A Survey of Selected National Organizations Providing Support to the Community Building Field

In recent years, community building has emerged as a powerful, comprehensive approach to neighborhood improvement. Increasing numbers of national and local organizations use community building to describe the ways in which they work to improve outcomes for children and families in low-wealth neighborhoods. As a local and national technical assistance provider and resource to the field, the Urban Strategies Council (the Council) set out to conduct a limited scan of the national organizations providing programs and services to support community building practitioners.In early 1999, the Council surveyed a dozen national organizations involved in community building support to identify the core strategies they employ to support practitioners and the development of the field. We also asked about the target populations for their supports and services. The twelve organizations were not selected through scientific sampling methods and are certainly not a representative sample; rather, they include organizations known to us and engaged in work that they identify as community building.This report presents the findings of the scan. The report begins with a brief review of community building definitions. It then presents a summary of the methodology used to conduct the scan. It continues with a review of our findings about strategies used by the responding organizations and the target populations that are the focus of their work. The report concludes with implications we draw from this limited scan and a discussion of possible next steps for the field along this line of inquiry

Preparing Higher Education Tutors for Delivering Online Courses

This paper identifies that academic staff need to be suitably prepared to deliver wholly online courses, and outlines the steps taken towards achieving this, at one Higher Education institution in the UK. E-learning, whether partially (blended) or wholly online, is not simply about the technology, but also requires an understanding of the pedagogical considerations, and the skills that are needed, to effectively facilitate them. Through the use of a formal questionnaire, and collation of informal comments made on a social network, evaluation is made of a staff development course designed specifically to promote effective facilitation of high quality online courses. The results determined that the course is fit for purpose and achieves its aims. Future cohorts are already over-subscribed as a result of positive commentary by participants. Further developments will be made, based upon constructive feedback by participants. Whilst possibly not unique, this course demonstrates action being taken in an educational institution to recognise that effective online delivery requires specific knowledge and skills that are different from those used in the traditional classroom

Rhythm of My Sole

Tap dancing was one of the first dance forms created here in America. It is a perfect representation of the mosaic that is America because tap dancing is the fusion of dances brought to this country by slaves and immigrants. This fusion has been passed down from generation to generation and evolves every day. When it was created, it was used in celebrations; later it was used in musicals and variety shows to entertain; now it stands on its own in concert setting and conveys stories, shows emotions, and still entertains. I have created four tap dances; each is different in the story it tells or the emotions it portrays. I will present them in a concert form to entertain and show the audience that tap dancing can move one emotionally just as other art forms do

Grades 6-8 Ecology

This is a lesson for 6th-8th grade students on Ecology. This culminating activity has students creating a brochure or presentation on a National Park of their choice based on differentiated guidelines and rubrics. Through this lesson students will have an understanding of how their knowledge of ecology can be applied to the National Parks through collaborative group work

Repairs in Conversation: A Demonstration of Competence

Introduction The field of speech errors and repairs is a relatively new one. Repairs have been studied from a number of anoles, notably by Scheqloff, Jefferson and Sacks (1977) and Jefferson (1974). Scheqloff et al. saw merit in investigating repairs because of their role as a self-riqhtinq mechanism for the organization of language in social interaction. They focused, for the first time, on the repair rather than the error. Jefferson suggested in her paper that repairs miqht have an even more important role than the correctional one--that they are in fact, an interactional resource. The use of certain phrases, lexical items , or even speech acts may mark a speaker with a certain role or status within· a restricted domain. Errors and their repairs allow speakers a wide ranqe of meanino. Jefferson cites the lexical pair \u27\u27cop\u27\u27 and \u27\u27officer in repairs such as: I told that to thuh--uh--officer. She claims that the speaker beqan to say cop as evidenced by the use of thuh rather than thee which would ordinarily be used before a word beqinning with a vowel such as officer. She contends that this pair ~mon~rates contrastive domains of talk, alan~ with their appropriate roles for speakers. She chooses clearly defined pairs such as the above, or Negro and colored ; but of course, many utterances cannot be so clearly attached to specific roles or domains. The purpose of this study of simulated negotiation sessions is to present a taxonomy for certain types of repairs and give further evidence for the claim that repairs are an interactional resource and, as such, are a part of native speaker competence. It can be seen from the data below that, while structural changes made in repairs may vary a great deal, changes in content are generally of two types: those which adjust the force of an uttemnce and those which shift its focus. Because speakers are often well into the first portion of an utterance before changing strategies, the hearer is in a good position to decode both portions of the utterance. The hearer thus has access to two, sometimes contradictory, messages. Furthermore, the speaker may use these paired messages to imply dual meanings

How does increasing the darkness of a plate affect the perception of both bitter and sweet flavors?

Extrinsic cues like plate color have been shown to effect taste perception. Previous studies conducted show a consensus that plate colors can modulate taste perception (Piqueras-Fizman et al., 2012, Stewart & Gross, 2013). No studies, however, have investigated varying color hues and their effect on taste perception. This study aims to determine whether the change in the black to white ratio of plate color can affect consumer perception of sweetness or bitterness. We presented a group of volunteers two different brownies on plates varying from 100% white to 0% white in 25% increments. A 30:70 male to female gender ratio was established with m = 210. The two brownie samples were made with different amounts of coco powder and sugar. A series of questions measured with a 9-point categorical hedonic scale and a 9-point categorical intensity scale were asked. The following questions had the most interesting results: appearance liking, flavor liking, and overall liking. The results of this study found for the dark chocolate brownies flavor liking and overall liking were not significantly different between the groups according to Tukey’s Honestly Significant Difference (HSD), but there was suggestion that the 0% white, 50% white, and 100% white colors had higher chocolate flavor intensities and higher overall liking ratings. For the milk chocolate brownies, the appearance liking was shown to have no significant difference between the 5 groups by HSD. These results counter the notion that plate color influences the perception of sweetness previously seen to be true, and they show that for bitterness the influence of plate color hue is not influential in overall liking. This leads to the conclusion that in a restaurant setting, for brownie products specifically, the plate color used will not impact the overall liking of the product