Organizing a ground crew for today's helicopter parents

The relationship between college students and their parents is far closer than it was when most of today's educators were in school. Tapping into the upside and managing the potential drawbacks of highly involved parents is taking on great importance on an increasing number of campuses.     

From ideal to real: Understanding the development of new educational settings

Summary and Conclusion In this paper we presented a framework for viewing the development of new educational settings. We also postulated the necessity of two conditions for the creation of a coherent self-renewing educational program: the development of a community, especially in a linguistic sense, and on-going practical dialog that defines and redefines the setting over time in light of collective action and experience. In doing so, we took the position that educational program and program development mean something more than what is implied in most theories of organizational and program development. We argued that a collection of educational activities constitutes a program only when the activities are grounded in a commonly perceived core of beliefs and values about what is and what ought to be.Clearly, we have only begun to sketch out the nature and operation of the processes by which a new educational setting evolves and develops into an organization. We need to know why development and growth through the application of the dialectic are typically not present in new programs. Our future research efforts are oriented in this direction and we hope that by setting forth our tentative ideas at this point we may encourage others to react to them and perhaps to pursue a similar line of inquiry.OISE     

Museums as Media in the Emergent Global Context

The papers, participants, presentations, and discussions that serve as the source of this special issue of Curator: The Museum Journal bear witness to the fact that museums are not only places to which something radical, even traumatic is currently happening. They are participants, and essentially agents of change, in the stressful, shifting ecology of globalization that has unmoored whole economies, regions and populations. Fundamentally, they are a form of media, in the sense defined by the Oxford English Dictionary. This article summarizes the challenges museums face in pursuing their mission as media, and ends with a few remarks about the need to turn some attention in the future to the topic of research.     

Assessing Research Compliance for Federally Funded Projects: The Good,the Bad,and the Publicly Accessible

Abstract

In 2016, Utah State University launched a program to ensure their campus’ federal grant recipients were in compliance with funder mandates to share any data or publications produced as a result of the award. This article discusses how a cross-institutional team of librarians and administrators evaluated the success of this program using online asynchronous focus groups (OAFG) in conjunction with a traditional survey. The challenges and successes of using OAFGs to assess library services are also examined. An OAFG gave participants greater convenience, flexibility, participation, and time to craft answers, eliminating some of the hurdles to traditional focus group participation.     

Thinking Pluralistically: Dynamic Decision Making in Kinesiology

In this age of postmodern supercomplexity, universities face increased demands from many precincts in our society to respond to such issues as broader access, graduation rates, costs, and relevance, to name just a few. The cultivation of professional conditions that will help higher education and its kinesiology professoriate to not only to survive, but flourish, in an age of supercomplexity is a necessary adaptation for the future. No obvious single, coherent moral framework exists to use as a guide for today’s (and tomorrow’s) faculty. This article argues, then, for a pluralistic way of thinking by applying reason to the diverse moral frameworks in kinesiology in higher education. The purpose of this article is to explicate a moral positioning in kinesiology based on this pluralistic approach so that decision making can extend beyond the current boundaries of pragmatic thought, now prevalent in higher education. Specific examples of this approach and some accompanying strategies are offered.