Factors that Influence Students to Enroll into Teletechnet Programs

Some of the areas considered in this study include: 1. Identify the factors that influence student enrollment at the Southwest Virginia Community College Teletechnet site; 2. Identify the population of students enrolling at the Teletechnet program in regards to age and occupation; 3. Project the graduation rate of those students enrolling at the Teletechnet site located at Southwest Virginia Community College during spring 2002

Engaging With the Community

This article focuses on how higher education institutions (HEIs) engage with their external community, contribute to social and economic development, and underpin civil society and democracy. The external community consists of a wide-range of stakeholders from business and industry, the public, private and non-governmental sector, and civil society. While many HEIs have historically had a strong association to their city or nation, today the health of society and the economy is inextricably tied to greater collaboration between “town” and “gown”. The article has five main sections: i) Introduces the social and public responsibility of higher education, ii) Describes the policy context, iii) Defines “engagement”, iv) Offers some indicators to assess and measure engagement and v) Summarizes and makes some recommendations to help institutional leaders ensure engagement is successful and sustained

Theological Teflection : Methods

Reviewed by Rev. Susan Conra

Decolonial Dreamers and Dead Elephants

The 11 articles in this special themed issue examine the complexity of issues of power between individual researchers, between researchers and community organisations or higher education institutions, and between community organisations and institutions in relation to community-engaged research and scholarship. The articles uplift the pain and joy in community-engaged research, the harm and the benefits, the contradictions and tensions, and the true gifts and understanding gained in research with communities for the purpose of co-creating transformational change. We weave our own knowledge and experiences together with these individual articles as we seek ways to reimagine the future of community research and engagement. Specifically, we connect the near obliteration of African elephants and loss of Indigneous ways of knowing in Africa with the diverse communities, contexts and issues of power in community-engaged scholarship represented in this special volume. We, like the authors, hold a dream for the future of engaged scholarship that is more equitable, inclusive and morally just. We believe this dream is not only possible but achievable, as evidenced by the work of the authors in this volume. We present an African indigenous knowledge system, Ubuntu, whose principles, values and tenets simultaneously promote the conservation of the community as a whole and the harmonious existence of the individual within the community. We posit that the adaptation and adoption of this knowledge system within the scholarship and practice of community-university partnerships and community research relationships may enable the development of a mutuality and reciprocity that levels power hierarchies within the personal, organisational and societal arenas of community-university partnerships. We demonstrate that many of the cases described by contributors to this special volume resonate with this knowledge system, which itself has survived colonisation and its concomitant epistemicide. Together, the authors help paint a pathway for those who want to become decolonial dreamers (la paperson 2017) daring to reimagine the nature of power in research as we collectively find ways to dream bigger in order to uncover new and exciting possibilities for this work we call community-engaged scholarship

Lesson 4--Friends are Everywhere.

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A NERCHE Annual Report: Profiles of Public Engagement: Findings from the Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement for Early Career Faculty

Community-campus engagement has evolved significantly over the past quarter century, shaped by a number of factors. One has been the effort to reclaim the civic mission of American higher education. Frank Newman, while at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in the early 1980s, asserted that the most critical demand is to restore to higher education its original purpose of preparing graduates for a life of involved and committed citizenship,” and concluded that “the advancement of civic learning, therefore, must become higher education\u27s most central goal (1985, xiv). Another factor has been the increased understanding that colleges and universities serve as “anchor institutions” (Axelrod & Dubb, 2010) and thus have responsibilities to their neighbors to act as “stewards of place” (American Association of State Colleges and Universities, 2002). There is also the influence of research in the cognitive sciences and developmental psychology that has provided a deep understanding of how students learn, highlighting the importance of validating prior experiences and gaining higher-order thinking skills through inquiry-based, problem-posing teaching and learning strategies that involve students in addressing important, trans-disciplinary issues in communities (National Research Council, 2000). Finally, there is an emerging awareness that generating knowledge increasingly requires new epistemological frameworks and research methods that honor and emphasize the “ecological” or interconnected nature of knowledge generation that includes but go well beyond the academy (Bjarnason & Coldstream, 2003; Gibbons et al., 1994; Saltmarsh, 2011). This last factor, in turn, is being driven especially by a new generation of scholars who are fundamentally oriented to networked knowledge generation and are creating integrated academic identities as engaged scholars (Sturm, Eatman, Saltmarsh, & Bush, 2011). In many ways, the Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement is a product of this set of influences, particularly the evolution of perspectives on knowledge generation and the scholarly work of faculty. NERCHE created the annual Ernest A. Lynton Award in 1996 to recognize excellence in what was then called “Faculty Professional Service and Academic Outreach.” In 2007, it was renamed the Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement to reflect shifts during the intervening decade toward a fundamentally more collaborative, integrative conceptualization of faculty work. What has not changed is the recognition of Ernest Lynton’s key contributions to engaged knowledge generation and its implications for faculty work and institutional change

Lesson 7--Friends Join a Group.

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Quizzes on tap: exporting a test generation system from one less resourced language to another

It is difficult to develop and deploy Language Technology and applications for minority languages for many reasons. These include the lack of Natural Language Processing (NLP) resources for the language, a scarcity of NLP researchers who speak the language and the communication gap between teachers in the classroom and researchers working in universities and other centres of research. One approach to overcoming these obstacles is for researchers interested in Less-Resourced Languages (LRLs) to work together in reusing and adapting existing resources where possible. This article outlines how a multiple-choice quiz generator for Basque was adapted for Irish. The Quizzes on Tap (QOT) system uses Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to automatically generate multiple choice test items. Adapting the Basque application to work for Irish involved the sourcing of suitable Irish corpora and a morphological engine for Irish, as well as the compilation of a development set. Various integration issues arising from differences between Basque and Irish needed to be dealt with. The QOT system provides a useful resource that enables Irish teachers to produce both domain-specific and generalknowledge quizzes in a timely manner, for children with varying levels of exposure to the language. Keywords: LRL, less-resourced languages, Irish, morphological analysis, multiple choice tes

Housing for All: Addressing the Housing Needs of Massachusetts\u27 North Shore Residents

The aim of this report is to support North Shore efforts to build a regional approach to housing. The report explores the housing needs of people who are caught in the squeeze between low incomes and high housing costs. The report has two goals: to provide information for understanding the need to expand below market rate housing; to illustrate that need by providing detailed documentation on the situation in Gloucester, Peabody, and Salem. The report is not intended to propose solutions, but to provide groundwork for solutions

Body mass index, prudent diet score and social class across three generations: evidence from the Hertfordshire Intergenerational Study.

BACKGROUND: Studies describing body mass index (BMI) and prudent diet score have reported that they are associated between parents and children. The Hertfordshire Intergenerational Study, which contains BMI, diet and social class information across three generations, provides an opportunity to consider the influence of grandparental and parental BMI and prudent diet score across multiple generations, and the influence of grandparental and parental social class on child BMI. METHODS: Linear regressions examining the tracking of adult BMI and prudent diet score across three generations (grandparent (F0), parent (F1) and child (F2)) were run from parent to child and from grandparent to grandchild. Linear mixed models investigated the influence of F0 and F1 BMI or prudent diet score on F2 BMI and prudent diet score. Linear regressions were run to determine whether social class and prudent diet score of parents and grandparents influenced the BMI of children and grandchildren. RESULTS: BMI was significantly associated across each generational pair and from F0 to F1 in multilevel models. Prudent diet score was significantly positively associated between grandparents and grandchildren. Lower grandparental and parental social class had a significantly positive association with F2 BMI (F0 low social class: b=1.188 kg/m2, 95% CI 0.060 to 2.315, p=0.039; F1 middle social class: b=2.477 kg/m2, 95% CI 0.726 to 4.227, p=0.006). CONCLUSION: Adult BMI tracks across generations of the Hertfordshire Intergenerational Study, and child BMI is associated with parental and grandparental social class. The results presented here add to literature supporting behavioural and social factors in the transmission of BMI across generations