HOW SUCCESSFUL ARE BR&E IMPLEMENTATION EFFORTS? A FOUR-STATE EXAMPLE

For several years, Business Retention and Expansion professionals have pointed out that BR&E visitation programs appear to be relatively successful until it comes time to implement the plans developed in the BR&E visitation program. At the implementation stage, however, there have been very mixed reports. A number of articles have documented the benefits of BR&E visitation programs. Yet, none of these have examined the implementation of the strategic plans developed by BR&E visitation programs. Few communities would undertake the program if they did not expect to see some action on their plans. Likewise, few state agencies or universities would continue to support BR&E educational efforts if the BR&E programs do not implement the results of their BR&E visitation and planning programs. Because of the importance of this issue and the lack of systematic research on it, a four-state research project was conducted on this issue over the past two years. The major questions addressed were: (1) To what degree have BR&E visitation programs implemented the strategic plans which they developed? (2) How beneficial have these BR&E plans been? (3) Did these BR&E visitation programs conform to strategic planning principles? (4) Was the level of benefits received higher for programs that followed strategic planning principles?Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Integration of Technology in Math and Science Education – A Model for Teaching Elementary and Middle School Pre-Service Teachers

This paper describes the development and implementation of a course, Integration of Technology in Math and Science Education, to introduce elementary and middle school pre-service teachers to real technology skills that they can use in their future classrooms. Activities allowed the students to learn technology skills while using the Internet to enrich their content skills and share information with their fellow students. The course was designed to allow students to master a variety of technology skills, and see how these skills can be used appropriately in their future classrooms, while also increasing their comfort level to use the technology and reduce their resistance and anxiety to use it later in their real-time classrooms. During the class hands-on activities, the students became fluent at using the Internet for enrichment and communication, and at developing strategies for using their new skills to present SOL-relevant lesson plans. Students enter this course with very little in the way of educational technology skills, but leave with a teaching toolbox filled with new skills

Social-aware Opportunistic Routing Protocol based on User's Interactions and Interests

Nowadays, routing proposals must deal with a panoply of heterogeneous devices, intermittent connectivity, and the users' constant need for communication, even in rather challenging networking scenarios. Thus, we propose a Social-aware Content-based Opportunistic Routing Protocol, SCORP, that considers the users' social interaction and their interests to improve data delivery in urban, dense scenarios. Through simulations, using synthetic mobility and human traces scenarios, we compare the performance of our solution against other two social-aware solutions, dLife and Bubble Rap, and the social-oblivious Spray and Wait, in order to show that the combination of social awareness and content knowledge can be beneficial when disseminating data in challenging networks