PlanetUSF

Considering yourself as a distance instructor, then take a few minutes to reflect on your situation. Ask yourself questions such as, how do I see the different delivery methodologies playing a role in my teaching schemata?
I’m not sure I would call them “methodologies”, but I see various delivery modes as options. Part of the instructor’s responsibility in preparing and organizing a course is to determine what mode/method is most appropriate for that course (content & learners).

Will I be using or trying something now that I have not considered before?
Since this is my third Distance Learning course (also third instructional technology course), most of the topics discussed I have already considered or at least had some exposure to them. One aspect I hadn’t previously considered was the possibility of adding research to my class by collecting data on my students as part of an ongoing project.

What do I see as some of the barriers that I might encounter?

I still think that group work is the most challenging aspect of teaching a distance learning class. A good number of students would say that the same is true for traditional classes as well. The same issues of group work (working together, roles/responsibilities of members, having to rely upon others, the strengths/weaknesses of members) are the same for distance learning and traditional classrooms. However, distance learning introduces other issues, such as arranging meeting times and places. It can be more difficult to coordinate various aspects of the work because you aren’t by default all together for class.

Overall, the issues that piqued my curiosity the most during this course revolve around research. While we were introduced to various NSD reports, I feel that more inquiry should occur about methodological issues with research in distance education.

It’s funny to see so many musicians playing the same instrument in one room. Campers are rehearsing as I type.

…and the staff fooling around:

I just finished escorting some of our under-age campers to a Taco Bell/Pizza Hut for lunch. Starting Sunday evening, meals will be at Masterson’s (on campus dining) and we will not need to escort anyone off campus. We have been really productive and expect another huge push through tomorrow before settling into some semblance of a routine. It’s invigorating to see such excitement on some of the attendees’ faces.

It was nice to meet Talkbass moderator Chris Fitzgerald, who is on faculty at the University of Louisville. Chris is the second TB moderator I’ve met in person (Jairaj Swann being the other) and has proved consistently that bass playing is a brotherhood. I’m looking forward to lessons with the faculty here. Our very own Jack Wilkins just arrived and I expect Steve Davis to come in shortly, rounding out the USF contingent.

Students are waiting in the hall to attend their second rhythm section session.

I’s seven thirty in the morning, much later than I normally get out of the apartment, but I am not dealing with it well today. We’re getting ready to check people in for the two-day seminars, getting instructions from Ben Gritton. I’ll be checking in people’s gear, but they get to schlep it. Perfect!

We’ll see when things change for the day, but I’ll be off for my a.m. assignment in just a minute.

Very late last night, I arrived in Louisville, KY for the Jamey Aebersold Summer Jazz Workshops. I am in the middle of helping set up for two weeks (and weekends) of camp. Look for updates as I get a bit of downtime.

Aside from the fact that I’m lazy, I have an excuse for my brief silence. On Tuesday the 12th of June, Meghan , Rylee, Audrey and I packed up and headed North. We stopped in Beckley, WV for the night and finished the next morning, getting in a little before noon. Though the drive was less stressful than I expected, but not without it’s difficulties. Rylee refused to drink from the travel water dish and, several hours into day one, started panting like a dog. I’ve never seen a cat pant, and found this disconcerting. She got lethargic and temperamental and worried us quite a bit. She drank from her own dish that night, though.

We went to Ohio for my Brother-In-Law’s wedding. The four of us have known each other since High School, which is why I was actually looking forward to this. The week was busy with golfing and parties and rehearsals and such. Each time I head to Ohio, I’m reminded of how much I miss it. It was beautiful up there.

I kept intending to blog and transcribe and do so many other things, but it just wasn’t happening.

Picture proof:

DSC_2735 Drop into black w logo border, originally uploaded by walter_april_haynes.

Basic setup here. I have set up a camera, tripod, wireless remote, and a bowl of water. I could not find the food coloring so I added some cool aid and here ya go. Drip.
Please visit our family’s website at www.plantcityartgallery.com
Thanks

By far, the most common search string directing people to this site is “Charles Barr.” Charles was a member of the Cleveland Orchestra Bass Section and was tragically killed last summer, having been struck by a truck while cycling. Richard Waugh, CO violist, embarked on a project to cement the memory of his dear friend and named it Riding For Charles. Today, Waugh dipped the front tire of his bicycle in the Atlantic Ocean following a 17 day coast-to-coast ride to raise money for the Charles Barr Memorial Chair .

I haven’t even had a chance to read all the posts (Waugh posted daily, via phone dictation to people back home), but I have been deeply moved by this endeavor. It is so uplifting to see someone take up a cause so personal. It’s great to do charity events and arts events, but I believe that depth in our daily lives is achieved in the presence of our friends. Waugh poignantly reflects:

After I left the beach, I did break down for a moment. I’ve been focused on this ride for a long time, and now it’s over. I thought of Charles and the RidingforCharles project and how that project has also come to an end. It’s bitter-sweet. But the Charles Barr Memorial Chair will exist as long as the Cleveland Orchestra does, and through this ride I have come to know Eric and Cathy and am pleased to call them dear friends.

My best wishes to Waugh and the Barrs (pictured), who were able to visit with Waugh during some of the precious down time the riders had. Please consider contributing to the fund.

I’ve been gone. I’m back. You’ll be hearing about why and seeing my new project soon!

http://dananilan.pbwiki.com/

As you’ve noticed, I haven’t blogged much this summer. Been out of town or just catching up with friends via MySpace. Now I’ve also created a del.icio.us network as well as an account in Facebook. I was mainly convinced to join the latter as a means to be part of the AoIR group, but in past few hours I’ve also found a group dedicated to the Oxford Internet Institute summer program.

Having resisted social networking sites for so long, I can now see Facebook as a place where I can do some of the same academic conference networking I’ve done in person and perhaps make even more international contacts as I prepare for my summer program and the impending job search!

And for a more conventional take on professional development, check out the resources compiled here by the Computers and Writing folks.

As a distance instructor that uses Centra as a synchronous environment to deliver training in our organization. We create programs for our HR partners in the field who must deliver HR program and processes to their internal customers. I have to decide on how to deliver the information to these HR professionals in the best way to get the message to them 1) using the tools my company has available and 2) in a format they can deliver to their customers.

We have a wide variety of levels of comfort with technology in our company and although we have asynchronous methods (bulletin boards, document repositories, intranet collaborative websites) most won’t use them. I have used most of the tools that are available to me - some with success, others not so much. So instead of new tools, I will consider using some of the interactions I’ve experienced in this class in different ways in my teaching schemata (plans).

Specifically, I will try having the learner answer questions posted on our intranet community boards, directed at using the information they were taught via the Synchronous session and have the answers tied into completion of the course materials. This will hopefully help to embed the learning more effectively and show me that they understood what they were trained on. Of course, I must still battle a culture of getting information fed to the employees in classroom or via email and get them to actually go to the intranet community boards. A marketing strategy might help. I’ll have to ponder it some more. ~donna

I’m a new distance learning student at usf, and i’m a little worried about the availability of some of the core classes I need to take. Some of them were not only not available online, but not available at all. I’m not talking about obscure electives, I’m talking about 1 or 2 of the core classes I need to take to graduate from my program. Of the 18 core classes I need to take, only two were available online, and I couldn’t take one of them, because I am lacking the prerequisite class. So, I am a part-time, first semester student, and I’m going to be forced to take one required course and one elective. Of the 15 core, and elective courses I searched, I could only find two online courses. Hopefully, this is not a sign of things to come, or I won’t graduate until 2015.

Students who read the Joe Williams book know that he views teacher unions as looking primarily after the material self-interest of teachers, and from the last class, you know that I am skeptical of that rhetorical stance. I want to spend a little time today on the history of teacher unionism, because I think it sheds a little more light on some of the caricatures of unions floating around public policy rhetoric. Unions are certainly far from flawless, but we should look at them analytically rather than from an emotion-filled framework that Williams (or anyone else) proposes.

There are two larger points I want you to take away from this. First, the modern history of teacher unionism is relatively short, only the 45 years or so in which any substantial portion of teachers in the U.S. have had collective-bargaining rights. School bureaucracies developed long before teacher unions became powerful in more than a handful of school districts. That history does not mean that teacher unions do not defend bureaucratic rules in some places, but one cannot blame teacher unions for the existence of bureaucracy.

The second larger point is that teacher unions have always struggled with the identity of a professional union. There has never been a time when teacher unions did not think about the material interests of teachers, but there has also never been a time when that focus on material interests was not in some tension with views of teachers as professionals and as advocates for children and education.

The end of this blog entry contains suggested readings that serve as the best historical sources about the history of teacher unionism in the United States.

The first wave

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, two organizations were successful in establishing themselves as the representatives of educators. One was national, focused on professionalism, and dominated by (mostly male) administrators. The other was local, frequently acting as a political advocate, and composed entirely of elementary (mostly female) teachers. Formed in 1870 by the merger of several other groups, the National Education Association (NEA) early had teachers as a majority of the membership, but the top echelons of the early NEA were administrators or those allied with administrators and focused on professionalism. Very little of the early NEA activities focused on the conditions of teachers. In Chicago, by contrast, the Chicago Teachers Federation was founded in 1897 by elementary teachers and headed for many years by Margaret Haley. Early in the 20th century, the Chicago Teachers Federation were politically active, participating in a lawsuit that forced the collection of back taxes from local corporations to increase school funding. The Chicago Teachers Federation was one of the founding local unions that created the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in 1916. A year later, the federation was essentially destroyed by a local school district rule that prohibited teachers from joining unions.

For decades after the weakening of the Chicago Teachers Federation, many organizations of teachers called themselves associations to avoid attacks on teacher unions. I think the St. Paul Federation of Teachers was the first to strike for better working conditions in the 1940s. (A strike is when a group of workers stays away from the job in protest of working conditions or low pay. Sometimes an organized union authorizes a strike, though there is also a long history of so-called wildcat strikes when a group of workers leave the job spontaneously. The existence of wildcat strikes is why I am hesitant to claim that the St. Paul strike was a first; there easily could have been a few wildcat teacher strikes before then that we just do not know about.)

For the most part, unions and teacher associations were relatively weak, trying to gain better working conditions by consulting with school boards and administrators where allowed, rather than seeking legal authority to bargain with school systems. In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, allegations at the national and state level that the loyalty of public employees was suspect also part of an era we often term McCarthyism, after Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. A number of local unions faced allegations that they were controlled by the Communist Part of America, and a number of purges (conducted both by communists and opponents) roiled New York City unions over the years.

All of these factors hindered organizing among teachers. In the 1950s, it was fairly common for teachers to have no right to time for planning, for a peaceful lunch, or even going to the bathroom during the student day.

The modern rise of teacher unions

Modern teacher unionism emerged in the 1960s. At the beginning of the decade, the NEA was dominated by administrators and tried to improve the condition of teachers indirectly at the national and local level, by talking with school officials and occasionally by making public pronouncements about the conditions of schools. The AFT was a much smaller organization, with fewer than 200,000 members. In 1960, neither national organization officially supported strikes. By the end of the decade, in large part because of militants in both the AFT and the NEA, a critical cluster of locals had acquired collective-bargaining authority (the right to bargain with school boards over the terms and conditions of work), and both national organizations decided to support the strikes of local affiliates.

The first to move into a more activist era was the AFT, in large part because New York teacher Al Shanker and others in the United Federation of Teachers led a strike in 1960 to improve pay and working conditions and to pressure politicians to require the New York Board of Education to bargain with teachers. The United Federation of Teachers was part of the AFT, and the national affiliate helped the local win a collective-bargaining election in 1961. With that victory, membership in the AFT expanded rapidly and started organizing locals in other school districts. In 1963, the AFT formally approved striking as a tool for improving the conditions of teachers.

The NEA moved into union organizing because the sudden growth of the AFT created competition for membership, and the tipping point was a strike in 1968 by Florida teachers. For half a decade, teachers in Florida had complained about low wages in an era when the state established minimum salaries. The NEA issued a report on poor conditions in 1965, and Republican Governor Claude Kirk had promised to improve teacher salaries in his 1966 election campaign. But nothing happened to improve salaries in 1967, and three short strikes in Pinellas, Broward, and Bay counties encouraged more militant teachers in Florida in planning a statewide strike. As the legislature was meeting in early 1968, Florida teachers demanded action by March 1. When Governor Kirk threatened to veto the legislation passed out of both houses to improve teacher salaries statewide because the bill included a tax hike, teachers walked off in late February. The national NEA governing bodies had moved slowly to support collective bargaining and edged towards supporting strikes, but the Florida strike finally tipped the NEA into formally backing strikes by local unions.

The militant teachers could not keep most teachers off work, and by early March, many had returned. Florida newspapers generally called the strike a failure, but Kirk held off on his veto and let the salary bill become law without his signature. The truth is that both the 1960 New York City teacher strike and the 1968 Florida teachers strike included only a minority of teachers in its more militant form, but in both cases, the strikes led in the long run to improved conditions for teachers and also to the right to bargaining collectively. In 1967, the New York legislature passed the Taylor Law, which forbade strikes by public employees but which also gave public employees the right to collective bargaining with their employers. In 1968, the new Florida state constitution included parallel provisions. Today in Florida, public employees cannot legally strike, but they do have the right to choose collective-bargaining representatives. Teachers have chosen collective bargaining in 66 of the 67 counties in Florida.

Teacher unions grew dramatically in the 1970s. Today, the AFT and NEA count several million members nationwide. In some states such as Florida, the statewide affiliate belongs to both national organizations. In other states, the national organizations compete. The legal structure varies by state today. Many states follow the hybrid structure of New York and Florida in its treatment of teachers and other public employees, with the right to bargain but without a right to strike. Some states allow strikes. Some states do not allow any collective bargaining by public employees. Texas does not allow collective bargaining but gives teachers and university faculty the right to a process to settle grievances. Some states such as Florida give university faculty the right to bargain. Other states exclude higher-education faculty from collective bargaining or give faculty in only some institutions the right to bargain. In many Northern states, public-employee unions have the right to collect representation fees from non-members. In Florida, public-employee unions only collect money from members, and teachers do not have to join the local union.

Teacher unions at the local level have three legal and ethical responsibilities: bargaining a contract on behalf of everyone they represent (what is called a bargaining unit), enforcing the provisions of a collective bargaining agreement, and operating in a democratic and effective manner. In Florida, collective bargaining agreements generally last three years, though most of its provisions will continue after its expiration until a new agreement is ratified. Every year after the ratification of a complete agreement, each side will generally meet to discuss salary provisions and occasionally a few other parts of the agreement. If the two sides cannot agree on contractual language, there is a legal process to resolve such an impasse.

A K-12 contract will commonly describe the hours that a teacher must work, how much time a teacher has without students for planning and lunch, what jobs a teacher can volunteer for, starting salaries, salary increases for experience and additional levels of education, procedures to use when teachers do something wrong, and anything else that the union and the district school board agree to discuss and are allowed to set through a collective bargaining agreement. In almost all cases, the collective bargaining agreement also describes how the two sides resolve alleged violations of the contract through a grievance process, one that usually starts with informal attempts to address the violation and ending with binding arbitration.

What is a professional?

Even while both the NEA and AFT became more union-like in their behavior, they made statements about general policy issues in education. The NEA has a huge convention every year, the Representative Assembly, and this group of 9,000 teachers and other educators commonly approves policy statements. The AFT holds a smaller convention every other year and also approves policy statements. In 2006, for example, the NEA Representative Assembly approved a set of recommendations for changing the No Child Left Behind Act.

One of the trickiest areas for both affiliates is in the description of teaching as an occupation and what teachers need to be and do. Both unions use the term professional to describe both what teachers do and also how they should be treated. Both national organizations have professional-development arms that print materials for teachers and hold seminars for teachers wanting to improve their skills; many state affiliates and local unions do the same. From the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s, the AFT was more visible in taking positions in favor of education reform. Beginning in 1970, Al Shanker had a weekly paid advertisement placed on the editorial pages of the New York Times, an advertisement that looked like an opinion column and gave Shanker a platform for talking about education. He used it to promote his view that teachers needed support, needed to be professional, and needed an education system with higher demands on students. He supported reforms in the 1980s that raised graduation requirements after the national report A Nation at Risk.

One reading the Shanker advertisement/column every week could easily assume that the AFT and the NEA had switched places between 1960 and 1980, with the NEA more obviously liberal in its policy pronouncements and with the AFT talking about professionalism. That is partially true at the national level. The AFT today is generally associated with the higher nominal standards that Shanker encouraged. But both organizations talk about teachers as professionals, support an academic curriculum, and are skeptical of at least parts of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Moreover, those national differences blur when one looks at state and local organizations. Local unions and their state affiliates often make strategic choices based on local circumstances. For example, while some critics of teachers unions point to vocal opposition to merit pay in some quarters, some locals have negotiated some version of performance pay when they have judged it in the interest of the teachers they represent and when they participate in the creation of the program. Some local contracts have rigid considerations of seniority in personnel decisions, but many are flexible. In these decisions, the views of the national pale in comparison with what union leaders at the local level think.

Local differences also blur when unions become involved in politics. In many states, the teachers unions have indirect political power through the ability to endorse candidates for election and more direct power when members vote as a bloc for individual candidates or engage in campaign work. (Many locals also ask members to contribute beyond dues to separate funds that can go to candidates directly. Member dues are not used in such efforts.) In Florida, many local teachers unions have candidate questionnaires and interviews where members can ask questions of politicians and decide whether they will recommend a candidate for election. This endorsement process is at its most powerful at the local level, in terms of school board elections where many voters will listen to the views of teachers and where turnout is low. Those local endorsements often turn on local concerns, not national policy issues.

Disclosure

In the interests of disclosure, you should know that I have been a member of the faculty union at USF since I was hired in 1996. I became more active in 2001 and 2002 when the newly-appointed Board of Trustees at USF violated academic freedom in several ways. I am currently the USF chapter president and the university system vice president in the United Faculty of Florida, which belongs to the Florida Education Association. I do not always agree with the decisions of my state affiliate (or both national affiliates), and I am occasionally on the losing end of votes in the faculty union, but that is the nature of democracy. I am a member of the union because it is the only democratic body of faculty (and teachers and other educators in K-12 systems) that has legal authority to protect the interests and the shared values of the employees it represents.

Suggested readings

Michael Makowsky, The 1968 Florida Teachers’ Strike and the Emergence of Teacher Unionism, paper delivered at the Florida Conference of Historians (March 11-13, 1994, Orange Park, Florida). This paper is drawn from his dissertation research at Florida State University in the 1990s. Oral history interviews are available in the oral history section of the FSU library special collections department.

Marjorie Murphy, Blackboard Unions: The AFT and the NEA, 1900-1980 (Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1990). Murphy’s book is the standard history on teacher unionism in the 20th century.

Kate Rousmaniere, Citizen-Teacher: The Life and Leadership of Margaret Haley (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005). Rousmaniere’s biography of Haley is an important source for the history of the Chicago Teachers Federation.

Wayne J. Urban, Why Teachers Organized (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982). Urban’s book is an essential resource for the history of the National Education Association.

______, Gender, Race, and the National Education Association: Professionalism and Its Limitations (New York : RoutledgeFalmer, 2000). Urban rethought some of his views in this book.

Arsenal have sold Thierry Henry to Barcelona for 16 million pounds. Arseblogger has written up a nice perspective here and the man himself speaks here. The man was pure class, and his final statements make that abundantly clear.

Of course, now that he’s left Arsenal, the rest of his career is set-up for immense dissappointment (Overmars, Petit, Anelka, Pires, Viera, etc.). I predict a metatarsal injury sometime in the near future.

Not that it matters anyway, seeing as he’ll be fighting for playing time with Ronaldinho, Messi, Eto’o, Giuly, etc.

Greetings to all, this is my first post. I’m about to begin my life as a USF graduate student in the library and information science program. Let me tell you, I am no longer worried that someone is going to sneak into my account, register for my classes for me, or read my emails. Those password restrictions are tough. I had to try about 13 different variations of words and numbers before it would let me move on to the next step. First it was, sorry that resembles a word from the dictionary. Then, sorry you have too many similar characters in your password. (It knows swear words too!) Finally, I started using these weird acronyms, but still it was telling me that these were words from the dictionary. I feel like Jason Bourne. Actually, I feel more like a person with a really expensive car alarm on a crappy car.

After many successful years of operation, time and circumstances have led The Pierian Press, Inc. to discontinue production of their three databases, Consumers Index, FactSearch, and Media Review Digest. Unfortunately, this development affects three of our databases.

OCLC will continue to offer the databases via FirstSearch through June 30, 2007.

The data from the 2006 Journal Citation Reports is now available in the ISI Web of Knowledge database. This data gives information on how many times a journal was cited, how many it has cited other journals and it’s impact factor, among others.

This kind of information is interesting when you are choosing a journal to submit an article, or when you are collecting additional information for a tenure and/or promotion dossier.

You can access the Journal Citation Reports in the Web of Knowledge database. Go to MetaLib, search the database by name and click on the resulting link. In the database itself, at the very top, you will see a drop-down menu. You will see the option for the Reports. If you are from off campus, don’t forget to log into the network first.

I like what I’ve read about a man named John Muir.

One of his stories is STICKEEN about a little black dog named Stickeen who won a place in John Muir’s heart while traveling in Alaska in 1880. Together they explored the Brady Glacier in what is now Glacier National Park in Alaska.

I also enjoyed reading Travels in Alaska which details the 1880 trip in more detail and others. Stickeen is mentioned again in this story with a little more detail. No matter where he went the little dog Stickeen followed relentlessly.
Here is an excerpt.
_ In the midst of the general auroral glow and the
_ specially vivid flashes made by the frightened fish darting
_ahead and
_ to right and left of the canoe, our attention was suddenly
_ fixed by a
_ long, steady, comet-like blaze that seemed to be made by
_some
_ frightful monster that was pursuing us. But when the
_ portentous
_ object reached the canoe, it proved to be only our little dog,
_ Stickeen.

I enjoy anthropology and enjoyed his description of the lives of the natives he encountered.

A wealthy railroad executive man named Edward Henry Harriman gathered scientist from different fields in science and made an expedition to Alaska in 1899. He invited John Muir. They collected a wealth of data but also sparked some controversy. They entered what they thought was an abandoned Tlingit village and took many artifacts including five totem polls. After being on display in museums around the world including the Peabody Museum. in 1990 President George Bush signed into law the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which mandated that museums receiving federal funds return cultural property to the native groups to which they belong. The artifacts were finally rightfully returned to the Tlingit Natives nearly a hundred years after being taken. I read that John Muir wished to have no part in the removal of the artifacts and I commend him for being a man ahead of his time with respects to native rights and environmental conservation and protection.

Read more of my thoughts at http://www.flickr.com/photos/walterhaynes
and my families website at http://www.plantcityartgallery.com

Thanks
-Walt Haynes

In the Social Foundations class last night, I did not have time to explain how disability is best seen in context. There are at least two dimensions of this in schooling, one regarding students and another on teaching skills. You may be more familiar with seeing the context of student disability issues. For example, the problem for students who use wheelchairs is an interaction between how they move around and the physical structure of the building. Today, if a student using a wheelchair cannot access a building, we first ask if the building has a ramp, doors that accommodate wheelchairs, and so forth. We no longer blame the wheelchair user or his or her physical attributes.

That same contextual approach can be used in looking at academic problems. Forty years ago, psychologist Nicholas Hobbs argued that behavioral problems are contextual—the fancy term in psychology is ecological perspective, a term most commonly associated with Urie Bronfenbrenner. We look at the interaction between a student and her or his environment. Special educators will recommend that you look at the environment as well as the student to see what can improve the life of a student and academic performance. Sometimes, it makes sense to focus on student, but it is often hard to disentangle the problems of an individual student from the environment. Is a weak reader having problems because of some internal difficulty or because her or his teachers have not provided enough opportunity to read with immediate feedback?

Changing that perspective, from an internal deficit to an interactional explanation, is harder than creating special education programs in the first place. The history and routines of schooling tend to emphasize the individual problem over the environment. Common suggestions about children identified as having attention deficit disorder (ADD or ADHD) are a case in point. I am agnostic about the value of psychotropic drugs for any child; over the years, school psychology colleagues have pointed out the existence of double-blind trials that individuals can use, but double-blind trials of psychotropic drugs are hard to arrange. I am certainly willing to grant that Ritalin and other drugs may help some children. But for a school to rely on a diagnosis and a prescription is foolhardy, because the consequences of ADD or ADHD are not instantly reversed by taking medication. If someone has missed valuable instructional time for whatever reason, then one must address the environmental issue and teach the child what she or he originally missed.

You will find that many special educators and others are sensitive to deficit assumptions and quick to correct them. What is less frequently discussed is the need to view teaching skills as a contextual matter as well. Consider first the specialization within teaching and the certification of special educators. This varies from state to state, with some states having categorical certification of special education teachers, different programs for teachers of students with learning disabilities, developmental disabilities, behavior problems, etc. Other states, such as Florida, have a single certification.

I invite you to step back from the pragmatic issues and think about the specialization as an organizational function: what message does specialization send about the ownership of students in special education and the responsibilities of all teachers to have skills to teach and accommodate students with disabilities? States are fairly clear that all teachers must work with students with disabilities, but there is an inherent tension involved between that inclusive mandate and specialization.

One can address the tension by viewing teacher skills in context. All teachers need to have a broad repertoire of instructional strategies, even if their daily routines emphasize a few. So most special educators and general-classroom teachers are aware of learning strategies such as mnemonics. But the opportunity to individualize may be far greater in smaller settings or when a teacher has time reserved for working with individuals or very small groups. I know many skilled, caring general-classroom teachers who can individualize instruction to a great degree, but the other demands of the day and the school can make the necessary time very scarce. One can thus define a special educator as much by having the repertoire and time to individualize as by having a unique set of skills. One must also keep practicing skills throughout a career, or they will atrophy, and so the opportunity to individualize is not only a matter of educating individual students but also keeping skills fresh.

Does a separate certification still make sense? I think so: general-education teachers are as much defined by curriculum coverage as by specific instructional techniques, and this is true of elementary teachers as well as subject specialists in secondary schools. In most undergraduate programs, those intending to become elementary teachers will spend more time learning the broader curriculum than special educators, whose programs emphasize a broader repertoire of individualizable skills.

Problem

Collecting Messages in any discussion board redraws the screen in such a way as to prevent subsequent viewings.

Here’s how to recreate the problem

1. Go into any discussion board discussion
2. Check the boxes next to some threads, or else select all threads, click Collect to collect the messages
3. Observe at this point that the screen with the collected messages loses it’s top tab frame
4. Scroll to the bottom of the collected messages and click OK(or else click the breadcrumb bar) to return to the discussion forum
5. Observe that the page is still without the top tab frame
6. No longer will threads display in the thread box, and the whole lower message pane will not render.

You can try to go to any other discussion post. So long as the top frame is missing, the discussion board will not work correctly. Collecting messages causes the page to be redrawn sans top frame.

Browser window without the tab frame, and no discussion board posts where there should be four

Work Around

The most straightforward solution is to reload the URL https://my.usf.edu, which will redraw the screen with a proper tabset on the top frame. You can then go into your course Tab and reenter your course.

It works, but it’s cumbersome.

When we come up with a better solution we’ll update this post.

Just like any other piece of software you install on your computer, users of P2P applications must be careful and configure their sharing folders properly. Otherwise, you may be sharing more than you asked for.

“… nearly 17,000 Pfizer employees will receive a heartwarming letting dictating that their identities have been compromised on a P2P network.”

Slyck News - Pfizer P2P Security Breach

DSC_2471 Eastern Screech Owl, originally uploaded by walter_april_haynes.

Here is an eastern screech owl.Visit our webpage at www.plantcityartgallery.com

DSC_2483 carnival legend, originally uploaded by walter_april_haynes.

Here is a view of the Carnival Cruise line cruise ship Legend moored at the Channelside attractions and the Florida Aquarium in Tampa. When it left dock It looked like a building moving. A few years ago April and I sailed on the Sensation from this same place in Tampa, FL. Visit our webpage at www.plantcityartgallery.com

Submissions are now accepted for the 2nd Annual Florida Book Awards, a program established in 2006 that recognizes, honors, and celebrates the best Florida literature published the previous year.

Authors who have residency in Florida may submit works of fiction or poetry that have a publication date between January 1, 2007 and December 31, 2007. Non-fiction works on a Florida topic published in 2007 may be submitted by any author. (…) Submissions are accepted in the following seven categories: General Fiction, Florida Nonfiction, Spanish Language Book, Poetry, Young Adult Literature, Children’s Literature, and Popular Fiction.

More information can be found at http://www.fsu.edu/~ams/bookawards/index.html.