Going green….

Sometime in the last few years, the Lifestyles Center at SUNY – Oswego began posting posting a one-page Toilet Talk: Words to Whiz By newsletter above the urinals throughout the SUNY-Oswego campus.  The current issue (printed on the college’s official hunter green color paper) has an article on the “green” initiative on campus. It notes that people are requested to reduce the printing and distribution of paper copies of materials that could be distributed in other means. I am going to assume that the irony of this was intentional.

The Twelve Days of Bailouts

I tried to resist posting this… I really did, but….

Most trusted news sources

A recent Zogby poll indicates that the internet is the most trusted news source. Among TV news sources, Fox news is the most trusted (by a large margin).

This represents a decided victory for truthiness and the campaign to save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus. (Note that a survey of 7th graders found that 24 of 25 would recommend the Tree Octopus web site as a useful resource to another class that was studying endangered species.)

Second Life used to train diplomats and miltary envoys

ScienceDaily provides an interesting report on the Second China project in Second Life. This project, funded by a $1.25 million federal grant, is designed to provide training to diplomats and military envoys about what they will be experiencing when they visit China. Those using this simulation will experience interactions in an office building, a tea house, a taxi cab, and other experiences that are designed to provide information on the society in whic they will be working. Information on cultural differences are provided within this simlation and on an accompanying website.

The Economy and eLearning

An article on ScienceDaily cites a survey that suggests that firms will be focusing more efforts on eLearning and blended learning initiatives to provide internal training. For several years, eLearning and blended has been growing dramaticallty in community colleges, but has been somewhat slower to catch on in 4 year colleges. With reductions in state budgets as state tax revenues decline under current economic conditions, I suspect that we’ll see greater use of these approaches in more colleges and universities.

Freddie Mac and Cheese

An interesting take on public perceptions of current economic conditions is found on the video: “Freddy Mac and Cheese.”

Cognition prints

In his most recent blog entry, Gardner Campbell has posted reflections on his visit to Oswego as the keynote speaker (and workshop leader) at our annual symposium on learning and teaching. His keynote address focused on the use of web 2.0 tools to more effectively engage students in their learning. Audio and video transcripts of his keynote address are available from links on his blog posting.

One of the many things that struck me during his talk was the suggestion that the widespread use of course management systems, in many ways, is inconsistent with the web 2.0 world with which students are most comfortable. The closed nature of these systems limits their use in engaging students in a wider dialogue with the academic world and reduces the permanence of their creative work.

The main theme for our work this year at the SUNY-Oswego Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching is on “new forms of communication with students.” Gardner’s presentation and workshop left us with many threads to follow as we work on developing faculty use of web 2.0 and 3.0 tools to more effectively engage students in their learning.

I should also note that, in our discussion on the trip back to the airport, Gardner encouraged me to begin a blog. I had considered this for some time, but Gardner’s suggestion was the tipping point that convinced me that it was time to start.

International multicultural education on a budget

Early in the semester this fall, I gave my econometrics class an assignment that included an analysis of the relationship that might exist between poverty rates and student performance across school districts in the region. Students were asked to use economic analysis to state a hypothesis concerning the possible relationship between these variables. Approximately two-third of the students are from the U.S. and the remaining third are from China.

The U.S. students universally argued that students in schools with more poverty would perform less well on standardized tests. The arguments generally involved lower levels of initial human capital endowments due to lower parental education and resources and/or lower school quality because of the use of local property taxes to finance schools. This prediction is what I had anticipated. I had not, though, anticipated that nearly every Chinese student would argue that students from poorer areas would perform better on standardized tests. The argument was that students from low-income families had more incentive to work hard to escape from poverty.

This sort of cultural difference was something that I simply had not anticipated. Our understanding of the world is influenced by our culture and economic institutions in many ways that only become obvious when we interact with people who are part of different cultures and institutional frameworks. We learn most when we are confronted by situations that challenge our expectations and preconceptions. Multicultural experiences such as this provide many possibilities for such learning.

Around the same time, my office hosted a presentation by Jon Rubin, the Director of the SUNY Center for Collaborative Online Learning (COIL). The COIL initiative involves pairing classes in the SUNY system with classes at foreign colleges and universities that investigate similar issues. Students in each class work together on joint projects that are shared and discussed using web 2.0 tools. This allows U.S. (and their foreign counterparts) to interact extensively with students from other cultures and nations without leaving their own countries. This weekend, I attended a COIL conference at SUNY-Purchase. (Representatives from 27 SUNY institutions, as well as several non-SUNY institutions were present at the conference.) There was a remarkable amount of energy and enthusiasm in the discussions at this conference.

Web 2.0 tools such as wikis, blogs, YouTube, and other media sharing sites, make it possible for students to share their work across international boundaries as easily as they share it with their domestic classmates. Skype, instant messaging systems, Facebook, Second Life (and other virtual worlds) make it possible for students to directly communicate with their international counterparts in real time at no cost (other than the cost of their time).

For students that cannot afford to participate in study abroad programs (and the vast majority of our students do not participate in these programs), such an arrangement provides a potential for intercultural and international interactions that would not otherwise exist. I’ve already begun to seek partners for my introductory microeconomics and labor economics classes and for my colleague Said Atri’s classes in international economics. There are, I believe, very strong possibilities for such possibilities in classes in language and cultures, the fine and performing arts, communications, sociology. psychology, political science, business administration, marketing, and even statistics (as the exam in my econometrics class suggested, even the comparison of simple correlations between variables can open up interesting discussions).