Access to Higher Education
By Anneke Larrance, Executive Director, Associated Colleges of the St. Lawrence Valley
Larry Dotolo, President, Virginia Tidewater Consortium and Anneke Larrance, Executive Director, Associated Colleges of the St. Lawrence Valley are co-editors of, Access to Higher Education through Consortia; Published by Jossey-Bass. Representing many consortia, ACL members wrote chapters for Access to Higher Education through Consortia. Authors shared insights into building a college-going culture and solutions to providing access to the underserved. They explained a secondary school holistic approach to access and described how to leverage resources to provide access. Other chapters addressed access to graduate education and the consortia-building experience of the Jamaican Higher Education Consortium; the final chapter articulated the questions and possible solutions that consortia must face in order to provide access. For More information Contact:

Nicola Beltz
(757) 683-3183
Program Manager
Association for Consortium Leadership
www.acl.odu.edu


U.S. Department of Education
The U.S.-Brazil Higher Education Consortia Program
U.S.-Brazil Program is a grant competition run cooperatively by the governments of the United States and Brazil. The purpose of this competition is to promote student-centered cooperation between the United States and Brazil to increase cross-national education and training opportunities in a wide range of academic and professional disciplines. The U.S.-Brazil Program will fund collaborative efforts in the form of consortia. A consortium must have at least two academic institutions from each country. The funding period will be for four years.

The U.S.-Brazil Program fosters university partnerships through the exchange of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff within the context of bilateral curricular development. Students benefit from having an international curriculum and cultural dimension added to their studies through a combination of bilateral curricular innovation and study abroad. The U.S.-Brazil Program is administrated jointly by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), U.S. Department of Education, and the Fundacao Coordenacao de Aperfeicoamento de Pessoal de Nivel Superior (CAPES), Brazilian Ministry of Education.

Grants for the U.S.-Brazil Program will provide four years of funding. Each country will support only participating institutions within its borders. Most grants will be for four years of funding, including a first-year preparatory phase. Total grant amounts for each U.S. consortium will likely be about $200,000 for the four-year period. This amount will be matched on the Brazilian side. The program aims to improve the quality of students in undergraduate and graduate education in both countries and to explore ways to prepare students for work through - the mutual recognition and portability of academic credits among U.S. and Brazilian institutions; the development of shared, common, or core curricula among U.S. and Brazilian institutions; the acquisition of the languages and exposure to the cultures of the United States and Brazil; the development of student apprenticeships or other work related experiences; and an increased cooperation and exchange among academic personnel at U.S. and Brazilian institutions. FIPSE Home

 

College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) is Penn State’s
Recent experiments in IST’s new Digital Atelier have demonstrated the facility’s potential to help identify missing persons and, in doing so, produced tangible imagery related to mysteries dating back as far as the 19th century. The methods used may point to a new way to protect children against abduction through the use of 3-D scanning and printing technologies, much as keeping identifiers such as photos, fingerprints, and DNA samples do today.

Working in collaboration with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), Wade Shumaker, IST senior project associate, has created the busts of two children: One depicts the believed appearance of a girl whose skeletal remains were found two years ago in the debris of a burned-out home in central New Jersey. The second is of a boy whose lead-lined coffin was accidentally disturbed in 2005 by workers in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, D.C.


Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) Globalization and agriculture
Economic opening and integration are pervasive, global processes that are presently shaping the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and other regions of the world, and will continue to do so in years to come. Emerging with great force in this context is the great "paradox of agriculture," which can be described as the difficulty of recognizing the renewed role and great importance that agriculture and rural areas have acquired for society and other economic sectors.

The emerging supranational dimension of the bilateral and multilateral integration processes under way in the Americas (which include many bilateral and multilateral agreements, including NAFTA, CARICOM, MERCOSUR, CAN, MCCA, FTAA and WTO) is revealing the complexity of the agricultural sector and its importance in the region due, in part, to the many economic, social, cultural and territorial ties that exist between agriculture and the rest of the economy, and with society as a whole.

The sectoral and autarchic view of agriculture that prevailed well into the early 1980s is becoming less and less practical and useful today, and is being seriously questioned as an ineffective and dysfunctional means of addressing integration and economic opening. This situation offers great challenges for adapting the institutional structures (both public and private) of agriculture and the rural milieu in the LAC countries, which must consolidate a new architecture of mechanisms, norms and procedures in keeping with the new circumstances.

One of the great challenges facing our countries is to determine how to achieve the following simultaneously: a) a renewed vision of agriculture, one that gives rise to a consistent (i.e., holistic and systemic) way of acting in the new context of globalization and integration; b) a new institutional framework that facilitates achievement of the great public objectives of enhancing competitiveness and overcoming poverty (in the context of present and future scenarios in which already very important public and private actors acquire even greater strategic importance and are involved in an intense process of decentralization and de-concentration); and c) the positioning and revaluation of agriculture and the rural milieu in the Americas, to enable them to contribute substantially to economic and social development in our countries.

 

Global Reading Campaign Makes History While Raising Money and Awareness for Early Education in Low-Income Communities
Jumpstart's Read for the Record Breaks World Record with 250,000+ Children Reading Same Book on Same Day. Jumpstart's Read for the Record campaign made history on September 20 by breaking a world record for the most children reading the same book on the same day. As of Monday, October 1 reports had come in providing documentation of 258,000 children, who read The Story of Ferdinand with adults on Sept. 20. With nearly 2,000 local reading events taking place last Thursday, Jumpstart expects this number will keep climbing as reports continue streaming in from locations across the country.

Jumpstart's Read for the Record campaign included major events in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. Among the hundreds of thousands reading across the nation were First Lady Laura Bush, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, actresses Mariska Hargitay and Gabrielle Union, Grammy Award-winners LL Cool J and Wyclef Jean, best-selling author Frank McCourt, and several Members of Congress. Each read with a group of children last Thursday, joining hundreds of thousands around the country in demonstrating their support for Jumpstart and early education.

The campaign created the world's largest "shared reading experience" as children and adults read this year's official campaign book, The Story of Ferdinand, written by Munro Leaf and illustrated by Robert Lawson, published by Penguin Young Readers Group. Along with the record-breaking participation, the campaign raised more than $1 million through donations and sales of a special-edition campaign book, with proceeds going directly to Jumpstart to support its early education programs for at-risk children in communities across the nation. Additionally, more than 100,000 copies of the official campaign book were donated to children in low-income communities. For more information about Jumpstart, visit www.jstart.org.


Syrian Higher Education Institute of Business Administration Signs a Cooperation Agreement with 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. Atunouma University 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.

 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Globalization and Higher Education: Competition and Cooperation
While globalization poses critical challenges for the U.S. economy, Charles Vest believes that knowledge-sharing may serve as the best response to increasingly competitive times.

Vest sketches the increasingly dire situation of U.S. manufacturing, R&D and innovation, which are “migrating and morphing.” Between 2000 and 2002, the U.S. lost 400 thousand jobs in IT manufacturing, and during roughly the same period, foreign firms built 60 thousand manufacturing plants in China, Vest notes. In the U.S., agriculture and industry have given way to the service sector. This means, says Vest, that “a huge part of the population today is employed, and in the future, more, in providing services largely but not exclusively driven by information technology.”

But the U.S. science and engineering infrastructure, in contrast to other nations, is not keeping pace with these changes. Warns Vest, “People everywhere are smart and capable, and give them a chance and the education,” they’ll do at least as well as Americans have. China is already churning out far greater numbers of engineers than the U.S., and making them available to a global market at a far lower cost. The solution is to “strengthen the quality and nature of science and engineering education,” with a focus on technological proficiency, leadership, and international vision.

In practice, this means to Vest a new phase for the research university: creating a physical and/or virtual presence in other countries, alliances with overseas partners, and freely shared, digitally housed content -- what Vest calls “the emerging meta university.” With MIT’s own web-based Open Course Ware as a model, Vest prescribes increasingly accessible resources for scholarship and education, which will prove “strategically and fundamentally important to us, in the true spirit of education, democratization and empowerment.” Sharing underpins “innovation, cooperation and competition worldwide.” Vest envisions a “dynamically constructed framework of open materials and platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be constructed or enhanced.”


Academic Co-operation Association
ACA is very happy to announce that two new members have joined the organization this year: the Latvian Academic Programme Agency (APA)  and the Polish Education Foundation PERSPEKTYWY. The Academic Programme Agency (APA) was founded in 1992 as the Latvian Tempus centre and now operates as  a state agency on behalf of the Latvian Ministry of Education and Science. APA is essentially a programme management organization, with a focus on EU education and training programmes. 

Among the programmes that APA manages are the Socrates Programme, the Lifelong Learning Programme, the Erasmus Mundus Programme and  - starting 2008 - the Nordplus Programme (of the Nordic Council of Ministers) in Latvia. PERSPEKTYWY is a Polish non-profit organization founded in 1998. The focus of PERSPEKTYWY’s work is on information about and marketing of Polish higher education abroad. In this area, it is present world-wide, and it also runs its own higher education fairs. A second specialization of PERSPEKTYWY is the assessment of higher education institutions: the organization annually conducts a ranking exercise of Polish higher education institutions.

PERSPEKTYWY already has close links with a number of ACA members, for example with DAAD and CampusFrance in the framework of the European Higher education Fairs (EHEFs). It has also collaborated with the British Council and it is a member of IIE (Network). ACA is delighted to welcome both APA and Perspektywy to the ‘family’ and looks forward to much fruitful cooperation.

ACA - Academic Cooperation Association
15, rue d'Egmontstraat
B-1000 Brussels
BELGIUM
Tel.: +32-(0)2 513 22 41
Fax: +32-(0)2 513 17 76
General inquiries: info@aca-secretariat.be

 

The Institute of Museum and Library Services
$18 Million Awarded to Advance Innovation and Public Service at Nation’s Museums and Libraries
Washington, DC—The Institute of Museum and Library Services, the primary source of federal funds for the nation’s museums and libraries, announced today the 43 recipients of its prestigious National Leadership Grants for 2007. The projects chosen for funding will receive a total of $18,661,716. Because institutions receiving grants are generally required to provide matching funds, National Leadership Grants are leveraging an additional $24 million in non-federal spending this year. For more information on the 2007 National Leadership Grants recipients, please see the list of awarded institutions.

"Cultural institutions energize their communities by not just preserving culture, heritage, and knowledge, but by supporting life-long learning and engagement," said Anne-Imelda M. Radice, PhD, Director of the Institute. “National Leadership Grants harness the work of the best of these institutions. By promoting innovation and partnerships, they allow these institutions to create national models that address the challenges of the broader library and museum communities, and help strengthen their impact.”

National Leadership Grants help libraries and museums collaborate, build digital resources, and conduct research and demonstration projects. The selected projects are national models that will help foster individual achievement, community responsibility, and life-long learning. This year, IMLS received 213 applications for National Leadership Grants seeking more than $78 million.

Highlights from this year’s list of recipients include awards to the Children’s Museum of Houston in Houston TX, in partnership with the Houston Public Library, to develop and make available nationally multi-lingual kits that will increase literacy and family learning; to the Libraries of Eastern Oregon in partnership with the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, to deliver programs in science and art to 30 disadvantaged rural communities, including three Native American reservations. Both these awards are from our Library and Museums Community Collaboration Grant category that was brought back into National Leadership Grants this year.

Other awardees include: the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, TN, in partnership with the High Museum of Art, the J.B. Speed Museum of Art, and the Institute for Learning Innovation, to conduct research on how families learn in art museum environments; the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, to test a web-based analytical tool that will allow multiple museum and library environments to be evaluated and monitored through the Internet; the University of California, Los Angeles and UCLA’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures to create the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative: Second Generation (CDLI 2) for the long-term preservation of the text inscribed on endangered ancient cuneiform tablets; and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, to investigate and implement a systematic approach for the development of useful, meaningful and usable digital collections, building on the prior work of the IMLS Digital Collections and Content (DCC) project. To learn more about the Institute, please visit www.imls.gov.


United States-Indonesia Partnership for Higher Education
Presidential Scholars Initiative
Presidential Scholars initiative, which has the endorsement of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, seeks to foster the development of world-class department faculties at Indonesian universities by generating up to 400 internationally trained Indonesian PhDs.  This initiative differs from previous assistance programs to higher education by focusing on a Center of Excellence model in which both the selected universities and the selected scholars jointly commit to enhancing the quality of their academic department.  The scholar portion of the initiative will be funded initially by the United States (via the Fulbright program) and Japan (via the Joint Japan/World Bank Graduate Scholarship Program and the Monbukagakusho program).  The Indonesian Ministry of Education, along with the World Bank office in Jakarta, will administer the selection and evaluation processes for the Centers of Excellence. 

The Ministry of Education has conducted two rounds of Centers of Excellence competition, and has pre- selected 34 CoEs to be based at 16 different universities for further consideration.  At this stage, the selected CoEs have been asked to begin identifying candidates for scholarships by the end of July.  Meanwhile, the first batch of Fulbright Presidential Scholars will begin their studies in the United States later this year.  The second group of Fulbright Presidential Scholars, who will begin their studies in the Fall of 2008, are in the process of being selected.  These individuals will be open for recruitment by the selected Centers of Excellence, in order to bring new talent to the field of higher education – a key component of the program.  The Japanese contribution of 120 scholarships will come via the Japan Indonesia Presidential Scholarships (JIPS) Program (40 scholarships), to be administered by the World Bank Institute, in coordination with the Directorate-General for Higher Education, while the remaining 80 5-year scholarships will be allocated to the existing GOJ Ministry of Education Monbukagakusho program.  The Indonesian government will make a $10 million dollar commitment to support Centers of Excellence development and have indicated support for additional major funding. 

Teacher Education
This initiative, centered on the US/Indonesia Teacher Education Consortium (USINTEC) and headed by Ohio State University, is focused on promoting higher education partnerships and strengthening institutional capacity in teacher education through collaborative development of innovative educational programs and research.  To date, USINTEC includes Ohio State University, Indiana University and the University of Illinois, along with 13 Indonesian institutions.  Other universities, both American and Indonesian, and including private institutions, are expected to be included in the future. USINTEC, with USINDO support, won a grant from Higher Education for Development (HED) to support preliminary work in strengthening institutional capacity in elementary teacher education.  Work under this grant will take place this August, and will involve assessments of current programs; assessments of ICT capacities; development and revision of undergraduate programs to enable certification; and pilot implementation of the resulting programs.  It is expected that the work funded under this grant will lead to a comprehensive expansion of the consortium’s scope and work.  Additional funding for further development and implementation of the Consortium’s work is currently being sought. 

Educational Technology
This initiative seeks to address a number of technology issues facing Indonesian higher education institutions, including internet access and internet-based systems to streamline academic research and university management capabilities.  Effort will be concentrated on helping develop a nationwide, affordable, and sustainable Internet system for use by all tertiary level institutions.  The initiative will also attempt to address the lack of Indonesian language software that could be used in classroom and distance learning settings, course management and university administration. 

USINDO is developing a proposal to focus on the effective deployment of educational technology within an Indonesian university setting.  The goal is to assist universities in instituting best-practices to develop a fully-utilized, fully integrated ICT structure that will foster increased and higher quality ICT use for research, communication, and other academic and management uses.  USINDO will initially focus on a pilot project with one university or a small consortium.  USINDO is also working with the Ministry of Education’s INHERENT network, which is a nationwide university intranet system, as well as Telkom, the national telecommunications company, to see what joint efforts can be made going forward.

University Management
The initiative in University Management seeks to address selected management concerns in Indonesian universities, which result from the decentralization process now being implemented by the Ministry of National Education.  Exemplar management concerns include financial management, fundraising, strategic planning, course management, credit systems, and accountability. 

USINDO has begun discussions with the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL) on developing a project that would address these management issues.  UMSL is currently conducting preliminary work in developing a scope of work, identifying potential partners, and seeking necessary internal approvals.  It is expected that UMSL representatives will go to Indonesia in this summer on a study mission to identify Indonesian partner universities and to identify areas of collaboration.

Contact: Tom Spooner (tspooner@usindo.org)
Updated information may be found at: www.usindo-highered.org