Giving Proper Credit To Home-Schooled

In the pursuit of a homemade high school education, Jay Voris played drums in Guinea, Colin Roof restored a 134-year-old sailboat in Ireland, and Rebecca Goldstein wrote a 600-page fantasy novel and took calculus at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

The independent-minded Maryland students and two dozen others gathered at a Unitarian Universalist Church in Annapolis one afternoon this month for an alternative graduation ceremony that is becoming more common across the country as home schooling expands. Now the movement is gaining ground in a crucial arena: college admissions.

Goldstein, 18, of Ellicott City will be a full-time student at UMBC in the fall. Alan Goldstein said his daughter's idiosyncratic education distinguished her from "cookie cutter" applicants from conventional schools and helped her gain entrance into honors programs and win a full scholarship. Others at the June 2 commencement are bound for St. John's College, Hampshire College, the University of Rochester and other liberal arts schools.


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Training a key in IT Departments - Learning Management System helps

Dice.com, a career webiste for It professional, reports that according to a recent survey of 281 IT leaders with hiring authority, companies in 2007 are especially looking for IT professionals with project management, security and architecture skills, as well as strong interpersonal abilities. The study of small, medium and large organizations, conducted by Forrester Research, also found that many organizations plan to train existing personnel to rectify current skills shortages, and increasingly, outsource their more commoditized IT tasks.

Beyond hiring, CIOs expect to acquire needed skills by devoting substantial resources to training existing staff. Top training priorities — for more than half of all organizations — include project management, change management, service management, business process skills, and vendor or sourcing management. Almost half of all organizations will also offer risk management, enterprise architecture, account management, financial management and security training.

Also hot: More than one-third of organizations will train existing employees on application maintenance management, infrastructure architecture and network management. Finally, about one-quarter of organizations will train developers to improve their legacy programming skills, a key component will be a learning management system offered by companies like Simplydigi to make course assignments and track progress.

To manage training costs, some organizations are utilizing innovative tactics to negotiate better discounts with training providers. "One of the interesting things I saw was a smaller IT shop banding together with several other small IT shops to artificially create scale, then running a course for all those IT employees," says Bright.

Blogging as an e-learning tool

Instructional blogging operates as a knowledge-centered instructional tool. In this model, the instructor involves students in research activities, engages them in discussions with practitioners, and leads them through developmental concepts of the discipline's knowledge domain. In some content modules, such as strategic planning and request for proposals, students and guest practitioners interacted by exchanging ideas and asking questions of each other. The guest practitioners also commented on student blog entries. By the end of the course, students had analyzed the deeper structures necessary to make sound decisions when evaluating information systems for use or purchase.

Learner-centered blogging acknowledges the important attributes of learners as individuals and as a group. As an instructor, I have used blogging as a learner-centered instructional tool by giving positive feedback to students on their comments in blog entries and by adding comments to discussion threads involving two or more students. Given that many on-line students miss the face-to-face contact realized in a traditional classroom, blogging offers particularly useful opportunities for learner-centered feedback and dialogue. Learning management systems - LMS like the one provided by SimplyDigi, offer customizable forums, chat rooms and many other collaborative tools that allow students and instructors to engage in online and real-time discussions.

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