Higher Education, Collaboration, and Education for the 21st Century

TALIM


In a few days I am off to Morocco for a seminar at TALIM on higher education and employment in Morocco. But the job market in the United States is also very challenging of college graduates right now, and American educators may well be asking themselves if higher education in this country is adequately preparing students to enter the work force of the global era.
We still function in terms of national economies, but those economies are increasingly connected so that a crisis in one affects many others.  We also live in a world in which graduating students in America compete for employment, directly or indirectly, with their peers in Mexico, Morocco, India and Taiwan. And the whole lot of them are also competing with graduating students in Pakistan, Costa Rica, Tunisia, Israel and Poland. Continue reading

My Career in International Education, v 4.0

Globes in Chicago, by John LeGear

In 2005 the Association of American Colleges and Universities launched the “Shared Futures: Global Learning and Social Responsibility” initiative. The mission statement for that initiative describes what should be one of the most important principles guiding higher education today. Shared Futures

is based upon the assumption that we live in an interdependent but unequal world and that higher education can help prepare students not only to thrive in such a world, but to remedy its inequities.

Higher education not only can prepare students to do those things, but it must, for their benefit, for the good of our nation, and because remedying inequalities is the right thing to do. Hence, as the statement continues, the academy

has a vital role of expanding knowledge about the world’s peoples and problems and developing individuals who will advance equity and justice both at home and abroad.

These are fine and noble ideals, but they are also solidly rooted in reality. The United States finds itself involved in two wars at the moment, and neither is with a neighbor or even a nation in this hemisphere. The largest share of our foreign debt is owned by China. America is a nation addicted to television, yet only Zenith makes television sets in the US, maintaining one factory so that it is able to claim it is an American producer. Problems like global warming can only be tackled on an international scale, and when the mortgage crisis hit the banks in the United States, many of the world’s banks also felt the impact. The engine of globalization is, of course, technology, which makes it almost as easy to conduct business between Boston and Hong Kong (8,000 miles) as it is between Boston and Cambridge (next to one another).
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Study Abroad as a Collective Priority and Technology

There’s an article in Peer Review, a publication of the AAC&U that caught my attention recently.  In “Transforming the Study Abroad Experience into a Collective PriorityRoss Lewin, Director of Study Abroad at the University of Connecticut advocates for a more holistic approach to the study abroad experience.  In recent years there has been a growing emphasis on including some sort of experience abroad in undergraduate education, in response to the challenges of the global age, but Lewis raises concerns that the way these experiences are too often conducted does little to equip students to better compete of function as responsible citizens in the global age. Indeed, too often study abroad is little more than a vacation in some friendly European capital or seaside town.  The solution, he argues, is to make the study abroad experience a collective priority.
Continue reading

Video Conferencing for Global Education

National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education

National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education

The next instance in NITLE’s professional development series, Teaching Tools for the Global Age is next Thursday.  I am responsible for this series and I have really enjoyed it.  The potential of technology to help our students better understand the wider world and their place in it is enormous and we, as educators, are just beginning to take of advantage of it.

Video Conferencing for Global Education: Tools for Teaching and Administration
Date: August 13, 2009, 4:00 PM – 5:15 PM. EDT.
Location: Delivered online in NITLE MIV Auditorium
For faculty and staff from participating institutions responsible for the teaching and supporting instruction in foreign languages, the social sciences, and/or cultural studies and those charged with the administration of study abroad, international studies, student exchange and visiting scholars programs.
This session considers the uses of real-time audio and video communication tools in higher education, for both pedagogical and administrative purposes, with a particular focus on the widely used, free internet videoconferencing application, Skype. Todd Bryant, language technology specialist at Dickinson College, will discuss uses of the tool for the instruction of language, and present the Mixxer, an online application he developed for finding conversation partners for language learning. David Clapp, director of the Office of International Students and Off-Campus Studies at Wabash College, will discuss the use of Skype by his office to connect with students in advance of, during, and after programs, and the impact its use has had on recruitment for programs, student satisfaction, administrative effectiveness, and the costs of running programs.
Participants will

  • explore the features of Skype
  • discuss its current and potential use in higher education
  • begin developing best practices for its use in programs and courses
  • investigate its features and limitations in comparison with other programs

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For more information and registration instructions see NITLE – Video Conferencing for Global Education.

International Bac chooses Epals

International Baccalaureate has selected ePals, Inc., to implement and manage a customized hosted learning community for it’s students, teachers and other community members including administration and alumni. The International Baccalaureate is a nonprofit educational foundation with programs for students aged 3 to 19 that can be found in 2,704 schools in 138 countries. Programs aim to

help develop the intellectual, personal, emotional and social skills to live, learn and work in a rapidly globalizing world.

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