The Career Pathway Model: Small Steps to Big Leaps

Palm Beach Community College realigned its curriculum to allow student to seamlessly process through career pathways. Students can start in clock-hour-based instruction and transfer that learning into credit-based associate in science degrees. Along this pathway, students can use exit points to employment with recognized certificates.     

Beyond the Library's Walls: Using Library 2.0 Tools to Reach Out to All Users

ABSTRACT

The Library 2.0 movement emerged as a response to the technologies and concepts in the Web 2.0 movement and has been taking the library world by storm. Web 2.0 takes the stagnant Web 1.0 and makes it more user-driven, collaborative, participatory, and personalized. Library 2.0 takes the tools of Web 2.0 and moves them into a library setting with libraries that are user-centered, networking faculty, students, and librarians to create a vital and evolving organization designed to meet the needs of the current information culture. Library 2.0 is especially relevant to institutions providing services to off-campus students. Many students taking courses remotely have full-time jobs and busy lives beyond their coursework. Providing those students with a customizable, personalized, and collaborative library assists in their success as a student. Using Web 2.0 technologies and other social networking tools in the library setting brings the library to our users, making them more relevant in today's information society.     

Teachers’ assessment-related local adaptations of a problem-based learning module

Teachers’ implementation of a problem-based learning (PBL) program was examined to determine both how they assessed student learning and their reasons for these assessment practices. Ten 6th grade science teachers used Alien Rescue, a computer-based PBL module, with their students for approximately three weeks. Interviews, observations, and teacher-developed artifacts were analyzed qualitatively. The results suggest that assessment-related issues impacted the way that teachers implemented this PBL program, with teachers using grades as extrinsic motivators, deemphasizing PBL’ usual focus on student reflection on their process and solutions, and adding assignments to the PBL program in order to provide greater structure for students’ process and help prepare them for standardized tests. Some of these adaptations conflict with practices typically advocated in the literature on PBL. The implications of these results for the design of PBL programs are discussed, with an emphasis on supporting teachers’ (a) local adaptations of PBL materials and (b) professional development through educative components embedded in PBL programs.

Double Blind: Supervising women as creative practice-led researchers

Abstract

Many women creative practice-led researchers appear inhibited by a number of factors directly connected to their gender. This article discusses these factors, including the culture of visual arts professional practice, the circumstances surrounding women postgraduate students and unproductive self-theories about intelligence and creativity. A number of feminist strategies are discussed as potential interventions that may assist women creative practice-led researchers and their supervisors to reap more personal and professional rewards from their postgraduate research.     

IT portfolio decision-making in local governments: Rationality,politics, intuition and coincidences

IT project portfolio management (IT PPM) has evolved into a significant area of research interest, but we know little about IT PPM practices in public sector organizations. Therefore this article investigates decision-making processes in the IT PPM practices of local governments, and discusses how these practices match the normative advice proposed by the IT PPM literature. We rely on decision-making theories together with case-studies of four Danish local governments. We find that politics, intuition and coincidence play a crucial role in IT PPM decision-making, while technical rationality (as proposed by the IT PPM literature) plays a minor role. Our account also reveals how the decision-making practices create IT portfolio problems and in some aspects is considered to have a negative impact on the outcome of e-government investments. Our analysis and previous research into decision-making allows us to argue that implementing textbook-IT PPM is difficult because it relies on decision-making ideals that are incompatible with organizational contexts and individual behavior in these organizations. Instead of radically changing decision-making styles, the organizations might be better off improving IT PPM practice within the boundaries of their existing decision-making styles, and the IT PPM literature might improve support for practitioners by incorporating other decision-making styles besides technical rationality.     

Exercise,nutrition and immune function

Strenuous bouts of prolonged exercise and heavy training are associated with depressed immune cell function. Furthermore, inadequate or inappropriate nutrition can compound the negative influence of heavy exertion on immunocompetence. Dietary deficiencies of protein and specific micronutrients have long been associated with immune dysfunction. An adequate intake of iron, zinc and vitamins A, E, B6 and B12 is particularly important for the maintenance of immune function, but excess intakes of some micronutrients can also impair immune function and have other adverse effects on health. Immune system depression has also been associated with an excess intake of fat. To maintain immune function, athletes should eat a well-balanced diet sufficient to meet their energy requirements. An athlete exercising in a carbohydrate-depleted state experiences larger increases in circulating stress hormones and a greater perturbation of several immune function indices. Conversely, consuming 30–60?g carbohydrate?·?h^?1 during sustained intensive exercise attenuates rises in stress hormones such as cortisol and appears to limit the degree of exercise-induced immune depression. Convincing evidence that so-called ‘immune-boosting’ supplements, including high doses of antioxidant vitamins, glutamine, zinc, probiotics and Echinacea, prevent exercise-induced immune impairment is currently lacking.