In the past 12 months, my assessment of the money that was saved by fostering user generated content (UGC) in the past twelve months is in the regions of €200,000 if I include all the top quality articles which all our users have produced and the 1000+ comments which they have generated, some of which have even helped us improve dramatically some of our services,
5. Eventually, my prime advice to those who’d like to spread the word about how Social Media can help a brand engage in passionate discussions would be to suggest to them that they speak to their boss about it and ask him/her to write things for the company blog. I did this and guess what: I never had the ROI question anymore because he understood immediately that he too could spread the word across about his own pet subject (Green IT) and that was – as he himself admitted – invaluable.

Maybe the final reason for not falling into the ROI trap is that ROI is often used by execs to get rid of subjects they don’t like even though there may be no other rational reasons for them to do so.

Original Post: http://visionarymarketing.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/selling-corporate-blogging-to-your-boss-dont-mention-roi/

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Serial intrapreneur Yann Gourvennec has dealt with Marketing and innovation for 20 years. He created the Visionary Marketing.com website in 1996, which he has maintained and animated ever since. Yann has a 20+ year international experience in the fields of marketing, business development, Internet and e-business, strategy, product/services marketing as well as team management (direct and cross-organisational) in complex international environments, especially in the UK, Continental Europe and the middle-East. His contact details and resume can be found at http://visionarymarketing.com/engcv.html.

Investing in Knowledge

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:22:01 +0000

In a 21st century world where jobs can be shipped wherever there's an internet connection; where a child born in Dallas is competing with children in Delhi; where your best job qualification is not what you do, but what you know – education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity and success; it is a prerequisite. That is why workers without a four-year degree have borne the brunt of recent layoffs... And that is why, of the thirty fastest growing occupations in America, half require a Bachelor's degree or more. By 2016, four out of every ten new jobs will require at least some advanced education or training.

A call to action delivered by President Obama to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce demands the support of furthering the education of our workforce. You can no longer count on the value of your own degree and education level to prove the worth of your business – your business is only as good as the education level of your workforce as a whole. Managers who want to take their organizations to the next level need to recognize the importance of their firm’s intellectual assets - the importance of top talent - and be sure to provide mechanisms to enhance human capital so that they can innovate and develop products and services that create value.

Now, more than ever, it is evident that knowledge is the primary means of wealth generation in today’s economy. In fact, today, more than 50% of the gross domestic product in developed economies is knowledge-based). That is, the market value of goods and services is heavily dependent on knowledge put to good use. In the U.S. intellectual and information processes create over 76% of the value in service industries.

It is in this context that employee development becomes not only a function housed in Human Resources, it becomes a strategic decision resulting in an added value to an organization. A study in the late 1970s compared the market value with the book value of more than 3,000 companies in the U.S. over 20 years. The study demonstrated that the book value and market value gap was greater for knowledge-driven organizations than for firms which based their value on assets, meaning that organizations where knowledge and management of knowledge workers is the asset are considered more valuable in the market than those who concentrate their assets in tangibles (Roberts and Dowling, 2002).

If organizations are aiming for high growth as well as high quality, training plays a big part in this endeavor. Measuring the ROI of training is difficult, but Motorola, for example, has calculated that for every dollar invested in training there are $30.00 in returns. But educational development in the form of training programs or tuition assistance for higher degree programs need to be delivered at every level, not exclusively to top leadership. In order to become competitive players in the marketplace with improved overall performance, organizations need to have the smartest, most qualified people in each layer of the business.

When budgets are tight, it’s hard to talk about investing in employee development programming, but the numbers show it pays to invest in the talent you already have. It is well known that in certain industries (e.g. high tech) knowledge becomes obsolete even after a year. And, since recruiting new talent every year would be a costly and inefficient way to keep up with the demands of a constantly changing market environment, it is more necessary than ever to invest in developing our workforce.

The hesitation to encourage employees to take on a commitment such as a degree program that will draw attention away from keeping up with their jobs is completely understandable. But nowadays, universities are stepping up to their end of the deal to make programs accessible to working adults, offering evening, weekend or online programs. Online programs are particularly attractive to more seasoned working adults to honor family commitments and prefer the pay-as-you-go approach while maintaining full-time work rather than taking time off work to pursue a degree and seeking loans.

The beauty of these programs is that you set the tone and pace. You can pay registration and tuition for your employees from the get-go, or you can wait to see what kind of grades your employees manage to get and pay based on their academic success. Often, higher education institutions will offer specialized discounts to employers that send several employees into their degree programs, so you may think of limiting the options for which school or program you’ll support.

Another very important element of employee development is mentoring programs. One of the barriers individuals cite to enroll in higher learning institutions has been the lack of role models within their communities and families. Through mentoring not only can your employees gain insight into business tactics and how to comport themselves in a business setting, but they can develop self-confidence and competency and set higher standards for themselves in their education and career paths.

To those of you bottom-line thinkers, employee development has been proven to have a positive impact on your numbers. For those of you who are believers in the American dream, and as entrepreneurs I have to believe you are, investing in the knowledge of your workforce will help to expose your team to the opportunities for success. And individual success can only lead to a better economy as a whole.

Sources:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-of-the-President-to-the-United-States-Hispanic-Chamber-of-Commerce/anic Chamber of Commerce, March 10, 2009.
The New Titans: A survey of the world economy.(2006) The Economist, September 16, 3-8.

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Dr. Ivonne Chirino-Klevans joined Walden University in 2005 as a professor of organizational psychology and currently serves as Program Director for the Center for International Programs. The International Management Certificate is a post-bachelor business certificate designed to give business professionals in Latin America international business acumen and English language skills. Her extensive experience includes years of working with Fortune 500 companies in designing training and development programs and serving as Program Director for Duke Corporate Education.

Dr. Chirino-Klevans received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Universidad Iberoamericana, and also holds an MBA from Universidad de las Americas, and a Masters in Psychology from Georgia College and State University. Earlier in her career, she also served as the psychologist for the Mexican national rowing team, and contributed to the team winning a silver medal at the 1991 Pan Am Games. She herself is a Pan American games medalist in gymnastics.

BSR (Business for Social Responsibility) 2009

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 05:53:18 +0000

I'm at the BSR 2009 conference and expo in San Francisco. It is a picture perfect day "by the bay" and in front of the Hyatt Regency hotel the cable car fills with passengers and that iconic clang reminds me that I love this city I once called home.

But I'm feeling weird. There are 250 corporate members in BSR. Most are among the Fortune 500 largest corporations in the world and about 1,000 delegates have come here today to focus solely on doing the right thing. Maybe that's why it feels so odd. I don't usually think of corporations as doing the right thing unless they are forced to, or because they'll make an inordinate amount of money in doing so, but today they have come to network with one another about the kinds of things they are doing around the world to address climate change, human rights abuses, supply chain irregularities, and the need to develop sustainable business practices.

So, on the one hand I am delighted they each have spent at least the $1500 early bird registration fee per participant and then at least $169 room fee per night plus plus plus to send each freshly scrubbed professional to gently, very respectively, and even deferentially discuss ways of dealing with the worsening crisis in the environment and the many stresses and strains on the economy - especially as it impacts people around the world – that were caused by the very companies that sent them here to sort it all out.

On the other hand it just feels like a stunt.

I know I can't have it both ways. I want to believe they are sincere in doing the right thing. Monsanto is here touting their genetically modified organisms (seeds used to produce what are sometimes referred to as Frankenfoods) to build upon the green revolution that has added new crop cycles to the food supplies in much of the world. How can you argue with that? But it is also those crops that overburden farmers already suffering with depressed commodity process while the middlemen and food processors make tidy profits. Some of these seeds don't propagate, thus requiring ongoing purchases from Monsanto. I know there’s nothing wrong with doing business if it raises the income of the farmer, but the costs for some GMOs also asks Mother Nature to play roulette with a new entity in the biosphere. That's not all it's about either; it's also the arrogance of a narrowly applied technology being touted as THE answer and governments being strong-armed by their lobbyists to allow the use of the GMOs before we really know what the full spectrum of risks is. Something is better than nothing, though, right? Even GMOs have to be an improvement over losing half a crop to bugs and crop disease; right? And then I see why there is resistance even when the "solution" seems so darn obvious - like DDT, Thalidomide PCBs, nicotine. We've been there so many times before.

It's complicated, of course. And uncomfortable. That’s the kind of conference this is, and why it is important for me to be here to grapple with these paradoxes and dilemmas.
This is what happens at these kinds of conferences, but sometimes it's a little like listening to the fox talk about fixing the hen house.

This is just day one. Tomorrow I'll share some more tales from the frontier of how the world's biggest corporations try to moderate some of the nastier effects of their own impact on the planet.

Darwinopterous and Mosaic, Modular Evolution

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:05:34 +0000

It's yet another transitional fossil! Are you tired of them yet?

Darwinopterus modularis is a very pretty fossil of a Jurassic pterosaur, which also reveals some interesting modes of evolution; modes that I daresay are indicative of significant processes in development, although this work is not a developmental study (I wish…having some pterosaur embryos would be exciting). Here it is, one gorgeous animal.

Holotype ZMNH M8782 (a,b,e) and referred specimen YH-2000 ( f ) of D. modularis gen. et sp. nov.: (a) cranium and mandibles in the right lateral view, cervicals 1-4 in the dorsal view, scale bar 5cm; (b) details of the dentition in the anterior tip of the rostrum, scale bar 2cm; (c) restoration of the skull, scale bar 5cm; (d) restoration of the right pes in the anterior view, scale bar 2 cm; (e) details of the seventh to ninth caudal vertebrae and bony rods that enclose them, scale bar 0.5 cm; ( f ) complete skeleton seen in the ventral aspect, except for skull which is in the right lateral view, scale bar 5 cm. Abbreviations: a, articular; cr, cranial crest; d, dentary; f, frontal; j, jugal; l, lacrimal; ldt, lateral distal tarsal; m, maxilla; mdt, medial distal tarsal; met, metatarsal; n, nasal; naof, nasoantorbital fenestra; p, parietal; pd, pedal digit; pf, prefrontal; pm, premaxilla; po, postorbital; q, quadrate; qj, quadratojugal; sq, squamosal; ti, tibia.

One important general fact you need to understand to grasp the significance of this specimen: Mesozoic flying reptiles are not all alike! There are two broad groups that can be distinguished by some consistent morphological characters.

The pterosaurs are the older of the two groups, appearing in the late Triassic. They tend to have relatively short skulls with several distinct openings, long cervical (neck) ribs, a short metacarpus (like the palm or sole of the foot), a long tail (with some exceptions), and an expanded flight membrane suspended between the hind limbs, called the cruropatagium. They tend to be small to medium-sized.

The pterodactyls are a more derived group that appear in the late Jurassic. Their skulls are long and low, and have a single large opening in front of the eyes, instead of two. Those neck ribs are gone or reduced, they have a long metacarpus and short tails, and they've greatly reduced the cruropatagium. Some of the pterodactyls grew to a huge size.

Darwinopterus is in there, too—it's the small purple box numbered "7". You can see from this diagram that it is a pterosaur in a very interesting position, just off the branch that gave rise to the pterodactyls. How it got there is interesting, too: it's basically a pterosaur body with the head of a pterodactyl. Literally. The authors of this work carried out multiple phylogenetic analyses, and if they left the head out of the data, the computer would spit out the conclusion that this was a pterosaur; if they left the body out and just analyzed the skull, the computer would declare it a pterodactyl.

What does this tell us about evolution in general? That it can be modular. The transitional form between two species isn't necessarily a simple intermediate between the two in all characters, but may be a mosaic: the anatomy may be a mix of pieces that resemble one species more than the other. In this case, what happened in the evolution of the pterodactyls was that first a pterodactyl-like skull evolved in a pterosaur lineage, and that was successful; later, the proto-pterodactyls added the post-cranial specializations. Not everything happened all at once, but stepwise.

This should be a familiar concept. In pterodactyls, skulls evolved a specialized morphology first, and the body was shaped by evolutionary processes later. We can see a similar principle in operation in the hominid lineage, too, but switched around. We evolved bipedalism first, in species like Ardipithecus and Australopithecus, and the specializations of our skull (to contain that big brain of which we are so proud) came along later.

As I mentioned at the beginning, this is an example of development and evolution in congruence. We do find modularity in developmental process — we have genetic circuits that are expressed in tissue- and region-specific ways in development. We can talk about patterns of gene expression that follow independent programs to build regions of the body, under the control of regional patterning genes like the Hox complex. In that sense, what we see in Darwinopterus is completely unsurprising.

What is interesting, though, is that these modules, which we're used to seeing within the finer-grained process of development, also retain enough coherence and autonomy to be visible at the level of macroevolutionary change. It caters to my biases that we shouldn't just pretend that all the details of development are plastic enough to be averaged out, or that the underlying ontogenetic processes will be overwhelmed by the exigencies of environmental factors, like selection. Development matters — it shapes the direction evolution can take.

Lü J, Unwin DM, Jin X, Liu Y, Ji Q (2009) Evidence for modular evolution in a long-tailed pterosaur with a pterodactyloid skull. Proc. R. Soc. B published online 14 October 2009 doi: 10.1098/rspb.2009.1603

I should have mentioned that Darren Naish has a very thorough write-up on Darwinopterus!

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PZ Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris. Read much more from him at his blog, Pharyngula.

"Pharyngula" is a term coined by William Ballard to describe a particular stage in the development of the vertebrate embryo. At the pharyngula stage, the vertebrate embryo:

• is at the phylotypic stage, an evolutionarily conserved period when vertebrate embryos of all species are most similar to one another.
• has assembled at least the rudiments of most of the major organ systems.
• is expressing the well-known series of Hox genes, regulatory genes responsible for patterning the embryo.
• has a repeated series of pharyngeal arches. These are characteristic chordate tissues that form a 'basket' of cartilage and associated tissues in the throat; they contribute to jaws and facial structures, ear bones, gill arches, etc.

It's an interesting and important period of embryonic development, and happens to be the period my students and I spend a lot of time studying.

If you're wondering how to pronounce it, try "fa-RING-you-la" or "fa-RINJ-you-la."

24 State Teachers of the Year Enroll at Walden University

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Top educators come to Walden from all across the country.

The Importance of Self Regulation Skills

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:41:41 +0000

I was touring a mother through our facility the other day when she posed the dreaded question, “what do you teach in the 3-4 year old program?” I paused for a moment, looked her straight in the eye and decided to take a chance. “We teach them how: to get along, get their needs met, follow directions, wait their turn and respect the rights of others.” I let the words fall and rest for awhile. She said, “Good; my son is in a day care setting which is no longer good enough”.

Of course we expose the children to letters, shapes and numbers and the various academic skills most of us are familiar with, but we teach the socialization skills needed to become a good citizen.

To most lay people they will consider this activity “play”, but in a quality preschool it is “work”. The work of free play falls under the heading of executive function. Executive function is a neuroscience term, which refers to the ability to think clearly, to order your thoughts, to process information in a coherent manner, remember relevant details, to avoid distractions and focus on the task at hand.

Children enter the preschool with varying abilities to negotiate the social setting. Some children have a wonderful vocabulary and can easily demand attention. Others are unsure of the terrain and will sit quietly along the side. It is through extended “Dramatic Play” that they will all begin to hone their socialization skills. While at play for lengthy periods of time, the children will have the opportunity to extend their attention span, try on new roles and imitate successful behaviors.

The role of the teacher becomes one of a facilitator; they help the children expand their creative play through meaningful conversations. “Dramatic Play” provides the children with opportunities to develop their self regulating skills (an executive function). These skills help the children gain control of their emotions and cognitive impulses. Children who have ample opportunity to practice their self regulating skills are better adjusted to the world they live in. There is a direct correlation between good regulation skills and short and long term success academically and socially.

In a time when more and more children are being expelled from preschools due to poor self regulation, the need for more opportunities to practice these skills is paramount. With the advent of the state funded programs (VPK et al) comes the need for accountability. Bureaucrats find comfort in standardized tests and insist that our children perform well on them; but how do you test social competence? Because frankly, if your child cannot sit still for an appropriate period of time and socialize in an appropriate manner, do you really think their Kindergarten teacher is going to care if they can read? Too many preschools are falling prey to pushing down academics which places inappropriate pressure on children.

Free Play relieves stress and builds social skills, but it also has been found to make children smarter. Play in the hands of a good teacher is the best case scenario. Someone who can help your child negotiate the ins and outs of socializing while in a structured setting, a place where the whole child will be educated, is the key.

Of course we want our children to learn to read, but our ultimate goal is to have well rounded, socially adept, educated children. “The lessons learned in childhood are engraved on our life.”

So once again, I am happy to tell you I played at work today!

Peace & Light,

Grace

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Grace Geller is responsible for the development, administration, and implementation of early, primary and secondary programs As former Director of Operations, for Charter Schools USA, she played a pivotal role in the development of Charter Schools USA's first schools and was involved in the daily supervision of facilities, procurement, and school operations.

Grace has over 25 years of experience in educational administration. Her expertise in education includes curriculum development and program design. She has facilitated Personal Education Plans, Portfolio Assessment procedures and has developed standards enabling teachers to perform with a quantifiable increase in student standardized test scores of 1-2 years for both mainstream and special needs students. Ms. Geller has been the Early Childhood Director of a nationally recognized pre-school, which was featured in N.A.E.Y.C's film, "What To Look For In Quality Child Care". After achieving success as an Early Childhood Director, Ms. Geller served as Principal of The Vista School, an accredited private institution. As Principal, she designed and implemented an elementary and middle school that received national attention for its innovative programming and client satisfaction.

She holds a Masters Degree in Early Childhood Education, and an Advanced Level Director's Credential. Ms. Geller has been a validator for NAEYC and A.I.S.F. as well as a DCF trainer for Nova Southeastern University. She has authored articles on childcare, parenting and curriculum featured in: “Our City Weston”, “City Magazine”, “Today’s Parent” and “Broward Family”.

Read more from Grace Geller on her blog, Preschooltimes.net

Businesses Harnessing the Power of Complex Events Processing

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:24:41 +0000

A new approach to analyzing large volumes of data, something called stream processing, or complex-events processing (CEP), is changing how companies keep up with the world and react to it. The technology’s aim is to sift through large, fast-changing streams of data as quickly as possible and identify patterns and correlations in the data that signify meaningful events or opportunities to take profitable action.

In traditional database setups, which form the basis for virtually all enterprise software applications today, data first gets collected, then organized in a highly structured way, and then cross-indexed for rapid searching, and only after all that—hours or even days after its creation—is the data finally ready for any kind of analysis.

CEP systems, in contrast, are designed to analyze floods of data virtually at the moment each item is generated, with no pre-processing. That calls for highly specialized software and, in the most extreme cases, specially engineered hardware, too.

How fast is fast? Try several hundred thousand messages processed in one second using a standard, single-core microprocessor. But more processors helps: IBM recently unveiled a CEP product called System S that, running a 1,424-core computer, analyzes five million messages per second for customer TD Securities.

How it works
Potential applications for CEP run the gamut, from algorithmic trading in fast-paced financial markets to interpreting torrents of live battlefield data, from managing far-flung supply chains to enabling massive multiplayer Internet games to securing IT systems and networks against intruders. Curt Monash, principal at Monash Research, Acton, Massachusetts, identifies two broad classes of CEP apps: One, as used in financial trading, centers on low-latency analysis of data—identifying significant data and events near-instantly—while the other focuses on filtering data to find the most significant records, which may get stored for analysis at a later time.

In technical terms, CEP achieves its high speed mainly by analyzing incoming data records entirely in main memory, a.k.a. RAM, with no need to call on comparatively slow hard disk drives. Traditional database systems, in contrast, store data on the hard disk, organized as rows and columns, and swap selected chunks in and out of high-speed memory as needed. For more speed, extra processors can be ganged together to work in parallel. And for the most extreme applications, such as analyzing data packets on a network to detect hacker activity, specialized silicon may be required—network processors designed solely for that task.

Speed, in short, is of the essence. In fact, by jacking up the speed of data analysis, CEP brings companies a big step closer to what business theorists have described as the “real-time enterprise.” Ideally, the enterprise should monitor changing business conditions moment by moment and, in response, reorient its internal operations and change its business processes on a proverbial dime. Until recently, business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing techniques, building on traditional database management, have helped managers and executives to understand and delve into a company’s past performance, but with CEP, BI tools would illuminate current performance and alert executives to situations that need immediate attention and action.

Business intelligence 2.0
Such tools might even fuse data from a variety of independent sources and, in effect, create entirely new information and unanticipated insights. For example, data indicating a particular combination of bad weather and unexpectedly low inventories in a certain geographic region might trigger a call for special logistics to move extra quantities of a much-in-demand product to store shelves in time to support an important retail promotion already underway.

CEP-based BI may have especially big implications for Web-based companies, such as Google, Yahoo, and Amazon. They are able to collect mind-boggling quantities of information about their visitors’ behavior—every mouse-click on every Web page. And these firms try their best to keep up. Last year, Yahoo disclosed that it had assembled a 2-petabyte (or 200,000-gigabyte) data warehouse to analyze the activities of the 500 million visitors it serves each month. The Yahoo database processes 24 billion events a day, a huge stream of data. But with CEP technology, these events might be analyzed and acted on almost as they happen—selecting just the right content and advertising for each and every person using the site, say.

As usually happens with promising new software technologies, a handful of startup companies have been funded by venture capitalists to pursue the CEP opportunity, even as established database companies—including IBM, Oracle, Sybase, Tibco, and Microsoft—move into the arena. Among the startups are Streambase (founded by relational database pioneer Michael Stonebraker), Truviso (originally launched as Amalgamated Insight), and EsperTech. Though nobody expects CEP to rival the traditional database market in terms of size or importance, it is, for now, one of the fastest-growing and most exciting segments of the overall data management field.

More is better
One obvious reason for all the excitement is the near-exponential growth in the amount of data that’s becoming available in seemingly every sector of the economy. Thanks to advances in microelectronics, the cost of physical sensors has plummeted, making it more viable than ever to measure temperatures, pressures, and speeds on seemingly every kind of machine and vehicle. BMW, for instance, builds dozens of such sensors into its cars, along with banks of microprocessors to analyze feedback from them. One future scenario: A car might warn its driver of a dangerous driving condition, such as hydroplaning on a rainy highway, or it might alert the car’s dealer to schedule a service visit to check on what appears to be a faulty part.

What’s more, radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags are now low enough in cost to help track the movement of goods through complex supply chains—all the way from a factory in China to a distribution center in Illinois to a specific shelf in a Wal-Mart store. But with potentially millions of tagged pallets and boxes in the world, each one registering its location as it passes through a doorway or leaves a truck, traditional IT systems may easily be overwhelmed with data. That has made the RFID industry particularly interested in CEP, and companies such as SAP and Oracle are paying particular attention to the opportunity.

Another highly interested party, albeit mum on such matters, is the intelligence establishment. The National Security Agency could use some form of CEP to filter the mountains of data it gleans from phone taps and eavesdropping on global flows of email. The CIA could use the technology to find tell-tale correlations between items in the floods of data it collects from field agents, newswires, and spy satellites.

Trucking companies, as analyst Monash points out, are interested in the technology for monitoring the movement of their vehicles—each one equipped with GPS and a radio link back to HQ. “It could provide an early-warning system, discovering if a truck were off-course, lost, or involved in an accident.”

As with traditional database management, making pattern-recognition engines reasonably easy to set up and easy to modify over time is one of the major technical problems that CEP engineers have had to solve. It’s one thing to build a program that can search for a specified set of patterns at high speed. It’s quite another to produce a generalized solution whose search patterns can be altered on the fly and not lose any speed. These are difficult technical challenges that have intrigued academic researchers for many years, and it is from their projects that most of today’s CEP companies originate: Telegraph at University of California, Berkeley, for example, and The Aurora Project at Brown University.

Still, as technical problems get solved, CEP will likely weave its way into everyday life, perhaps even finding patterns in people’s daily activities and travels, second by second. After all, what is a cell phone but a potential sensor and source of rich data just waiting to be correlated with billions of others?

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Practical complex events processing

Saving lives with complex events processing

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COMMENTS

How will instant analysis of data change enterprise management strategies and consumers’ experience of the Web?
Leave your response in the comments below.

In the News

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Walden community members are making news.

Call for Proposals: Public Administration Theory Network

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Share your research.

The War for Your Company's Reputation

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:21:16 +0000

I was in Boston recently caring for my sister, who underwent surgery at one of the city’s major medical institutions.

The team of doctors and nurses at the surgical center was knowledgeable, extremely caring, and worked at a very impressive level of efficiency. My sister went into surgery fully informed on what to expect and experienced minimal anxiety. Recovery room care was also world-class.

Once she was transferred to the overnight wing of the hospital, however, the story changed. The overnight nursing staff was surly to patients and family, didn’t answer calls for help, and didn’t get my sister at least two medications that had been ordered hours earlier. They also neglected to administer an important IV solution to my sister’s hospital roommate, who now has to spend an extra night in the hospital because of it. As I type this, the poor woman is also lying in soiled sheets that were ordered changed at least four hours ago.

It’s enlightening to observe how one department of a hospital can be an enviable model of healthcare while another is a petri dish of potential lawsuits.

When it comes to your business, are all departments achieving the same high level of performance?

It’s easy – and comfortable – to focus on sales if they’re hitting the goal of serving the customer in a meaningful way. But if shipping, returns, and customer service don’t really give a rip – and show that they don’t – that is what the customer will remember and talk about with her family and friends.

Maybe it’s time to take a sweeping look at your company’s bedside manner. If quality control has turned into a tug-of-war between departments, it’s definitely affecting your reputation and your bottom line.

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Michele Miller is a classical musician by training, holding degrees in education and business administration. She has worked for companies as small as Diapers Unlimited delivery service (where she discovered the true meaning of customer service and loyalty) and as large as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and Sirius Satellite Radio. Michele is the author of "The Natural Advantages of Women" (Wizard Academy Press), the audiobook that has been hailed for its concepts, principles, and new scientific information that explains how the female brain is "hardwired" for personal greatness." Her blog on marketing to women, WonderBranding, has won awards from Marketing Sherpa and Forbes.com, and was featured in Seth Godin's ebook, "Bull Marketing." Michele is also the marketing columnist for Inc.com.

Read more from Michele at her blog, Wonderbranding.

The Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:02:54 +0000

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald perfectly describes the quality of thinking possessed by an Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community. They are comfortable with a duality, an "ambidextrous" approach to their focus and their function.

Roger Martin, dean of Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and author of the book The Opposable Mind: Winning Through Integrative Thinking, calls the embracing of this duality as having an, “opposable mind.”

“…we were born with an opposable mind we can use to hold two conflicting ideas in constructive tension. We can use that tension to think our way through to a new and superior idea.”

“Using our opposable minds to move past unappetizing alternatives, we can find solutions that once appeared beyond the reach or our imagination.”

In other words, Professional Learning Communities can think with ambidexterity.

Ambidextrous Thinking
Ambidextrous thinking is similar to what Roger Martin calls Integrative thinking, that is, “…the capacity to hold two diametrically opposing ideas in their heads. And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they’re able to produce a synthesis that is superior to either opposing idea.”

Martin defines integrative thinking as: "The ability to face constructively the tension of opposing ideas and, instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generate a creative resolution of the tension in form of a new idea that contains elements of the opposing ideas but is superior to each."

Martin offers 4 qualities of the integrative thinker.

1. "The first difference between integrative thinkers and conventional thinkers is that integrative thinkers take a broader view of what is salient.”

“More salient features make for a messier problem. But integrative thinkers don’t mind the mess. In fact, they welcome it, because the mess assures them that they haven’t edited out features necessary to the contemplation of the problem as a whole. They welcome complexity. And they feel confident that they will not get lost along the way but emerge on the other side of the problem with a clear solution.”

Ambidextrous Professional Learning Communities welcome complexity, they welcome the mess of student needs, strategies, student data, research, mandates, rules, restrictions, and barriers. Ambidextrous PLCs are comfortable with the mess and confident in their ability to arrive at a solution that will benefit students and teachers.

2. "Second, integrative thinkers don’t flinch from considering multidirectional and nonlinear causal relationships. Simple, unidirectional relationships are easier to hold in the mind, but they don’t generate more satisfactory resolutions."

The Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community understands that there are many factors, including nonlinear causal relationships that might account for increases or decreases in student achievement. Easy and quick conclusions are not necessarily the correct conclusions. There are many factor involved in learning, and the ambidextrous PLC considers more of them in their work.

3. "The third difference between integrative and conventional thinkers is in the architecture of their decisions. Integrative thinkers don’t break a problem into independent pieces and work on each piece separately. They keep the entire problem firmly in mind while working on its individual parts."

Ambidextrous Professional Learning Communities can work on keep the entire issue of student learning and achievement in their minds while they plan, develop, improve, and manage individual parts. They do not fall into the problem of “elementitis”, breaking things down into smaller disconnected elements and losing context. They keep all the elements connected and in context of the overall needs of students and teachers.

4. "Fourth and finally, the integrative thinker will always search for creative resolution of tensions, rather than accept unpleasant tradeoffs. The behavior associated with such a search—delays, sending teams back to examine things more deeply, generating new options at the eleventh hour—can appear irresolute from the outside, but the results are choices that could only have been generated by an integrative thinker who won’t settle for trade-offs and conventional options."

Ambidextrous Professional Learning Communities do not accept the traditional method of accepting trade-offs. They believe that all students can learn, regardless of the student, the situation, and resources. They believe they can put students first and put teachers first. The traditional trade-offs of breadth vs. depth, or taking your time vs. staying on pace, can be avoided through creative and innovative thinking. They look for non-conventional options to accomplish their work.

It is the ability to embrace this duality in their thinking that builds an Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community. To hold to opposing ideas in their minds and reach a creative solution creates an ambidextrous PLC, making them more flexible, innovative, and effective. It’s ability, but maybe more importantly, it’s attitude.

In the coming days I will discuss how the Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community's thinking can have...

Internal and External Focus

Bias Towards Thinking and Bias Toward Action

Put Teachers First and Put Students First

Focus on Teaching and Focus on Learning

Focus on All Students and Focus on Individual Students

Kaizen and Tenakaizen

High Levels of Teamwork and High Levels of Personal Accountability

We Have the Answers and They Have the Answers

Data Driven and Skeptical of Data

Predictable and Change is Normal

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About Robert Jacobs

By day, I am currently a Program Specialist at Valencia Park Elementary School. I am responsible for ensuring all aspects of the QEIA grant and HPSGP grant are met in terms of programs and services to students, aligned expenditures, activities, and staff development.

I love being a catalyst. Helping groups or individuals get ideas off the ground and implemented and I am usually volunteering with a number of groups or on projects at any given time.

In my free time, I think about the intersection and blending of science, technology, media, marketing, economics, creative thinking, innovative thinking, collaboration, problems solving and the future, with teaching and our education system. I share my thoughts on my blog Education Innovation. Please join in the conversation.

In Memoriam: D.B.A. Student

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:00:00 +0000

The Walden University community mourns the loss of D.B.A. student David G. Cartwright Jr.

Walden Introduces B.S. in Information Technology Program

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:00:00 +0000

New offering helps students develop the skills employers seek.

The Growing Backlash Against Outsourcing

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:26:10 +0000

In a climate of economic entropy, many corporate pundits view outsourcing and globalization as necessary evils. They are seen as the alternative strategies that can rescue the bottom line by cutting operating costs, yet at the same time, they often coldly ax once-stable American jobs.

How are corporate honchos grappling with this catch-22? With caution, says Atul Vashishta, the CEO of neoIT, a leading global outsourcing advisory and management consultancy, based in San Ramon, California.

“The reason businesses are outsourcing now is because they’re competing with other companies that have a lower cost base elsewhere,” says Vashishta, who co-authored The Offshore Nation: Strategies for Success in Global Outsourcing and Offshoring (McGraw-Hill, 2006). “When the economy is not growing, the human impact is tremendous. People are being laid off, and there is significantly lowered compensation for them.”

Within the past three years, offshore outsourcing has become a catalyst for the productivity and growth of some struggling corporations, Vashishta says. CEOs are hiring service and technical professionals to take advantage of the low wages paid in some developing nations, while simultaneously slashing jobs on the home front. Recent college graduates from China, India, and the Philippines are being recruited to do the twice the amount of work as American employees, for about one-fifth the pay.

“The downturn has put higher pressure on lowering costs, and companies are desperately outsourcing because their volume is falling,” Vashishta says. “On the flipside, in an economic environment like this, these decisions become more difficult for companies, because workers that are laid off have a much harder time finding something else afterwards.”

Globalization and Greed at a Glance
In January, BDO Seidman, one of the nation’s most renowned consulting and accounting organizations, conducted its annual “Technology Outlook Survey: Economic Climate Affects International Growth Plans.” The aim: to evaluate America’s current demand for outsourcing and to gain insight into how intelligently businesses are handling it.

Researchers tapped 100 chief financial officers (CFOs) at technology companies throughout the U.S. and found that nearly two-thirds of them were outsourcing services or manufacturing. The companies in the random sample all had revenues of up to $30 billion, according to Doug Sirotta, the head of BDO Seidman’s West Region tax practice and an advisor to companies in the technology and manufacturing sectors.

One-third of survey respondents said their primary concern about international growth was the shaky business and political atmosphere. Because of this collective hesitancy to globalize, international outsourcing could be on the downswing this year as CFOs push for more in-country options, Sirotta says.

Less than half of the CFOs in the survey claimed they held operations outside U.S. boundaries, compared to nearly double that amount the previous year. Twenty-two percent said they were inclined to seek outsourcing avenues inside American territory, as opposed to combing China and India for workers.

“We are seeing global factors that are causing U.S. technology companies to pull back from traditional outsourcing locations,” Sirotta says. “These range from terrorist attacks in India to shipping cost issues in China.”

Seeking an in-country approach
Of late, the most common non-U.S. locations for outsourcing are India (50 percent); Southeast Asia, including the Philippines (31 percent, down from 50 percent in 2008); China (19 percent, down from 46 percent in 2008); and Western Europe (19 percent), the BDO Seidman report states.

If American companies can afford to keep outsourcing within country lines, the U.S. economy will enjoy greater buoyancy and fewer jobs will be lost, Sirotta says. While global outsourcing can result in greater labor savings for some companies, the long-term cons may actually outweigh the pros, Vashishta says.

Executives are looking deeper at the potential effects offshore outsourcing could have on their corporate reputations. In the short-run, CEOs may earn more money by taking advantage of cheap wages overseas, but they may also be scrimping on their quality of staff and, ultimately, losing worldwide prestige.

Still, Procter & Gamble, Cisco Systems, DuPont, and Marriott have respectively struck billion-dollar outsourcing deals in recent years with India, Mexico, and the Philippines. Information technology companies, from IBM Global Services to Microsoft, as well as Fortune 500 companies such as American Express, Citibank, Bank of America, and General Electric, are all firmly on the outsourcing bandwagon. Meanwhile, disgruntled American employees are waving farewell to their overseas-bound jobs and an anti-globalization uproar is brewing.

Outsourcing on the outs
Before it folded in 2007, the Organization for the Rights of American Workers (TORAW) spoke out against this type of American job give away. TORAW held a two-day demonstration in 2002 outside the Strategic Outsourcing Conference at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City to protest rampant outsourcing.

Today, the American Rights Network, a nonprofit organization that supports workers’ rights to free choice, is standing up against outsourcing alongside advocacy groups like the Coalition for the Future American Worker.

One of the looming questions among protestors is this: When it comes to job loss in America, should the blame be placed solely on cash-hungry corporations? Vashishta says no. The burden, he says, belongs to the government and the individuals, too.

“There has to be a renewed focus in our country regarding how we take on roles that may be getting globalized,” Vashishta says. “How do we take those workers and skill sets and transition them to jobs that are much more in demand in the U.S.? By creating new industries.”

Possible jobs in the fields of social services, education, and biotechnology are becoming more available, and it is up to the government to continue offering companies incentives to retain American employees. If a worker is laid off from the automobile industry, for example, the parent corporation should compensate that employee for schooling so that he or she may enter another industry with comparable skills. Out-placement, extended severance packages, and retraining opportunities must all be part of that bargain, Vashishta says.

“The government has to come up with a tax credit to make businesses grow—and make it possible for employees to move from one industry to another,” Vashishta says. “Outsourcing is creating a much bigger human impact right now than people may even realize.”

______________________________

Is outsourcing to blame for the lack of jobs?

Outsourcing to India

______________________________

COMMENTS

What are the human costs of outsourcing, both in the United States and abroad?
Leave your response in the comments below.

Walden University Announces Grants in Support of Educator for a Day Program

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:00:00 +0000

$5,000 grants will be awarded to three P-12 schools during American Education Week.

Is There Any Solution to Plastic Marine Debris?

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:20:00 +0000

Do you ever wonder what happens to the litter that washes down into storm drains?

Maybe it's the cigarette butt somebody drops to the curb and leaves there, or the plastic bags that fly away in the slightest breeze. When the rain runs courses down the streets, all these bits of debris float down through metal grates and into the sewers. And then what?

Peter Hill of the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative says, the water gushes through the sewers and “often runs straight into waterways, untreated.”

It's just one of the ways that trash gets into the world’s rivers and oceans, a global problem on a huge scale. In a single day in 2008, volunteers in 104 countries picked up nearly 7 million pounds of debris from beaches and waterways, including more than three million cigarettes, more than a million plastic bags, and nearly a million each of food wrappers and bottle caps.

“The thing to remember is that every single piece of trash has a face behind it,” says Seba Sheavly, an independent consultant who has worked on the problem of marine debris for more than 15 years.

“I often try to get people to realize that a six-pack ring does not take itself off of a six-pack of beer, open the kitchen door, jump out into the yard, and find its way into a river.”

Just like many other pollution problems, Sheavly says people are behind marine debris. But she says, this one can be solved on a person-by-person scale—by making people aware of the consequences of their behavior, showing them how to do better, and making waste management tools readily available.

More than just an eyesore
Anyone who has shaken a slimy plastic bag off their leg during an ocean swim can tell you how they're affected by ocean litter.

But the problem has much larger consequences for aquatic wildlife, for marine navigation, and even for people, says David Osborn, who works with United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) marine and coastal ecosystem's branch.

For one thing, a huge amount of the debris littering the oceans and coasts comes from plastic. Plastics are a particular problem, Osborn says, because they don't biodegrade. Plastic just sits there, or else it breaks down into tinier and tinier pieces—eventually microscopic pieces—of plastic.

These pieces create a number of problems, largely when they are ingested by wildlife or when wildlife become entangled in them. Plastic can carry invasive species, spreading another insidious environmental problem.

Osborn says plastics in the ocean have the potential to cause damage further up the food chain. “Plastics are pollutants,” he says. “They carry chemicals that can get caught in the tissue of the fish. We eat them, and we're ingesting those pollutants in their system.”

Commercial fishing nets—big, bulky, and incredibly durable—are another big headache. Sometimes they get lost overboard, and sometimes there is no good way to dispose of them when they're no longer usable. When they're left in the water, all kinds of wildlife can get trapped and killed. Plus the nets can get tangled in delicate coral reefs or in the machinery of boats.

Beyond the individual impact of specific debris, the health of oceans affects everyone, says Tom McCann, who works for Ocean Conservancy. “When we're trashing our oceans,” he says, “we're really harming not only our economic well-being and our social well being, but ultimately the health of humans both here in America and abroad as well.”

Cleaning up the mess
McCann's organization is one of the major players working to clean up the debris. Theirs is often a fairly low tech approach: mobilize squads of volunteers and hit the beach with trash bags.

But although Ocean Conservancy expends a lot of energy on cleaning up, most experts, including McCann, say the problem cannot be solved that way.

Cleanup, it turns out, can be pretty complicated. The low-tech solution is inefficient and ineffective—and doesn't really even begin to address the problem of debris that is circling far away from land in the open ocean.

UNEP's Osborn says even finding the debris in deep water can be challenging. The litter doesn't show up on satellite imagery or radar, and it moves around.

Even in the case of the “North Pacific Gyre”—aka the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a region of ocean northeast of Hawaii where currents converge to concentrate marine litter—it's not so easy to clean up. Osborn says depending on the season, the location of the patch moves. Sometimes the litter cycles down far beneath the surface, and often the debris is spread out over a large enough area that litter density becomes minimal and attempting a cleanup becomes a monumental task.

Moreover, Osborn says, the cleanup itself can have an ecological toll. Anything that catches litter runs the risk of catching marine life as well, and he notes that the by-catch of a clean up can be as damaging as the litter was to begin with.

That doesn't mean some people aren't trying to tackle the problem. George Orbelian, a lifelong surfer and oceans enthusiast, helped found Project Kaisei, an organization dedicated to studying deep sea debris and trying to clean it up.

Right now, Project Kaisei is in the research phase, in partnership with, among others, the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. But Project Kaisei has also partnered with large-scale recycling companies, which think all that debris out in the water has the potential to bring in some profit.

Orbelian says there are a number of recycling possibilities. “We're actually looking at four or five different technologies that turn waste plastic into fuel and other things that can be used,” he says. “So we'll see which technology is most appropriate.”

In terms of collecting the plastic, he says one new possibility would be “to create a material that acts as a magnet that attracts the plastic or something that ends up connecting to the plastic bits.”

Going to the source
Osborn remains skeptical that an efficient solution can be found for collecting plastic. While he welcomes the effort—as well as the publicity and research—Project Kaisei is putting into the problem, he says finding a better solution for recapturing the waste “is extremely difficult and the primary reason why a market has not already appeared.” 

That's why he, like many other experts, says the real solution is prevention.

“[One step] many cities invest in is gross pollutant traps,” says Osborn. “Waste that goes into storm-water channels gets caught in effectively a big net, which stops it from going into the marine environment.”

Another technological advance that could help is to improve the composition of plastic so that it biodegrades in the marine environment. “There are a number of different variations of plastic bags,” Osborn says, such as “bags made out of corn starch or bags that biodegrade when they get wet.”

These may not be ideal from a consumer standpoint, Osborn points out—imagine walking home with your groceries in the rain—but could lead to a long-term solution that minimizes the number of bags floating around.

A less technologically advanced solution might be to use fewer plastic bags to start with. Osborn says “the UN has been calling for some time for governments to phase out those flimsy film bags, and move towards recyclable, reusable materials,” like cloth.

But given that we can't eliminate plastic 100 percent, some marine litter programs aim to make better use of plastic waste so it won't get discarded in the first place—for example, what to do with those bulky, durable fishing nets.

In many port areas, marine litter expert Sheavly says, there is no good mechanism in place to help fishermen dispose of the nets that don't work anymore, “so sometimes fishermen have no recourse other than to let it go.” Instead, some places have turned the nets into a resource. Hawaii has developed a program where derelict nets are collected, brought back to Honolulu, processed, and, in a special waste-to-energy plant, turned into electricity.

“Putting a fishing net into landfills is kind of worthless,” Sheavly says. “Being able to convert those nets into electricity, they now have a monetary worth to them, so that it makes it worthwhile to collect the nets and then process them.” And it provides an opportunity to convert the energy that was used to make that net into something else.

What you can do
Keith Criddle, a fisheries and marine conservation professor at the University of Alaska and the lead author on a congressionally mandated study on marine debris, points out, “All of the man-made debris in the oceans and on the coasts was put there by people, willfully or by accident.”

“It is important,” he says, “to acknowledge that the marine debris problem and its solution can be boiled down to simple individual and social choices about the disposal of waste materials.”

Sheavly says better education can play a big role in helping individuals make better choices. For instance, “most people have been told the caps on a soda bottle aren't recyclable,” she says, and so they toss them. But recycling technology is now capable of sorting the bottles, which are made from one kind of plastic, and the caps, which are made from another, and capturing and reusing both.

Any real solution, she says, will attack the problem from a number of different angles, but the personal angle should always be included. 

“In some pollution issues people don't see how they could affect it.” Sheavly says. “This is one where you can.”

______________________________

World's biggest garbage dump: the oceans

Plastic marine debris

______________________________

COMMENTS

How do you contribute to the global problem of marine debris, and what are some ways you can minimize your impact?
Leave your response in the comments below.

Bangladesh school needs English teacher and principal

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:33:45 +0000

We are looking for a volunteer English teacher and a retired person or couple for the position of Principal for our new study centre in Sylhet , Bangladesh . The centre runs O level and A level curriculum for the prospective students. Though the centre runs with commercial attitude, it also has a social objective in its business plan. The centre sponsors education expenses for the children in need from its income. We plan to help 200 children every year gradually.

Sylhet is a very beautiful place with its scenic beauty. The city is situated by the river Surma and surrounded by many tea gardens. It is a city with all the modern facilities from international airport to modern medical facilities. To mention, 80% of the British Bangladeshis are from Sylhet.

We aim to provide our volunteer teachers with private flat, maid, local transportation and food allowance for free.

We would be grateful if your company can help us getting suitable persons for us please.

Hope to hearing from you soon.

Thank you,

Regards,

Suvagoto Das
tilottoma_sylhet@yahoo.com

Nursing Faculty Member Named a Top Ten American Business Woman

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Dr. Janice Unruh Davidson honored by American Business Women's Association.

Walden Introduces New Accounting Degree

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:00:00 +0000

B.S. in Accounting program offers professionals a different view of finance.

Managing Long-Term Data Storage in a Regulatory Environment

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:35:02 +0000

Today’s regulatory environment is enough to make a data manager’s head spin. From legislation such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act to credit card processing security standards, data managers now face a dizzying array of regulations regarding what types of data must be stored and for how long.

But that’s not all. Thanks to a December 2006 amendment to the U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to encompass digital information, U.S. courts are now empowered to order companies to produce the right data in record time. Because e-discovery allows everything from e-mail to PowerPoint presentations to be called into evidence, companies must be prepared to preserve and sift through mounds of electronic data at breakneck speed or face possible legal penalties.

In response to such challenges, many data managers are upping the ante by purchasing vast amounts of data storage hardware. Research firm IDC reports the total amount of disk storage shipped in 2008 grew 40.5 percent over the previous year. According to research firm Forrester Research, 40 percent of enterprises said they plan to spend more on storage hardware in the coming year, with another 46 percent saying their spending on storage will be level. What’s more, Forrester estimates storage capacity requirements are growing at a rate of between 15 percent and 25 percent per year.

In addition to scrambling for the necessary hardware, many companies are adopting solutions that promise to help them better analyze, archive, manage, protect, and purge their data to meet long-term management goals.

Taking inventory
Take, for example, Vivisimo and its Velocity Search Platform. This data analysis software provides companies with easy access to information and content without having to rethink the way in which content is produced and stored. Using proprietary conceptual search technology, Velocity helps companies easily determine what information currently resides on a databases, how employees use and access this information, and how best to store this data on a long-term basis.

Setting data aside
Once companies have taken proper inventory of their data, the next step is deploying a data archiving tool. Data archiving works by removing and archiving master data from a database and storing it on a variety of storage mediums for future access.

After all, says Brian Babineau, a senior analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group in Milford, Massachusetts, “If data is being transacted upon on a regular basis, trying to figure out how you’re going to store that data, where you’re going to keep it, and how long you’re going to keep it is nearly impossible.”

Fortunately, by systematically extracting data from a primary environment, data archiving technology lets data managers store only the information needed to meet regulatory requirements while improving the performance and availability of critical systems.

Managing resources
Another approach data managers are taking to sorting out their data is through the use of storage resource management (SRM) technology. Tool suites such as the IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center help companies better manage their storage system capacity by centralizing, simplifying, and automating storage tasks. What’s more, not only can SRM tools better provision storage to optimize the use of existing storage resources, but they can also forecast future storage needs to prevent outages. For example, an SRM tool can automatically notify a data manager that storage capacity has reached its maximum threshold and that it’s time to acquire more capacity before disaster strikes.

Preventing leakages
Similarly, data-leak prevention products are helping companies keep better tabs on their data. Firewalls and encryption may keep hackers at bay, but a data-leak protection solution from vendors such as RSA, the security division of EMC, can serve as an early warning system that notifies data managers when employees are about to send out sensitive or classified corporate data. It’s a policy-based approach to data protection that, according to Greg Schulz, founder of StorageIO Group, a storage consultancy, helps data managers “monitor their networks, systems, and applications for vulnerabilities that will automatically set off an alarm when critical data is about to be leaked.”

New trends
Getting a better handle on data storage is also leading many companies to hot trends such as cloud computing and virtualization. Virtualization, for instance, pools storage from multiple devices into a single storage mechanism that can be managed centrally, enabling one computer to do the work of several machines. “The more tools that a company has to move data between physical devices, the better off they are,” says Babineau, highlighting the flexibility provided by virtualization.

The downside, warns Schulz, is that virtualization can introduce more issues. “With virtualization and cloud computing, all you’re doing is moving data around. That data still has to be stored and protected somewhere. You can protect it in the cloud, but guess what, you’ve just introduced another point of vulnerability.”

Internal checks and balances
Hot technologies aside, if data managers plan to cope with the regulatory requirements governing data storage today, then they must take a long, hard look at their internal policies and procedures. “Don’t make the mistake of assuming that your data and information are secure as long as they’re in your company,” says Schulz. “The headline news is always about a [storage] tape containing a million names getting released. But how about the 12,000 laptops that are lost or forgotten every month at Los Angeles airport—and the data on those [computers].”

For this reason, Schulz recommends that data managers establish and enforce stringent policies related to company-issued USB thumb drives, laptops, iPhones—any portable device that can transport confidential information and risk exposing a company to security breaches and legal liabilities.

“Policies are essential,” says Schulz. “Too often, we try to throw technology at the problem rather than create a policy or approach.”

Babineau agrees. He says that many companies make the mistake of leveraging technology to store too much data. For example, the Radicati Group estimates that the average corporate email user sends and receives a total of 84 messages per day and that the average size of a message without an attachment is about 22 KB. That can add up to a ton of non-mission critical data—and ever-expanding storage capacity needs. However, with the right data retention polices in place, a company can regularly purge its data while still sticking to the letter of the law.

“The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure allow you to expire content,” says Babineau. “You just can’t do it on a one-off basis. You actually have to have some consistent rules and policies to do it.”

Today’s data managers are facing stringent storage requirements at a time when companies are being deluged with everything from Word documents and email to business-processing applications and data-devouring digital content. In the end, overcoming these long-term data management challenges comes down to striking just the right balance between cutting-edge technology and internal policies.

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Surviving the data avalanche

Server virtualization 101

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COMMENTS

How is your business dealing with data storage issues in an age of rapidly changing technology?
Leave your response in the comments below.

Faculty Q and A

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Faculty award recipients on preparing students for a career in mental health.

Call for Proposals: American Association of Blacks in Higher Education Conference

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Share your research.

New Post-Master's Program Prepares Students for Principal Licensure

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Ed.S. in Educational Leadership and Administration curriculum focuses on current challenges in education.

Vote in Walden's Scholars of Change Video Contest

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:00:00 +0000

See videos from students and graduates sharing how their Walden experience has impacted their lives and the lives of those around them. Then, help choose the finalists. Your vote counts!

Restoring Wildlands: Two Business Models

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:06:38 +0000

Many Americans think of parks and rainforest when they think of Costa Rica—an exotic vacation destination with scuba diving and hiking.

But not too long ago, the only creatures hiking through a large swath of northwest Costa Rica were farmers and cows.

Originally wooded with dry forest, cloud forest, and rain forest, by the 1960s and ‘70s, most of the land had become dry savanna. But from one couple's initiative and a many private donations, 500 miles of savanna has been restored into national parkland.

Restoration minimalism
Dan Janzen, the field biologist, who, along with his wife, fellow field biologist, Winnie Hallwachs, pioneered the effort to restore the land, said the most important thing they needed to do to restore the land was to buy it.

“We don't plant any trees,” Janzen says, “wind and animals bring the seeds. We don't plant anything. What you have to do is stop anybody or anything from stopping animals.”

Of course, the reality is somewhat more complex. The Area de Conservacion Guanacaste has a staff of 150 people and an operating budget of about $1.5 million. Among other projects, the staff fights fires, researches wildlife, educates students in the surrounding areas about biology, and yes, in some areas, even plants some trees.

But Janzen says all that is practically beside the point. “Biologically, restoration is a breeze,” he says. “If you're willing to let a large area restore itself, that will happen.

“The real world is that every square foot out there is owned by someone,” Janzen says, and they're using it for something. If you want to use it for something else, for instance, if you want to let the forest grow back, you just buy the land.

William Allen documented the restoration process in his book Green Phoenix: Restoring the Tropical Forests of Guanacaste, Costa Rica. “The restoration effort was incredibly successful,” says Allen. “There’s been nothing like it anywhere, as far as I’ve been able to learn by talking with a wide range of leading and lesser tropical ecologists who know this world.”

Janzen says in another 100 years, the average observer would never know there had been anything but forest on the land. (He says it'll take about 500 years for the true balance to be restored.)

He raised most of the money to buy the land through private donations—although he worked with the Costa Rican government, and the park continues to be run in cooperation with the government.

But he says whether you raise money through tax dollars or private investment or winning the lottery is irrelevant.

A wider look
A more important question might be whether this model—large-scale buy back of degraded landscapes for the purpose of restoration—can be repeated successfully elsewhere.

One of the elements that made Janzen's plan for restoration possible was that undisturbed parts of the forest remained. Janzen says almost all the old species still existed in pockets on the land. Perhaps equally crucial, Janzen was able to buy a large enough amount of land to allow the natural process of succession to restart.

Allen says Janzen was helped by the fact that “in the 1980s the farm economy, especially for cattle production, was experiencing a major economic downturn, and many folks were glad to sell off and get out. For many of them, the restoration project’s interest in buying their land was a godsend. The restoration project was fortunate to have such an economic scenario make the land relatively available.”

But in other places, agriculture is still profitable, or the land has been used for other reasons, like building people's homes. Those owners might not be so interested in selling—or the price might be too high no matter how many people click on the donation button.

This, says Rob French, is largely the case in the Florida Everglades. What was once a “river of grass”—a wetland that covered much of south Florida—now contains cities, roads, sugar plantations, and farms.

In order to make the swampy land ready for development, the army corps of engineers built canals, dykes and levees, and engineered the water to flow where they wanted, when they wanted.

French, an environmental engineer who has spent much of his 30-plus-year career in Florida, says he “thinks it is virtually an impossible task now to go back and restore the Everglades.” He says the best shot is to try to fix some of the damage.

For instance, the water quality in Everglades estuaries has been deteriorating, because of the way the water flow has been controlled. During the rainy season, water is stored in Lake Okeechobee until it reaches a certain level, at which point water is released toward the ocean. But the stored water is freshwater, and when a large amount blasts through the brackish estuaries (a mix of salt and freshwater), it changes the salt content of the estuaries. It essentially kills everything in there, says French.

A solution along the lines of the Guanacaste restoration project would be for someone to buy up all the land and destroy all the levees, dykes, and canals to restore water flow to its natural state.

Restoration buy-back in Florida
In some places, this is exactly what the Everglades restoration project, funded through a joint agreement with the federal government and the state of Florida, is doing.

Randy Smith, media relations specialist for the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD), gives an example: Picuyune Strand, in southwest Florida, a 55,000 acre tract bought by developers in the 1950s and ‘60s that was going to be a city.

The owners went bankrupt, Smith says, but before they did, they put in roads and dug canals. Smith says, “the state of Florida bought that and we have been very successful in filing in one of the canals, and removing roads and the handful of houses that were there. And in the areas where we've gone in and filled up the canal, the sheet flow of water has gone back to a normal state.”

Engineering restoration
But Fred Sklar, the director of the SFWMD's Everglades division says, “we often find that it's very hard to just let nature take its course.” For instance, he says, thanks to invasive species like the Brazilian pepper, the ecology is changing. Invasive plants and animals crowd out the ones that lived there naturally—and that can have consequences all the way up the food chain, when animals can no longer find as much of what they’re used to eating. “Right now nature is having a hard time, and it's on a trajectory that often it means we have to go in and do something actively.”

So to improve water quality in the estuaries, the SFWMD is engineering a new system of storage and release that would vent the water in a more natural cycle, rather than in bursts.

Their approach has its critics. Stuart Pimm, a conservation ecologist at Duke University says that, with the billions of tax dollars being spent—current estimates hover around $10–12 billion—they could absolutely do more.

Pimm says real restoration requires restoring the natural flow, not building ever more complex systems to manage the water in new ways. He calls the restoration at Guanacaste “spectacular” but says, “what's happening in Everglades is really a very, very different kind of event.”

Ultimately, SFWMD's Sklar says, “I think the idea that we are just engineering restoration rather than allowing nature to take its course is something that we struggle with everyday. We always are trying to create an environment where we can let nature take its course.”

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Everglades environmental restoration

Dan Janzen in Costa Rica

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COMMENTS

Can there be a balance between restoring an ecosystem and still letting the human population use it? Or do we need to keep ecosystems as close to their original structure, even if it means people can't live there anymore?
Leave your response in the comments below.

Softening Up a Tough Audience

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Kimberly Adame-Davis on how to be a dynamic presenter.

Attend Walden's Social Change Conference Sept. 30

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Meet social entrepreneurs at a half-day interactive event.

Creating Smart Electrical Grid a Daunting Task

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:06:08 +0000

A lot has changed since Thomas Edison invented the electric light bulb in the late 1800s. But while two-cylinder automobiles and glass milk bottles have gone the way of the dinosaur, many experts argue that the nation’s electric grid remains stuck in the Victorian era.

“Basically, we still have the same energy infrastructure that we had at the dawn of the 20th century. One-hundred years later, the technology has changed very little from what Edison and [Nikola] Tesla laid out as they started to create the large-scale distribution of electricity,” says Bracken Hendricks, a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

Grim statistics
The reality is, the current electric grid is beginning to fail the nation with greater and greater frequency. According to the Center for American Progress, there have been five massive blackouts over the past 40 years as a result of grid failure—three of these in the last nine years. In fact, in August 2003, the blackout in the Northeastern United States and Canada impacted 50 million people and 61,800 megawatts of electric load. It took four days to restore power to the region and caused an estimated $7 billion to $10 billion in economic losses. What’s worse, the Electric Power Research Institute estimates that power interruptions and fluctuations cost the economy more than $100 billion each year in damages and lost business.

Everyone agrees: It’s time to upgrade our national electricity grid in such a way that we shift away from carbon-based power sources such as oil and coal and move toward renewable energy alternatives like solar and wind power. A national clean-energy smart grid could make electricity more reliable, more efficient, greener—and perhaps even save Americans money.

That’s because a smart grid would allow new, renewable-energy projects to connect to the grid. The smart grid would also improve the distribution of energy via devices that monitor peak demand times and thereby improve the efficiency of electricity distribution.

Plenty of hurdles
But while a “green” grid sounds like an excellent idea, factors such as cost, consumer resistance, public opposition, and jurisdictional issues threaten the possibility of replacing age-old energy sources with eco-friendly fare. Consider this: The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that the total investment needed in electric utilities could be as much as $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion by 2030. That figure includes money for energy generation such as wind farms, as well as all of the power lines required to transport the energy from rural areas to urban centers.

“The biggest obstacle [to building a smart grid] is that it costs money—significant amounts of money. The question is whether there’s a payback if we were to invest such a large amount of money,” says Anjan Bose, professor of electric power engineering at Washington State University and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.

Getting ‘smart’ meters
Unfortunately, money is just a small part of what’s needed to bring a “green” grid to life. According to Ahmad Faruqui, an analyst with The Brattle Group, an economic and finance consultancy, the first step entails the nationwide rollout of smart meters—devices capable of automatically measuring how much energy a particular household is using and immediately relaying this information back to a utility company for monitoring and billing purposes.

“New smart grid technology should begin … with a smart meter that has digital information on how much power is being used on a 15-minute basis,” says Faruqui.

Currently, Faruqui believes that “it could take anywhere from three to five years to change all of the nation’s meters”—a timeline that greatly depends on the willingness of utility companies to replace traditional meters with high-tech devices. After all, he says, “Many of those utilities are very traditional in their outlook. Their view is, ‘We are in the business to sell more electricity, not less,’ so they may not be ready to go the next step which is to get the new technology out to the customers.”

Battling consumer resistance
But truth be known, not all consumers are gung-ho about making the sacrifices necessary to build an improved electric grid either. According to Bose, there is plenty of “public opposition against building new power lines or new generators. People don’t like to have power lines going through their backyard.” Not to mention those consumers that still aren’t convinced that renewable sources of energy are necessary to our survival.

Yet it’s precisely this mix of modern technology and consumer awareness that promises to bring about a smart grid in the foreseeable future. “Studies show that if consumers realized that it’s more expensive to consume energy in the afternoon [than in the evening], we would see usage go down by about 13 to 15 percent,” says Faruqui. “Because behavior alone can reduce afternoon peak demand by about 15 percent, if you introduce technology such as smart meters, now you can reduce energy consumption by 26 to 35 percent which could eliminate the need for about 150,000 megawatts of power.”

Working together
While such numbers are encouraging, the final step in the equation is convincing federal powers, state officials, and corporate entities to work together to usher today’s grid into the 21st century. After all, the current electric grid is a hodgepodge of parts governed by a wide variety of sectors of the energy industry, often with competing interests. As it stands, in a major address to the country at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, in early January, Obama cited the creation of a smart grid as a key ingredient in the economic stimulus plan.

“The jurisdictional and political issues are really the biggest hurdles,” says Bose. “The problem is, in the U.S., the electric grid, from the generators down to the household level, are chopped up and owned by hundreds of entities.”

What’s more, he adds, this “unwieldy” infrastructure is heavily regulated by a variety of government bodies and agencies. “So not only do you have hundreds of entities but you also have 50 states, as well as the federal government, all having a say on the rules under which these hundreds of entities must operate,” says Bose.

The ultimate solution hinges on building widespread consensus on how exactly we should go about building a “green” grid that benefits all parties—government, utility companies, and consumers alike. It’s a tall order but one that everyone agrees America can no longer afford to ignore. Warns Faruqui, “In about three years, we will see the demand for electricity grow by about two percent a year in the U.S. To meet that demand growth, you have to build new capacity. We just don’t have enough capacity lying around.”

______________________________

Bridges to the future: Smart electrical grid

Easy ways to conserve energy and save money

______________________________

COMMENTS

What steps are you taking in your day-to-day life to conserve energy?
Leave your response in the comments below.

Volunteer for Walden's Global Day of Service

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Nearly 400 Walden volunteers contributed to their communities in 2008.

For the Greater Good

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Gray G. Davis on how to serve on a nonprofit board.

Social Change Talk

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Read President Jonathan Kaplan's interview in Triple Pundit about Walden's social change mission.

Video Contest Deadline Sept. 14

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:00:00 +0000

There's still time for Walden students and graduates to enter Walden's Scholars of Change video contest and be eligible for a $5,000 prize for each winner and a $2,500 prize for a winner's favorite charity.

Tales from Decrypt: Current Issues in Cryptography

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:48:47 +0000

The Cold War is over? Think again. Sure, the East-West geopolitical standoff may have subsided, but the cryptographic arms race rages on, largely behind closed doors, rarely shedding blood but affecting virtually everybody on the planet.

On one side are the white hats—academic and military researchers working on new ways of encoding information to protect it from prying eyes and guarantee its integrity. Working against them are hackers, criminals, and again, well-funded military researchers—black hats—all working on ways of breaking the latest codes.

And there’s the public, which these days has little choice but to trust that the white hats continue to maintain the upper hand—and can only trust that they’re truly white. The fact is, the mathematics underpinning most cryptographic techniques in use today are way beyond the average person’s ability to understand them, so it’s well nigh impossible to determine if the techniques actually work as advertised. After all, who but those privy to the most classified cryptographic research—which the government guards as strenuously as the designs of nuclear weapons—can be sure that common cryptographic programs don’t contain “back doors” that would easily enable government agencies, for instance, to read information that to others remains encrypted?

In short, cryptography demands a fair amount of trust. Like the atom bomb before it, it’s a technology that’s profoundly shaping the modern world but whose complexities only a few individuals, most of them sworn to absolute secrecy, fully understand.

Keys to the net
Though historically the purview of armies, secret agents, and governments, cryptography today is pervasive and pretty much everyone’s business. In a way, it’s what makes the Information Age tick. For without the ability to hide information from prying eyes—think credit card numbers—there’d be no e-Commerce on the Web. And without so-called hash techniques, which use crypto techniques to assure that the binary 1s and 0s of a digital object remain unaltered, only fools would run any software downloaded from the Web, even from known sources. Strong cryptography is obviously key to the viability of cash machines and retailers’ credit card terminals, but it also guards online consumer banking, transfers of money between banks, and wireless networking in homes and offices.

And that’s only the beginning. The general assumption is that black hats, if they care to, have no trouble tapping wires or snooping on wireless data transmissions, so it is always up to the senders and receivers of information to protect sensitive data through their own encryption efforts. As more personal computing gets done up in the cloud, so to speak—in remote computers available over the Internet—the public may demand better data protection and insight into how it works.

In mid-June 2009, in fact, 37 top security researchers publicly beseeched Google to beef up the security on its popular Web apps, such as Gmail and Google Docs. When not using their browsers’ crypto-based HTTPS option, the researchers said, Google’s users are left vulnerable to having their email messages and documents read by others.

“As a market leader in providing cloud services, Google has an opportunity to engage in genuine privacy and security leadership and to set a standard for the industry,” the researchers stated in an open letter to Google. Among the signers was Ron Rivest, who is the “R” in RSA, a widely-used encryption algorithm. Google, in response, agreed that HTTPS would certainly benefit users and indicated that it may widen the protocol’s use. But it also noted that because HTTPS’s encryption routines take some time to execute—around 1/4 second each time a Web page gets refreshed, according to others’ measurements—using HTTPS all the time could make cloud apps less responsive. Unstated was that HTTPS would also consume considerably more computing power at Google’s end.

Phony protection
Meanwhile, as an increasing portion of voice telephony moves to the Internet—a.k.a. Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP—cryptography is finding yet another use and arousing yet more controversy, too. In the past, only presidents and spies could afford to secure telephone calls against eavesdroppers, but now, anyone can do it—and perhaps ought to, considering that, compared to traditional, wire-based telephony (PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network), VoIP is potentially much more vulnerable to eavesdropping, spamming, and fraud, for instance.

Software called Zfone, currently offered at no charge but planned to show up as a commercial product, enables individuals to secure VoIP calls made directly between computers (though not over the popular Skype service, which employs non-standard protocols). In brief, Zfone uses a key, uniquely generated for every call, to scramble each packet of voice data before it hits the Internet—all in a way, the software’s makers claim, that’s simpler and more secure than other such schemes proposed for home and office use.

The controversy? Zfone’s encryption appears to be strong enough to thwart even the National Security Agency (NSA), the government agency that specializes in making and breaking codes of all kinds. And that means mobsters, terrorists, and other bad guys could, in theory, use it to hide their calls’ content from FBI, CIA, and local police. VoIP already presents a challenge to those agencies’ wire-tappers, because voice-data packets flow across the Net independently of each other, following potentially many different paths and mixing in with billions of other, unrelated packets.

White knight
The creator of Zfone, however, is not unfamiliar with government anxiety over his efforts. Philip R. Zimmermann is perhaps best known as the techno-political activist who invented and made freely available something called PGP (for Pretty Good Privacy), a crypto-based scheme for protecting email that’s strong enough to resist virtually any attack. Zimmermann has made it clear over the years that his ultimate aim is not to aid any bad hats but instead to help all citizens and especially political and human-rights activists around the world to communicate in a way that’s safe from government snoops. And with Zfone, he sees growing commercial opportunity in the business world, where corporations are waking up to the need to secure their telecommunications against industrial spies.

“We all know how organized crime has been taking over the Internet,” Zimmermann says, noting that it takes only a few minutes for an unprotected computer connected to the Net to be attacked and even shanghaied into a botnet. “When VoIP takes over from the PSTN, the Russian mafia will start attacking VoIP, too. It’s only a matter of time. Everyone knows that the future of telephony is the Internet. We have no choice but to encrypt our calls.”

Trust is a must?
Yet another area where cryptography is likely to have significant impact is in so-called trusted computing. Traditionally, owners of personal computers have been free to run any software they like—any operating system, any application, any digital copy of a movie. But conceivably, brand-name makers of computers and software—and users, too—might have an interest in setting up restrictions on what software runs where. Neither Hollywood studios, musicians, or software companies like to see purloined copies of their wares getting distributed across the Net, for instance. And no user wants to see his or her computer hijacked by malicious code injected by a criminally-run website.

Trusted computing attempts to eliminate those and similar scenarios by enforcing cryptologically-defined linkages between all hardware and software components. From a special, tamper-proof chip on the computer’s motherboard to operating system to applications to individual MP3 music tracks, for instance, a unique crypto-based digital signature would identify each component as being both properly licensed and unaltered since its creation, or not. Any code or content missing a proper signature could be disabled. In technical terms, the scheme prevents a computer’s owner from obtaining root access to the machine.

Freedom fighters
Critics, such as the Free Software Foundation and the self-styled Cypherpunks, an activist group, view this scheme as infringing on consumers’ rights, calling it “treacherous computing” and the “Mother(board) of all Big Brothers”. If one owns a computer, one ought to be able to run any software or content one likes, they argue—especially open-source programs like Linux. But some 170 companies, including Intel, Microsoft, and Seagate Technology, are backing it as a way to prevent pirating and to keep malicious and offensive programs from disrupting the computing environments for which they provide relatively costly support. For now, the idea’s getting used only sporadically: Certain Intel microprocessors have unique ID numbers burned into their silicon—a necessary first step in making trusted computing work—and Apple relies on trusted computing techniques to control apps for its popular iPhone.

Better living through better secret codes? There’s no question that cryptography’s role in everyday life has been widening over the past couple of decades and that it will continue to pervade more and more of daily life—even if it’s only humming away quietly in the background. And chances are, experts say, that from now on, its advances will be driven as much, if not more, by industry rather than the NSA and other government agencies. Zfone’s Zimmermann likens the technology to microelectronics, where the Pentagon surely funded early progress but which soon was being driven by the private sector. “At some point in the 1990s, things crossed over,” he says. “Today, there are way more technical people working on cryptography outside the NSA than there are inside. The U.S. government even purchases crypto gear that they didn’t design. We’ve all gotten better at it.”

______________________________

The theory and practice of cryptography

Verifying elections wtih cryptography

______________________________

COMMENTS

Cryptographic methods are pervasive now, but what risks does society face as it trusts more of its information to protection by this arcane technology?
Leave your response in the comments below.

Community News

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Walden's students, faculty and staff are contributing to their disciplines through publications, presentations and other professional activities.

The Transgender Professional

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Negotiating workplace settings in the gender continuum.

Video Contest Deadline Sept. 14

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 12:00:00 +0000

In The News

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Walden community members are making news.

Barter Returns to Help Businesses in Lean Times

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 14:14:10 +0000

Money isn’t a free-flowing luxury during economic dips, and in its absence, companies must seek out other means of revenue. Enter the barter system.

Last year’s credit vise impelled businesses to revert to this ancient source of commerce, which involves the exchanging of goods and services. In essence, companies trade something they already have for something they need and can no longer afford to purchase with cash.

An Automatic Data Processing (ADP) Small Business Report revealed that, in October of 2007, companies with 50 or fewer workers cut 25,000 jobs due to a shortage of cash. Taking advantage of this drop, barter exchanges, from publicly traded networks such as International Monetary Systems (IMS) to smaller entities like U-Exchange.com, began enlisting more participants. These organizations are now enjoying a significant spike in profits while simultaneously bailing out struggling companies.

John C. Moore, the co-founder of U-Exchange, a 2004-born bartering resource that boasts 64,000 members in 80 countries, has seen his site usage increase by 100 percent in a year. January 2009 was Moore’s most fruitful month to date, he says.

“Bartering has been around forever, and I think people have heard of it before, but with the downturn, they’ve been forced to look into it and say, ‘What can bartering do for me?’” Moore says. “If have a motel and you want to fill those vacancies, for instance, and if you don’t have a paying customer, you have to fill them somehow. If bartering can fill that void, why not do it?”

Barter or bottom out?
Nowadays, bartering is not just a means of casual swapping. It entails online networking, in which multiple parties from across the globe congregate and compete for exchanges. The concept of this contemporary bartering began shortly after World War II, and with the advent of credit cards and computers came the ability to track the activity.

During an economic lull, businesses can locate new customers via bartering and use their excess capacity (essentially, anything that is unsold—from empty airline seats to press time at printing shops). For example, a chiropractic company might trade a $3,000 health package for $3,000 worth of carpentry work to redo the office decor.

Through such scenarios, the bartering industry generates more than $3-billion each year in the United States, according to the trade publication, BarterNews.com. Nearly 400,000 companies worldwide completed $12 billion in transactions last year, the International Reciprocal Trade Association (IRTA) estimated. This was a 10 percent upsurge since 2007, and American companies were responsible for the majority of the exchanges. This year may see a 15 to 35 percent overall increase in the number of deals, IRTA research suggests.

Jason Richards, the director of marketing and business development for BizXchange, the leading barter exchange and trade network on the West Coast of the United States, says the site facilitated $50 million in trades last year, and membership moved up by 55 percent. In the past six months, BizXchange has witnessed a 25 to 30 percent upward shift in trade volume, Richards says.

“Right now, bartering is getting a lot of attention because of the economic times, but the truth is that it’s important even in good economic times,” Richards says. “Businesses are able to generate new sales and save cash. We provide them the ability to find new sales channels—and to move slow-moving inventory—which businesses have a lot of right now.”

Also, bartering saves cash on budgeted business expenses, Richards says. Every trade dollar a company spends adds another dollar to the company pot. And sites like BizXchange are savoring their own piece of that income. Many online bartering networks take a cut of 8 to 15 percent from each trade, charge a one-time membership fee in the $500 range, and demand a minimum amount of trading activity annually.

The ethics of exchange
Tax-wise, barter is regarded in the same way as cash or credit transactions, and thus, reported to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). All trades should be stipulated in writing, and lawyers may even check traders with the Better Business Bureau. However, some independent contractors and small companies may engage in informal, underground bartering, which raises ethical questions.

To cover its bases, BizXchange works in unison with the IRS. The IRS recognizes a barter exchange as a legitimate currency with a one-to-one ratio to the U.S. dollar, Richards says. As a result, any revenue a company generates is documented on the books, and all expenses are deductible as business expenditures. BizXchange also issues a 1099-B form at the end of every year that reports the site’s receipts.

At U-Exchange.com, customers set up the trades themselves, so the site does not monitor the exchanges directly, Moore says.

“As far as being ethical, I compare that question to accepting credit cards and checks, and whether is it ethical to accept cash instead,” Moore says. “I just view it as another way to have a sale.”

The IRTA, like BizXchange, is considered a third-party record-keeper in the eyes of the IRS, and everything is taxed.

“I don’t think there’s an ethical question involved in this. We keep track of the networks and make sure they are run safely,” says David Wallach, the president of the IRTA’s global board. “Through the use of modern technology, we’re able to track purchases and sales on credit cards. So we cover our backs.”

Tapping the resource
Before delving into the bartering sphere, company managers are advised to be cautious. Because cash is still king, companies should make every effort to spend it and only seek out bartering as an alternative to an unsuccessful sale. When joining an exchange site, surf the member list and make sure the network has the potential to facilitate trades in various industries. To avoid squandering potential cash business, experts recommend companies barter for no more than 5 to 15 percent of sales.

“The important thing is that these expenses are all made without spending cash, and that the new business each company gets would’ve otherwise not happened if they weren’t members,” Richards says. “The result is an increase in sales and the preservation of valuable cash resources. It’s a smart business tool no matter what the economic climate.”

Every $200,000 that passes through the bartering system creates the opportunity for a new job, Wallach says. Thirty years ago, only 12,000 businesses were engaged in the bartering industry, and that has since grown by more than 33 percent. That number will rise tremendously within the next 10 to 15 years, Wallach says.

“We are tapping into what has been wasted and ignored for years. Unemployment is the biggest problem in the world and the regular cash system is not addressing it,” Wallach says. “By using huge excess business capacity to generate revenue for business, we’re going to create employment and revive the economy.”

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The new age of bartering

Digital bartering takes hold

______________________________

COMMENTS

How are companies turning barter into a viable tool for maintaining the bottom line during a tough economy, and what are the ethical implications for a process that does not lend itself to strict accounting?
Leave your response in the comments below.

Read New Issue of Walden Alumni Magazine

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Read the summer/fall 2009 issue of this award-winning magazine to see how alumni are using their degrees.

Starting Up

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Dr. Lynn Allison on how to get a small business loan in tough economic times.

Women Leading Social Change Panel Video Available Online

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Watch Lilly Ledbetter, Gloria Lewis, Dr. Anita McDonald and Paula Singer discuss women in leadership and fair pay in the workplace.

Attend November Academic Residencies

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Meet face-to-face with faculty and peers in Seattle as you move toward your goals.

Christine Todd Whitman Plenary Speech Now Online

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Watch the archived speech to see the former EPA administrator and New Jersey governor address the 2009 Summer Session residency.

In Memoriam: Applied Management and Decision Sciences Student

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:00:00 +0000

The Walden University community mourns the loss of Ph.D. in Applied Management and Decision Sciences student Sharon Brown.

Meet the Faculty

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Dr. Sara Torres

Congratulations, Graduates

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Lilly Ledbetter and Senator Amy Klobuchar addressed Walden's 42nd graduating class.

New Concentrations Offered in B.S. in Psychology Program

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Courses focus on child development and criminal justice.

The Medium is Not the Message

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Read President Jonathan Kaplan's article in Inside Higher Ed.

The Family Who Studies Together, Graduates Together

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 12:00:00 +0000

How three family members supported each other through their Walden journey.

Against the Odds

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Michael Cox beats mental illness through education and helping others.

How I Did It

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Fire chief Dr. Scott Kerwood prevailed through five hurricanes, one tropical storm, and countless floods.

Native Care

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Laura Ybarra goes to great depths to treat America's most isolated patients.

Still Time to Enter Scholars of Change Video Contest

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Walden graduates and students are eligible for one of five $5,000 grand prizes.

5 Ways to Publish Your Book

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Which one is right for you?

Ph.D. in Public Policy and Administration Offers New Format and Specializations

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Enhancements provide students more options for how and what they learn.

New Concentrations Offered in B.S. in Business Administration

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Students can now study international business or public relations.

The Importance of Learning English

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 13:59:45 +0000

This is a question that Mexican students have been asking their teachers for many years. Lately, college students have realised that they have to learn English for some important reasons. Nowadays, Mexican students are asking for English as a subject in their curricula. They have encountered a serious dilemma because everytime they need to learn about a cutting-edge technology the best journals are in English, as well as the most innovative textbooks. In addition, Mexico has very important touristic sites and 90% of the tourists speak English.

So, why aren't the education authorities adding English to the curriculas? That's a mystery. Due to the fact that our main student population hasn't got the resources to pay for special tutoring, they need to study languages as a part of the college curricula. English is part of the high school curricula in Mexico, unfortunately it's not enough. Students acquire a basic knowledge in English which doesn't allow them to communicate.

I have been teaching English for 33 years. I teach it "as a tool". This means that I give a meaning to learning this language. Everytime, we learn a new pattern, a new tense, a new set of vocabulary words; I set a goal to using this new knowledge. It can be as simple as meeting people at a disco or as complex as writing a research paper.
Nowadays, it's easy to find a use for English. People love films, music, internet; and finding out about everday breakthroughs in science and technology is a thrill.

I hope that one day Mexican teachers unite to work for the benefit of students instead of for staying in their comfort zone.
Alejandra Cabrera

Why I Refer

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Nancy Keenan, RN, on her Walden experience and how she shares it with others.

Walden Names New Education Dean

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Dr. Kate Steffens has extensive leadership experience.

Alumni Accolades

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Walden's alumni are contributing to their disciplines through publications, presentations and other professional activities.

Education Programs Now Eligible for TEACH Grants

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Grant program aids teachers committed to high-need subject areas.

Report urges end to extra pay for Master's degrees

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 16:05:50 +0000

By Stephen Sawchuk

States are spending billions in education dollars each year rewarding teachers for earning advanced degrees that show little correlation with improved student achievement, a report released yesterday concludes.

The policy of giving teachers salary “bumps” after they earn master’s degrees in education “is in the drinking water everywhere, but we know the relationship between the degree and student achievement is nonexistent,” said Raegen T. Miller, a senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based think tank.

Mr. Miller co-wrote the policy brief—one in a series on school financing in the economic downturn—with Marguerite Roza, a professor at the Center for Reinventing Public Education at University of Washington, in Seattle.

By decoupling such degrees from salary schedules, states and districts could free up funding for other types of compensation policies that might promote student achievement, the authors suggest in the report.

The brief arrives even as transformation of teacher-compensation systems rises to the top of the national agenda, propelled by the $200 million in additional money provided through the federal economic-stimulus package.

Read the rest of the article here.

Walden Authors

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 12:00:00 +0000

From teaching strategies to the psychology of abandonment, Walden students and faculty members are sharing their expertise in new books.

Watch the Commencement Webcast Live

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Join the Walden community online or in Minneapolis on July 25, 2009, to celebrate our graduates.

New B.S. in Health Studies Offered

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Undergraduate program offers concentrations in Health Management, Health Informatics and Health Psychology and Behavior.

In the News

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Walden community members are making news.

Education for sustainability

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 13:10:52 +0000

International Greening Education Event in Karlsruhe , Germany (About Ecologizing Education)

A three-day International Seminar on Greening Education will be held from 30th September to 2nd October 2009 in the "green" city of Karlsruhe , Germany . This event will take education and environmental policy makers, government and non-governmental organisations, education institutions, teachers, international agencies and environmental professionals through the need for greening education, and then discuss effective initiatives that governments, education institutions and development organisations need to take and can take to provide sustainable knowledge, skills, values and practices in the classrooms and in the communities.

Further to the knowledge sharing on greening education including topics such as ecologizing curriculum (incorporating sustainability in curriculum), greening delivery of courses (sustainability compatible education delivery) and low carbon education institutions; the upcoming event also provides an excellent networking opportunity with education institutions, international agencies, governmental and non-governmental organisations, sustainable development practitioners and other stakeholders in Europe and beyond.

You are cordially invited to attend this international event and/ or nominate the member(s) of your institution.

For further information, please see the event details .

http://www.etechgermany.com/GreeningEducationEvent.pdf

Call for Papers: PA TIMES

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Publish your research.

Call for Papers: The International Journal of Technology Diffusion

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Share your research.

Faculty Member Wins APA Award

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Dr. Steven Little is recognized for his social change contributions to the field of school psychology.

21st Century Cultural Competency

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:39:16 +0000

It is more than "celebrating diversity" it is about intellectual diversity and not about what people look like at the work place. Now days, businesses are taking advantage of intellectual diversity by having their staff contribute to ways of solving company's problems and finding diversified solutions. Diversity and cultural competency are not longer seeing as your "HR requirements" if not a way of doing business in today's world.

Commitment to Social Change Scholarship Recipients

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 12:00:00 +0000

From eliminating the cycle of incarceration to educating the public about HIV prevention, scholarship recipients are initiating social change.

Attend September Academic Residencies

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Meet face to face with faculty and peers in Jacksonville, Fla., as you move toward your goals.

New Study Links Teacher Learning to Student Success

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Tacoma students taught by Walden M.S. in Education graduates achieve greater success in reading fluency.

Video Contest Offers $5,000 Grand Prize, $2,500 for Favorite Charity

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Graduates and students are encouraged to submit their personal stories of making a positive change in Walden's Scholars of Change contest.

Watch Walden's New TV Ad

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:00:00 +0000

See advanced degrees advancing the quality of life.

How to Get a Job Teaching Online

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Attend this online Career Lecture Series event presented by Dr. Marilyn Simon, a Walden graduate and faculty member, on June 30, at 7 p.m. Eastern time.

Community News

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Walden's students, faculty and staff are contributing to their disciplines through publications, presentations and other professional activities.

M.S. in Health Informatics Integrates Health Care and Technology

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 12:00:00 +0000

New program prepares students for rapidly expanding field.

Library Adds New Resources

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:00:00 +0000

New databases, webinars and social networking features keep students informed.

Lilly Ledbetter, Equal-Pay Advocate, to Speak at Commencement

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Namesake of recently enacted Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act will address graduates on July 25.

What to do about drug-resistant tuberculosis?

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 20:09:17 +0000

From NPR Radio Diaries:

Our friend and diarist, Thembi Ngubane, died June 4, 2009 from drug-resistant TB. She was brave and open about living with AIDS at a time when most South Africans were quiet about the epidemic. We learned so much from her and for that we are eternally grateful.

Thembi leaves behind her four-year old daughter, Onwabo. Many of you contributed in the past to Thembi's family, helping them to purchase their own house in the township. Radio Diaries has set-up a fund for Onwabo. If you would like to make a contribution in Thembi's honor, please consider a donation. We thank you for being a part of this journey with us.

You can hear our remembrance on NPR.

And you can also listen to her diary, which aired in 2006, here.

Here is the link to make a donation for Onwabo.

Presidential Scholarship Recipients Named

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Recipients' public service goals include facilitating cross-cultural exchanges, creating a heightened level of care for psychological clients and providing an effective guide to economic leadership.

Christine Todd Whitman to Speak at Minneapolis Residency

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Former governor and EPA administrator will discuss current events, political leadership and the environment.

Capstone Project Strengthens M.B.A Graduates' Business Skills

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Students apply online learning to develop and assess business plans.

Faculty: Apply for a $10,000 Research Grant from Walden

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 12:00:00 +0000

The deadline for proposals is July 10.

Who's Sorry Now: Public Apologies

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Attend this online Alumni Lecture Series event presented by Dr. Barbara Benoliel, a professional mediator and Walden graduate, on June 23, at 2 p.m. Eastern time.

Walden Updates M.S. in Education with Specialization in Science

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Enhancements address new standards and demands in science education.

Financial Aid to Phase in Direct Loans to Students

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Walden hopes to transition students by 2010.

Creating an Audience for Change

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Presenting your research brings Walden's mission to life.

10 Hardest Jobs to Fill in America

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:16:59 +0000

For the second year in a row, engineer is the hardest job to fill in America.
Why are engineers so hard to find? "We have whole generations of people loving liberal arts, not going into science and math," says Larry Jacobson, executive director of the National Society of Professional Engineers.

What's second on the list? Nursing!

Source: http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/03/hard-jobs-fill-leadership-careers-employment.html

Toxic Carrot Juice Becomes Powerful Learning Tool

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Faculty member's investigation uncovers cause of botulism outbreak.

The Impact of Cultural Differences on Learning and Teaching and What That Means for e-Learning

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Attend this online Alumni Lecture Series event presented by Dr. Andrea Edmundson, an author and Walden doctoral graduate, on June 9, at 7 p.m. Eastern time.

Attend the August International Academic Residency

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Meet face-to-face with faculty members and peers in Liverpool, England, as you move toward your goals.

RE: A Promise to be Ethical in an Era of Immorality

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:58:21 +0000

An interesting article about how some MBA graduates are taking an oath to "serve the greater good". Pity it's only 20% of the graduating class at Harvard but you have to start someplace. :)

Those graduating today, they say, are far more concerned about how corporations affect the community, the lives of its workers and the environment. And business schools are responding with more courses, new centers specializing in business ethics and, in the case of Harvard, student-lead efforts to bring about a professional code of conduct for M.B.A.’s, not unlike oaths that are taken by lawyers and doctors.
“I don’t see this as something that will fade away,” said Diana C. Robertson, a professor of business ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s coming from the students. I don’t know that we’ve seen such a surge in this activism since the 1960s. This activism is different, but, like that time, it is student-driven.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/30/business/30oath.html?_r=1&em