Enlightenment and Education in Eighteenth Century America: A Platform for Further Study in Higher Education and the Colonial Shift

The prolific educational discussions of America's founding generation have led to extensive treatments surrounding the nature of early-national education in recent scholarship. Republican educational models Jefferson, Rush, and Webster have been scrutinized and praised as the forerunners to modern American higher education. Where these treatments are remiss, however, is in clearly identifying the fundamental shift in educational purpose between 1740 and 1780. Higher education classrooms were inundated with both Enlightenment and Evangelical literature, resulting in new arenas of student autonomy, thus radically departing from the traditional model of higher education carried over from England. An analysis of this transformation will highlight how the highly regarded republican educational ideas on education did not necessarily illustrate a thoroughly new model of higher education. Rather, it gave new definition to an already existing paradigm.     

The telecommunications content of state public utility commission Web sites: Remaining relevant in a changing marketplace

The role and continued relevance of state telecommunications regulators have been challenged by the development of competition, the introduction of new technologies, and the increasing dominance of federal authority. An important role that state utility commissions can play in the current telecommunications environment is to provide consumer education and information about consumer protection, competition, and universal service. Commissions can use their Web sites as effective tools in educating and informing consumers. This study analyzes the consumer-related telecommunications information included on the Web sites of the commissions in the 50 states and the District of Columbia to determine whether, and how well, state commissions are using their Web sites to educate and inform.