PlanetUSF

Tips for new ACHE students in their first semester.

Before you begin your first semester…do the following:

1. Get to know your professors. Checkout ACHE website and learn who they are. Meet and greet them. Do not miss the Graduate student retreat. The earliest one is on Saturday, Sept 12, 2009. Checkout the ACHE website!

2. Get to know what you want to accomplish within specific time limit. eg. When do you want to complete the program? When do you want to take your qualifying exam? When do you want to begin and finish your dissertation?

3. Consider your completion time vs. your tuition costs (if you’re not on scholarship or assistantship). Consider carefully, if you finish later…you might experience an opportunity cost to get higher salary at your job!

4. Choose your program of study committee members to prepare your POS form (in no. 5). Just choose several professors you think will have the same interest research as you are. Don’t worry, you can always change the members later on before your dissertation!

5. Plan your program of study. Get the POS forms here. Make sure that you fill this form in and turn it in before you take a total of 12 credits course. Although in the past this hasn’t been enforced, it is important to do it early anyway. You’ll get the benefit from planning your courses carefully so that your target completion time won’t be missed.

6. Don’t miss your registration schedule. If the class capacity is limited, it’s good to register early because you might not get the course you want. If there’s a hold in your registration status, work on it early. How to search for your classes? Access OASIS schedule search here. How to register? Access your OASIS here. Use your U number and password to login to OASIS.

7. Contact your instructors of your courses and ask for their syllabus. You can purchase the textbooks early so that you can find bargain prices. Sometimes (not always) the USF bookstore prices are more expensive. You can also check USF bookstore website to find out what are your courses’ textbooks.

Good luck! I hope you’ll have everything in your hand and everything goes smoothly!

PS: email me: djajalak@coedu.usf.edu if you want to ask more questions.

I plan to use this blog to share my own experiences and share some tips for new ACHE students…
Please follow at your own risk! I will not be responsible for any consequences you have, please think carefully before you act!

Aphasia, they say, is an impairment of all modalities of language, including listening comprehension, oral expression, reading, and writing, due to a brain injury like stroke. This definition is technically correct, but incomplete.

I first learned that this was an incomplete definition as a Master’s student, serving as a resident assistant for a specialized aphasia rehabilitation program. Every Friday night after our early dinner, I watched a gentleman in the program dress carefully in a classy suit, shined shoes, pocketchief and matching tie. He would rap on our door with his gold-tipped cane, pull out a 3×5 card from his coat pocket, point to some of the words written there, and say “koo koo?”. These were the only words he could say. But he was asking us to call him a taxi to take him to the bar of one of the nicer hotels in town. We could see on his card that he also had the address of the hotel written down, and the address of the residence where he would return to at the end of the evening. In the interim, it was apparent that he successfully ordered his drinks, and by all reports he managed to get his usual, favorite cocktails. He would return no later than 10 p.m., cheerfully waving to thank us for checking on him, and uttering a slightly slurred “koo-koo” as a “good night”.

I think of some young men who had strokes with aphasia in their twenties. One of them spent a year and hundreds of job interviews determined to return to work. Another one, who had been a salesman, tried for many differen jobs, finally accepting a pizza delivery job. “Just pizza, you know”, he told me, “but working, working. And then next one, better.”

Another person, who also had had a stroke at a relatively young age, went from working as a highly educated professional with a graduate degree to working as a janitor. He did this, remaining independent and pursuing new computer technologies that helped him to write and communicate with people, for over 20 years. He tirelessly worked to get information and articles about aphasia out to newspapers, magazines, and professional conferences. At a national convention for people with aphasia, at the end of his talk, he stood in front of hundreds of people and yelled out, “I am proud to be aphasic!” And the entire audience clapped and cheered with him.

There’s a lot more to aphasia than the impairments. The impairments are the things that make the distinctive signature of aphasia, how we know that someone has aphasia after they are tested or evaluated. But for the person with aphasia, the list of impairments is just a gateway to a new journey, a new life, what Cleo Hutton described as “stroke-land”.

Speech-language pathologists have a very unusual role in all of this. We figure out when someone has aphasia, or doesn’t. We recommend and provide therapies that help the person improve language and communication skills. We share information about aphasia, what happens over time, and how the person can get back to doing the things that are important in his/her life. We serve as guides, helping to bring people from a place and time without aphasia to a new place and time with aphasia. And yet, we ourselves have never experienced what it is like to live in that “stroke-land”.

Recent testing has shown that the 1.6.0_12 version of Java shows a better user experience than the previous versions. Elluminate recommends that users on Windows update to this version of Java at the earliest opportunity - you can find the latest version at the Sun Java download page.

There are a couple of course roles available in Blackboard. I’ll do my best to explain them and how they come to pass at USF.

The most privileged role is called Instructor. The Instructor role has full access to the course in Blackboard. They can change the roles(promote or demote) of other people in their course. They are listed as Instructors of courses in various Blackboard reports.

In general, Instructors are added to Blackboard courses automatically based on the information in Banner. Anyone who is assigned as an Instructor of Record (IOR) regardless of primary or not, will be added to that course as an Instructor in Blackboard. The IOR is important to Blackboard as anyone who is an IOR in Banner is also eligible to submit final grades to Banner via eGrades in Blackboard.

The other roles in Blackboard:
- Teaching Assistant(TA): This role has almost all the access to a course in Blackboard as the Instructor, but is not listed as an Instructor. This role can add and remove content, grades, assessments. The only thing this role cannot do is manually add students to the course in Blackboard, or change the roles of students in the course (promote a student to a TA or Builder for example). TA’s also cannot submit eGrades.

- Grader: This role has full access to exams and exam results, and to the Grade Center. This role cannot add or remove content.

- Builder: The contrapositive to the Grader. This role can add and remove content and exams. This role cannot view student exam submissions, nor can it access the Grade Center.

A Person cannot have more than one role. Generally speaking, the roles are additive, that is
Grader = grades
Builder = content
Grader + Builder = TA
TA + role change privilege = Instructor

These three roles along with the Instructor can be assigned to anyone in the course by another Instructor of the course. The roles in Blackboard do not directly correspond to Banner, so for example, if I made you an Instructor of my course in Blackboard, you would not necessarily be or need to be an Instructor in Banner. Said another way, Instructor assignments in Banner are reflected in Blackboard, but not vice versa.

As a basic explanation, anyone who has an account in Blackboard can be made an Instructor/TA/Grader/Builder/Student of a course in Blackboard. The person does not need to be in Banner. There are a few caveats
- If the person was an Instructor in Banner first, they are automatically added as Instructor in Blackboard and special steps need to be taken to override.
- If the person was a Student in Banner first, they are automatically added as Student in Blackboard and special steps need to be taken to override
Otherwise, anyone added to a course by someone else retains that role for as long as needed.

Late last week I received the exemption letter and downloaded the dataset for NLSY79 from the NLS Investigator.

Next step: familiarize myself with the sampling codes for R (an open-source statistical package similar to S-Plus). I wish R had been around when I was in grad school, because in several ways it’s simpler than either SAS or SPSS. Any loss of speed is largely irrelevant to those of us who do piddling social-science statistics. I’ve used R for a few pilot things, but this and another project I need to finish up will be the first two projects I’ll be using R for in a more intensive way, and it’s time to brush up on a new language.

From the time you start to stand on your own small feet while trying to say “dada,” you’re already beginning the process of learning. After this point, you go to elementary school, middle school, high school, and now you’re in college. Elbert Hubbard, an American author and editor, stated that, “Education is a form of self delusion” (Simanek). Essentially, having a degree in Physics won’t make you Albert Einstein. In society today, education has become more about specialization. Most of my colleagues had the notion that college would offer courses solely pertaining to their major. While this is a disappointment to many, having a well rounded education will be more valuable to students in the future. A policy most universities follow is that concerning general education requirements. The University of South Florida, in particular, allows you to declare your major once you’ve taken two years worth of general education credits along with summer hours.

You may be wondering why you’re in an English Composition class. You may not write as much after this course as you will during this year, but when you get into your major, you will eventually have to write about your field of study. The book Graduate and Continuing Education for Community College Leaders: What it Means Today discusses that “[students] today must produce their own letters, reports, and scholarly manuscripts…obvious errors stand out in written documents” (Palmer and Katsinas 29). If you write a paper concerning Biology, but you can’t spell “deoxyribonucleic acid”, no one will take you seriously. When you don’t know if something is beneficial or not, you can always evaluate it. Evaluations arguments are essential that you will be able to distinguish if some things like the general education requirements are good if they meet certain criteria (Ramage, Bean, and Johnson 290). The general education requirement policy at USF is a good rule because it meets the criteria of being well rounded in terms of core subjects, differentiated interests, and job requirements.

In order to stand tall, you need a good foundation. At USF the university focuses on core subjects in order for you to have a well rounded education. In an article entitled “A Core Curriculum for Tomorrow’s Citizens” written for the Chronicle Review, the author discusses the importance of college students and their understanding of the values core values of America (Lewis B20). Lewis says that although students today are diverse “they will all be citizens” (B20). In being a citizen, we have to be educated in what our freedoms are and what our country was founded on (Lewis B20). This may seem irrelevant to core subjects in college, but in order to declare ourselves as intelligent adults and have the sufficient power to reason, we need to know how to write papers, solve math problems, and debate arguments. By having a well rounded education concerning these general requirements, we’re able to prove to any adult or official that we can be the future leaders and law makers. In the University of South Florida Strategic plan it states that the university values “student competitiveness, success and academic achievement through knowledge, communication and critical thinking skill acquisition” (Strategic Plan). USF is providing an education where we’ll learn and understand different subjects to the best of our abilities and be able to analyze and question them as well.

In addition to taking core subjects, being well rounded allows for you to discover unknown interests. When I first came into college, I was really set on my desire to become a therapist. It is still an option for me, but now that I’ve taken Intro to Drama and English Composition, I’ve realized that I enjoy writing more than I do Psychology. This being your first year, you may not know which major is the most suitable. In an article entitled “Career Service Offers Programs to Aid Students” it mentions that students change their major at least three times at Central Michigan University (Wilson 1). There are services at USF that help you in this process like the Career Center and Academic advising services.

As well as ascertaining new interests, general education requirements allow you to be well rounded in terms of your future career. My friend John used to work at Radio Shack. He knew everything about computers and how to fix them. He wasn’t, however, so good at talking to customers. At the time he was taking a public speaking class and that gave him the confidence to speak more to those that asked for help. The book Trends in Community College Curriculum discusses that one of the “dimensions” arising from general education requirements is “multicultural study” (Cohen 41). By taking courses where you learn about other cultures, you can impress customers of different ethnicities. Doctors in particular should know about a patients’ cultural and/or religious background to be wary of any phobias or precautions they may encounter from them. By taking courses concerning culture, you will have a better knowledge of people you will work with in the future and thus creating a better working environment.

Even so, the general education requirements policy is not perfect. In the Undergraduate Catalog site entitled “General Education Policy” it states, “All courses listed are certified as meeting the General Education requirement as of April, 1997” (General Education Policy 43). The issue with this is that we’re in the year 2009. It’s been over a decade since they’ve made any drastic changes to this policy. The university has to realize that the concept of education changes over time. My father always spoke about how being in a Liberal Arts College helped him tremendously in life. On the other hand, my cousin who solely focused on computers realized that he needed to know more about a specific field of computers in order to earn a job. Although I’m in support of this policy, the current generation is more focused on specialization. In order to support this change, perhaps USF could reconsider some of their requirements.

I know some of you are frustrated because you feel as though biology has nothing to do with being a third grade teacher or writing has nothing to do with being a Statistician. What you don’t realize is that you’ll probably teach Biology to some degree in third grade, and Statistics requires a lot of reasoning and writing which are two major components of the composition course. In the book entitled Leadership and Management Issues for a New Century the authors mention that “policy and practice based in foundation theoretical and conceptual scholarship and informed by research, assessment, and evaluation is essential” (Woodard, Love, and Komives 58). The University of South Florida has based its requirements policy on fundamental courses that will theoretically help us throughout our lives. You may not be trying to say “dada,” but you’re still beginning to walk on your own two feet only now they contain larger phalanges that make up our digits.
 
Works Cited
Cohen, Arthur M. Relating Curriculum and Transfer. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994.
Lewis, Harry R. “A Core Curriculum for Tomorrow’s Citizens.” The Chronicle Review 54 (2007): B20. Chronicle.com. 4 Mar. 2009 .
“Liberal Arts Requirements.” USF.edu. 1997. 15 Mar. 2009
.
Palmer, James C. and Stephen G. Katsinas. Graduate and Continuing Education for Community
College Leaders: What it Means Today. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1996.
Ramage, John D., John C. Bean, and June Johnson. Writing Arguments: A Rhetoric with Readings. 7th. New York: Pearson, 2007.
Simanek, Donald. “Quotes on Education.” Lhup.edu. 4 Mar. 2009 .
“Transforming Higher Education for Global Innovation Strategic Plan 2007-2012” USF.edu. 4 Mar. 2009 < http://www.ods.usf.edu/Plans/Strategic/values.htm.”
Wilson, Milinda. "Many Students Change Major During College." Cm-life.com. 13 Feb. 2006. The Independent Voice of Central Michigan University. 4 Mar. 2009 .
Woodard, Dudley B., Patrick Love, and Susan R. Komives. Leadership and Management Issues for a New Century. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000.

Trey & Train, originally uploaded by paulltran.

I could write about Trey all I want and he still wouldn’t know about my blog. Well, not for now at least. Trey and I went driving down an old road and found some abandoned trains. Cool look…i must say.

Tampa Theater, originally uploaded by paulltran.

There are many things to see in Tampa. I love how nice and old everything looks in the downtown area. This is when I attended the Gasparilla (did I spell that right?) art festival. The lighting and everything looked great that day.

After three weeks of communication with USF Academic Computing, I finally got them to delete the old blog so I could start over. Maybe it was hacked, I don’t know, and they kept telling me it was working.

Anyway, now I have a fresh blog to work with for another class.

Bye for now . . .

In my continued search of a new language/framework/thing to pick up, I’ve become pretty fascinated with Ruby. The word I have settled on for the Ruby language itself is “concise”, coming from C the amount of work that can be done in a few lines often makes me feel like I’ve left something out… but no, Ruby is there in the background doing it’s thing.

I have concerns about performance, Ruby 1.8 is slow. Ruby 1.9 however looks to be a huge improvement in speed.

Before dedicating myself to anything I perform a very simple test: I run a Google search for “X sucks” where X is whatever it is I plan to spend time learning. I’ll read through all the criticism, then try to figure out if the cons outweigh the pros. I discovered using this method that Ruby and RoR are perhaps the two most hated on projects in the open-source world. Nonetheless, for some reason I am drawn to the syntax of Ruby and the concepts behind RoR. I can see the possibilities. While the framework might not be solid and the language is slow, I can’t see anything but greatness in the future for Ruby and Rails, and it has nothing to do with either.

The reason I can see Ruby and RoR dominating the web environment within the next 5 years is the ideas and concepts behind them. With Ruby you have a purely OO language, that while slow, in a release or two it could be on the same performance level as PHP. With RoR you have a framework that makes huge tasks relatively trivial, but the documentation is horrible and you really need to understand Ruby before doing anything other than the most basic CRUD operations.

Now, on the flipside there are many RoR imitators hoping to copy these ideas and concepts into other languages. I’ve already discussed my experienced with PHP frameworks. What I found though is that while these RoR-like frameworks imitate the concepts well, what differentiates RoR is how the framework blends so well with the language. With CakePHP and symfony, I never got over the feeling that I was working with a framework that was trying to do things in a way that did not suite the language and made working with the framework more of a burden.

When you break down the pros and cons of any framework though, it really just comes down to what your comfortable with. I was looking to learn a new language and build a dynamic user-driven website with it, with RoR I found the ability to do both at the same time.

The Blackboard Grade Center benefits from having a lot of vertical screen space in which to display rows of students. The web browser uses a lot of that space with tool bars, address bars, and other bars. In Windows, you can temporarily reclaim that space by going into FullScreen mode. In both Internet Explorer and Firefox (Windows only), press F11 to go into FullScreen mode. Pressing F11 again to exit FullScreen and go back to normal.

Using FullScreen can easily display an extra 6-7 students on your screen. For people with limited resolution monitors such as netbook computers, FullScreen is essential for successfully using the Grade Center.

Regular view

FullScreen view

Whee I’ve updated the wordpress from the horrible default (v1.5) to the latest, v2.7.1!

I sent in the request for an IRB exemption certification for this pilot project, because secondary analysis of existing longitudinal data sets would not give me any identifiable information. There is an option for the NLSY79 to acquire geocoding (which requires permission from the Bureau of Labor Statistics as well as an IRB form), but that’s not needed for this particular project. We’ll see how long the response takes!

Update 1:31pm: Blackboard is back to full service levels.

A system error occurred overnight March 4th resulting in Blackboard being completely unavailable from about 7:30-8:30am. Resolving the error introduced an instability in the shared file system that resulted in a bottleneck that backed everything up in Blackboard. The result was slow, spotty service from 8:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. At 12:30, the system was shutdown completely and brought back online in a more orderly manner. From 12:30 to 1:30 the system was completely unavailable. As of 1:30 service has been completely restored.

March 4th
• 0730-0830 : Blackboard completely unavailable
• 0830-1230 : Service slow, spotty
• 1230-1330 : Blackboard completely unavailable
• 1330- : Blackboard available

Our apologies for this extended outage. We continue to review this incident to ensure a better response if it happens again.

Thank you for your patience.