Higher education study says community colleges and public universities must “collaborate, collaborate, collaborate!”
RALEIGH – “If community colleges and public universities are to be effective in moving North Carolina’s economy forward,” said Dr. Parker Chesson, “the two systems will have to change and collaborate.” 

Chesson appeared before the State Board of Community Colleges, representing the Pappas Group, the consultant hired to conduct the study mandated by HB 1264.  The study was to identify the role played by higher education in responding to the economic and workforce challenges facing North Carolina.  Chesson presented the final portion of the report and highlighted recommendations in that study. He said the study contains several observations, including the fact that North Carolina and the rest of the nation face extreme economic global competition and the only way the two educational systems are going to be effective in overcoming that competition is if our higher education systems collaborate.


Ministry of Higher Education, Damascus
A cooperation agreement between the Higher Institute of Business Administration and two European Universities
Under the patronage of Dr. Ghiath Barakat, Minister of Higher Education, the Higher Institute of Business Administration / HIBA /signed a cooperation agreement with the French University of Bordeaux the Fourth and the Spanish Atunouma Barcelona University to launch the Master Program of Business Administration.

This agreement, signed by the Dean of the Higher Institute of Business Administration and representatives of the two universities, is aimed at promoting cooperation within the framework of the Master Program of Business Administration to ensure continuity of the program according to the local and European standards. AtunoumaUniversity will grant all passed students MA degree, and University of Bordeaux the fourth will grant additional diploma for students of financial specialization. The two European Universities help the institute in teaching the courses of the program and participate to the budget in parallel to the institute's systems.

 

Higher Education for Development
New University Partnership To Promote Peace and Stability in Somalia
Higher Education for Development (HED), in cooperation with the U.S. Agency for International Development’s East Africa Regional Mission (USAID/EA) in Kenya, announces a new university partnership in Somalia focusing on conflict resolution. Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) in Harrisonburg, VA, will receive $399,649 to implement a collaborative partnership with the University of Hargeisa (UoH) in Somalia. The university partners will work with the people of Somaliland to promote peace and stability within their society by employing traditional means and best practices in global conflict resolution. 

Although civil unrest remains the primary obstacle to economic growth and development in Somalia, the northern region of Somaliland is autonomous and has a relatively stable government.  The genesis of this partnership stemmed from a UoH workshop in February 2007 when participants discussed plans for an “international institute” that would explore both traditional and modern mechanisms for conflict resolution. The aim of the higher education partnership is to assist UoH in establishing a School for Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding and to strengthen the institution’s research capacity, especially in the areas of indigenous conflict resolution. This approach would blend Somaliland’s three different justice systems: traditional, Islamic, and secular.

Partnership activities will include joint research and writing between faculty members at both institutions, and annual attendance by five UoH faculty at EMU’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI) to work with EMU faculty on curriculum development. At the summer institute, UoH faculty will co-teach up to three courses. EMU faculty will travel to Somalia each year of the partnership to develop teaching skills and mentor teaching colleagues. HED’s Collaborative Partnerships program mobilizes the expertise and resources of U.S. and host country higher education institutions to address global development challenges with funding from USAID's Bureau for Economic Growth, Agriculture, and Trade/Office of Education (EGAT/ED) and USAID Missions. For more information about how USAID has provided economic and humanitarian assistance worldwide for more than 40 years, please visit http://www.usaid.gov.

Higher Education for Development (HED) engages higher education institutions in the U.S. and abroad for global social and economic development through human and institutional capacity building. HED assists the nation’s six major higher education associations and their members in partnering with USAID, as well as other development agencies and donor organizations. For more information about HED, please visit http://www.HEDprogram.org.


UK India Education and Research Initiative
Higher Education and Research Collaboration
The largest part of the £12 million UK government funding and additional corporate sponsorship funds will be directed towards Research and Higher Education collaborations. The two principal activities will be promoting research partnerships between centres of excellence, and developing joint and dual course delivery.

UKIERI emphasises creating institution to institution links - establishing durable channels and vehicles for collaboration in the years ahead. Excellence will be the hallmark of the project and research collaborations funded. The initiative, through rigorous evaluation, will be supporting research and collaboration proposals that can demonstrate excellence. Project proposals will be evaluated according to research merit, potential for innovation and overall benefit, with subject areas drawn from science and technology, the social sciences and other areas of economic importance in the India-UK relationship. 

The initiative will support staff and student exchanges, promoting new links between Higher Education (HE) institutions and research centres of excellence. All institutions, intending to cooperate, are invited to submit project proposals. Research cooperation projects might include staff secondments, exchanges of postdoctoral and other research workers and support for postgraduate research students in both UK and India.

Collaborative delivery projects will include taught Master’s courses (Full Awards), and shorter postgraduate professional courses (Short Awards) which may carry an award or CATS credit rating. Collaborative delivery projects will normally receive support for a 3 year start-up period.

 

20th Anniversary Philadelphia Higher Education Network
for Neighborhood Development (PHENND) Conference:

The Power of Place: Regional Higher Education Networks for Community
Transformation

Thursday, February 28 and Friday, February 29, 2008
at the University of Pennsylvania

The will be a two-day national conference which will highlight the work
of PHENND and other similar regional networks around the country.

Confirmed speakers include:
Ira Harkavy, University of Pennsylvania
Amy Cohen, Director, Learn and Serve America
Bobby Hackett, Vice President, Bonner Foundation
Henry Louis Taylor, Director, Center for Urban Studies, University at
Buffalo
Kinnard Wright, Community Outreach Partnership Centers Program, Dept.
Housing and Urban Development
Sarah Stiles, Community Research and Learning Network (CoRAL),
Washington, DC
Maureen Curley, Executive Director, Campus Compact
Charlene Gray, Executive Director, Pennsylvania Campus Compact
Cathy Burack, New England Resource Center for Higher Education

Registration is now open! Visit
http://www.upenn.edu/ccp/PHENND/events/2008conf.html


Goldman Sachs Foundation Prizes for Excellence in International Education
Over the course of the last three decades, Indiana University has developed key international components within different areas of the school, providing long-term capacity-building initiatives for pre- and in-service teachers, and K-12 students.

The School of Education offers the Overseas Student Teaching Project as an optional supplement to conventional student teaching requirements. Following an in-depth, yearlong preparation and ten weeks of in-state student teaching, pre-service teachers spend an additional eight weeks teaching in primary and secondary schools abroad. Partnerships with schools and education officials in thirteen different countries, including Costa Rica, India, Ireland, Kenya, Russia and now China, allow candidates to learn about education, culture and life outside the United States at a formative phase of their training as K-12 teachers by spending time teaching abroad. The program has reached nearly 2,000 pre-service teachers and is open to candidates from other college campuses.

Indiana University is also the home of The Center for the Study of Global Change and the East Asian Studies Center. The Global Change Center connects the university’s extensive international resources, scholars and students directly to Indiana’s K-12 classrooms through live interactive video technology. The Center also offers summer institutes for teachers around international topics ranging from trade and global climate change, to populations at risk and conflict resolution.

The East Asian Studies Center (EASC) places great emphasis on its teacher outreach, with two flagship programs: the East Asian Literature workshop for high school English teachers and National Consortium for Teaching about Asia workshops for middle and high school teachers, which have reached nearly 700 educators combined. EASC has become the go-to teacher training center in the region for professional development resources on East Asia, and recently began leading study tours to Asia for educators. Both the Global Change Center and EASC actively develop curriculum resources for teaching about Asia and global affairs in Indiana classrooms.

 

U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings Delivers Remarks at Moscow State University of International Relations in Moscow, Russia
U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings today addressed students, faculty, business leaders and Russian government officials at the Moscow State University of International Relations (MGIMO) for a conference on international partnerships co-hosted by The Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at The University of Texas at Austin and Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP.

Secretary Spellings highlighted a newly inaugurated higher education research partnership between MGIMO and the Strauss Center and underscored the need for additional collaboration, innovation and exchange of ideas in today's globalized world. Contact: Rebecca Neale, (202) 401-1576


Information Literacy Partnerships in Higher Education:
Administrative Leadership and Faculty/Librarian Collaboration
The Name Game...Concepts Matter, Labels Don't. According to David Majka, Robert Morris University, “An inforamus is someone doing bad searches with an inadequate search engine in a morass of disorganized, incomplete, and sometimes inaccurate information, and who is perfectly happy with the results.” Librarians typically teach process and how to find information to overcome knowledge gaps. Faculty members, on the other hand, teach concepts and theory...

Jacobson and Vallely (1992) found fewer than seventy-five articles in nonlibrary journals in a recent ten-year period 'that mentioned library instruction or described courses requiring some form of structured library research in a college or university setting...Only about half these articles had been written by librarians and only about a quarter had been written jointly by librarians and faculty...Obviously librarians need to reach out more to the faculty through the disciplinary literature." Do librarians and faculty members understand each other's goals? In higher education we must: accommodate different learning styles, emphasize group work and collaboration, offer experiential, hands-on, service learning, offer asynchronous learning opportunities, and offer self-paced learning opportunities.

Building Consensus Through Collaboration
Information literacy librarians need to remember that "No programs can be successful when faculty are commanded to teach something new and unfamiliar to them without support."(Snavely) Getting faculty buy-in requires a mutual understanding of goals and the establishment of trust over time. Evan Farber, College Librarian Emeritus, Earlham College, has long advocated the importance of faculty/librarian collaboration. In discussing his 1974 opinions regarding some of the perceived shortcomings of historical approaches to bibliographic instruction, Farber stressed that "While the two groups - teaching faculty and librarians - can and should work together, neither can do the other's job." Librarians and faculty need to form a consensus on common goals (student learning outcomes). Librarians must be proactive and be able to effectively communicate their abilities and commitment to faculty. Kotter reminds us to not ignore the importance of old-fashioned "interpersonal contact," arguing that it "has a significant positive correlation with faculty attitudes regarding library services."
     
Successful student learning requires cooperation and planning amongst faculty, academic professional (librarians, instructional designers, programmers, etc.), and administrators. An evolutionary process to gain buy-in... Quoting Patricia Knapp's The Monteith College Library Experiment, Farber reminds us that the notion of effective library instruction being tied to a good working relationship with librarians and faculty is not new: "...instruction in the use of the library will be really effective only if it presented by the regular teaching faculty as an integral part of content courses in all subject fields."(Knapp) Regardless of what this process is called, librarians must avoid the appearance of forcing their agenda... In discussing the development of the University of Lethbridge's Library Science 2000 course, Chiste's group makes use of militaristic terminology to ... They make clear the importance of basic interpersonal skills - "kindness, politeness, and solid self-confidence" - in the development of positive working relationships with faculty.

As Amstutz and Whitson, point out, "Research conducted by library and information science professionals tends to focus on the librarian's role in working with faculty" - not on how faculty use information literacy concepts in their teaching, or how university administration supports both faculty and librarians to integrate this approach/philosophy/skill into the university curriculum. The question of who is "responsible" for teaching information literacy skills to students is an interesting one. While many faculty support the idea of producing information literate students, research and anecdotal evidence suggests that a good percentage of this group appears to be unsure of their own potential role in this process. Andrea Glover cautions librarians to "Beware of non-librarians wanting to crib information literacy courses with little or not involvement of professional librarians...Beware of handling over the keys of your information literacy vehicle to someone outside librarianship." Smith, on the other hand, Do faculty believe that working with librarians in the design of assignments and projects believe as librarians Werrell and Wesley do, that such a relationship "can actually increase the amount of subject matter covered, enrich in-class discussions, and strengthen students' understanding of the subject matter"? In his discussion of faculty acceptance of library bibliographic instruction programs, Hardesty
     
Educational mission...sharing control According to Snavely and Cooper, "an ideal information literacy program would be a sustained cooperative effort between faculty and librarians. It would not only depend heavily on librarians in all aspects of the program, but it would also depend directly on committed, supportive faculty to incorporate information literacy goals into their subject courses."