ERA Reviews

Higher Education in an Era of Digital Competition: Choices and Challenges
By: Donald E. Hanna & Associates

Higher Education in and Era of Digital Competition did an excellent job of explaining the current atmosphere of higher education. Although long, 347 pages, this book is very well organized and covers a wide range of topics, including emerging organizational models, leadership, and redefining faculty policies and practices. The overt theme of the book is to relate advances in technology to their current and future impact on Institutes of Higher Education from the perspective of the institution, the faculty, and the students. Yet, the book is also valuable for those entrepreneurs looking for opportunities and ventures in higher education.

Dr. Hanna presents the idea that universities need to evaluate, analyze, and evolve their current practices to reflect the current educational environment. Dr. Hanna has done an excellent job bringing together experts, such as Dr. Chris Dede a nationally recognized leader in Distributed Learning Environments, to contribute thoughts, views, and opinions to this book. The contributing authors did an excellent job of interweaving five main themes through out the book to organize and clarify the current educational situation. Furthermore, Dr. Hanna concludes the book with his opinions on educational impact as well as his proposed challenges to university administrators, faculty, and students.

This is one of the best books I've ever read related to technology in higher education. It surveys the entire field, looking at what is happening, analyzing it against sound educational theory and taking it to the future by asking the tough question of where will traditional higher education be if it doesn't adapt to the new millennium.

Although it's an easy book to read, it doesn't lend itself well to a summary review. Each chapter is unique, touching on different issues related to technology and innovation, such as change, organizational structure, leadership, ethics, faculty policies and practices and instructional design. Any of these chapters can easily be a book in itself. But in the breath of topics covered resides the book's greatest benefit, which is the ability to provide the reader with a "one-stop" understanding of the entire topic.

If you're interested in going beyond a survey of the field and are committed to changing the status quo, this book will help you navigate the basics of bringing technology to the classroom, dealing with resistance and staying motivated as a change agent for the future. It's most definitely a great book about a very important and timely topic.

The author presents a thorough analysis on the impact of the emergent world trends on higher education, clarifying the view for the institutions in the years to come. Emphasis is given on the following aspects as they challenge the global education in the 21st century:

1.Learning: Roles, Access, Emergent Approaches, Role of Technology and Assessment

2.Organizational Models: Design and evaluation, policies and practices

3.Leadership in the Knowledge Era

Learning

With the emergent digital era, the learning process undergoes reconsiderations that will shape our concept of education forever.

Access. Due to the improvements in the technological area, distances are being shortened making possible for more students to access education from different locations. This is demanding from higher education institutions to acquire and use technology efficiently in order to provide educational programs that reach out to students and are sensitive to cultural diversity.

Emergent Approaches.The following are some of the trends that are driving educational institutions to provide innovated educational experiences for their students:

·The constant and emergent changes worldwide are demanding from students and professionals continuous education or life long learning. According to the author, Americans could be changing careers six times during their professional lives.

·The improvements in communications capabilities are moving the market toward a global economy, which according to the author, will impact the continuous learning process worldwide. This will lead us toward a global learning community.

·Today it is not sufficient to acquire information. The learner must be able to appreciate and understand its meaning, in addition to be able to use it in problem solving situations.

·Emergent educational trends lead organizations to leave behind the traditional organizational approach.

·The increase of two-career families in America and single parents leave little time for students to enroll in traditional educational experiences, at the same time there is an increase in the pressure to learn and become better educated.

·The changing workplace is demanding new skills and abilities that ease people to work together in problem solving situations that requires critical analysis and a personal touch of creativity.

Three steps toward change in institutions in order to achieve effectiveness in the competitive era:

1.Identify the external trends that are forcing institutions toward change. 2.Study the forces that resist change. 3.Develop a rationale for organizational change considering the previous steps.

Higher education institutions should create effective learning environments under the emergent educational approaches and advances in technology. An effective learning experience should encompass an active and engaging process based upon a "constructivist" approach. According to this learning theory, supported by thinkers like John Dewey and Lev Vygotsky, is based on the construction of knowledge by the students allowing them to begin from their previous knowledge and experiences on the subject, being engaged in active and meaningful learning experiences in social activities in which reflection and metacognition will encourage personal, varied and unique outcomes.

The book discusses the basics for the following major constructivist approaches:

a.collaborative and cooperative learning b.problem based learning c.learning communities d.communities of practice

Technology. One of the major challenges of higher education institutions in the 21st century is the use of technology in effective ways to encourage the creation of knowledge based upon this theory, including the development and enhancement of virtual collaborative environments.

Assessment.The author differentiates between assessment and traditional evaluation methods, in terms of what they intend to determine about the learners progress. It is the belief of this author that the evaluation and assessment performed in class should "include strategies that value how students think as well as what they think." As the global learning communities enhances, more sophisticated evaluation strategies are needed. This will guide the educational process in accordance of standards of quality.

Organizational Models

"New forms of universities will emerge," in order to meet the demands of the new millennium.

Due to the learning demands, world trends and the emergent advances in technology that are characterizing the competitive professional area, new models will be considered in order to satisfy the educational needs of students, and professionals seeking continuing education. These will be conceived in new environments that promote alliances between universities world wide, organizations with global scope and impact, creation of institutions in which shorter certification or degree programs are based on specific competencies, and those in which technology is the foundation of the educational process.

Leadership in the Knowledge Era

The leader in the knowledge era must be highly motivated toward innovations and changing, eager to watch, understand and make decisions considering the dynamic nature of the world society in which we live. She ought to understand the meaning of the mission in her hands instead of seeing the final outcome as a monetary reward for her or the institution. According to the author the leader should: ·encourage shared leadership. ·be culturally sensitive. ·demonstrate ability to keep up the pace with world trends. ·have the necessary technological skills. ·be capable of networking and developing and maintaining interpersonal relationships efficiently.

In addition to these, the leader should be aware that nowadays trends and changes will demand from leaders to consider the creation of new and modification of existing policies concerning the workplace and its personnel.

Finally, in moments in which technology is becoming an essential component in our lives, leaders in higher education institutions face unique challenges that will require new technical and human approaches toward the organization's model. With all the advances in technology, the leader ought to remember that values and human virtues are the foundation of any corporation.

I bought this book about a year ago and use it at least one a week for reference as well as to make items even though my re-enactment period here in uk is 1879 (british campaign against Zulu nation).
This is a must have book for EVERYONE! And for those here in uk it is worth the wait.

This book is a super bargain compared to original _Harper's Bazar_ magazines with pattern sheets. It's easier to use too--all the patterns have been disentangled and presented separately. Patterns are included for just about every woman's garment or accessory you'd ever want to make. The articles on sewing techniques are different from other 1860s ones I've seen reprinted, and better illustrated.

I do a little historic sewing (not a lot) but this is an amazingly beautiful book to look at. It has pictures of everything--clothes and hats and trims and sewing techniques and, well, just everything. The engravings are stunning and the production is superb. If you're at all interested in Victorian fashions, this book is worth having.

An artistic, historial look at rustic barns throughout the United States with a slightly different hand-painted message on each of them urging all within sight to see Rock City,"a ten-acre tract of massive stone formations overlooking Chattanooga, Tennessee and the North Georgia countryside". Mr. Jenkin's photography is truly inspiring, a delight to the eye. This book can easily transport the viewer to simplier times via a subtle palette of colors and lighting. Highly recommended.

This is the best coffee-table book for anyone who has ever driven through the South and experienced the "See Rock City" phenomenon! I have lived in Tennessee and Georgia and seen many fading Rock City Barns. With this book, I can show my children someday these beautiful, creative advertisements that are familiar to anyone from around here!

A beautiful, thoughtful, and sensitive documentary of a too rapidly disappearing part of Americana. Anyone who has ever seen a "See Rock City" barn will appreciate the photography and written details of this bygone era. This book should be in the reference section of every library in the USA.

Arguing About Slavery has a very difficult subject to make live, what William Lee Miller calls the "tedium and sublimity" of republican debate. The historian's duty to be evenhanded even when faced with the moral pit of slavery doesn't make the job any easier. Yet, Miller handles these problems with aplomb and, more, handily succeeds.

At about 500 pages, Arguing About Slavery is concerned with the parliamentary debate and tactics used by pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces in the Congress in the 1830's and 40's. It shows how, nearly single handedly, John Quincy Adams insistence on the right to petition exposed the South's determination to controvert the Constitution in its quest to shelter the practice of slavery from congressional criticism. By the time the Congress puts the "gag rule" to rest, Adam's exposé had made abolitionism a powerful and accepted political force in the North.

Miller storytelling skills has the reader discovering the extent of sophistry the pro-slavery forces were willing to go to as they were forced to resort to deeper and deeper hypocrisy. He does this, however, without denigrating the men of the South. Indeed, much of the enjoyment you'll derive from reading Arguing About Slavery will come from the rhetorical skills the Southern Congressmen liberally display throughout.

Although Miller's protagonist is clearly J.Q. Adams, he spends considerable effort on a broad cast of characters, from the original abolitionists and their puritan backgrounds -- the Grimké sisters, Theodore Weld, Elizur Wright, Elijah Lovejoy -- to Adam's allies in the House -- Joshua Giddings, William Slade -- to the pro-slavery giants -- John C. Calhoun, Caleb Cushing, Francis Pinkens -- and moderates like Henry Pinkney (whose gag rule ironically was intended as a compromise) and President Martin Van Buren. If these biographies are not familiar to you, these and others in Arguing About Slavery should be. Miller describes the history and premises of all parties involved, but doesn't interrupt the flow of the tale to do so.

Miller does an incredible job of making the tedium and sublimity of republican debate come alive and at the end of the book you better understand the place of liberty in America's national consciousness, the intellectual forces that led to the Civil War, and the nature of the founders' relationship to the practice of slavery itself. The only criticism I have is that sometimes Miller's rhetoric is a bit too partisan, which reduces the value of the book as ammunition against slavery's apologists, which do still exist. But that has nothing to do with merits of the book as a work of the historical art, which are excellent.

This is an excellent book, one that surpassed any expectation I might have had for it. And my expectations were high, because the critics spoke so highly of it when it was released. Still, I doubted whether a decade-long legislative battle could carry my interest for 300+ pages. I was wrong. Every page and character was interesting, and the consistent imagery of John Quincy Adams, in the sunset of his political career, battling the southern foes in Congress on a daily basis is an enduring one. Books like this one should be substituted for the dry history curriculum that I had in high school.

Miller has taken a little-known set of antebellum incidents and made them live. The book is both a scholarly work and highly readable for the layman. Miller provides a modicum of "modern parallels" and editorial asides that would, if they weren't so intelligent, be inappropriate. As it is, his observations along these lines as the book progresses makes the work more interesting rather than less. This book is more interesting that last year's biography of John Quincy Adams, which I also enjoyed.

The book opens with a terrific overview of the personal essay. Not only does it discuss the place of creative nonfiction in the writing spectrum but it gets to the heart of the personal essay -how we express the human experience. Lopate walks us, the average reader, through the choosing and the parceling of these kinds of works and by the end we are prepared for the well laid journey ahead.

The voices are so varied - from George Orwell's beautifully written essay on life in a British boarding school to James Baldwin's piece on his father's death and life as a Black man in America. We feel with each author, cry with them and share in their triumphs. Though the styles are quite different from one author to the next, the common thread is each person's love of writing, their adept manipulation of language, and the most important element of the essay - their honesty in each line.

This is an excellent choice for those are learning the art of creative nonfiction or for those more seasoned readers or writers who truly want a satisfying read.

This has been a great reference into the insight of the personal essay. The introduction is about thirty pages long with rich detail of everything you ever needed to know about the "personal essay". Lopate delves into his selection, rationale and arrangement of this book. Everything you ever needed to know about the essay is here!

The collection consist of seventy-five essays, spanning over 400 years. The first section is called the forerunners, these are the earliest dating from 1600's, included: Seneca, Plutarch, Kenko, Shonagon, Hsiu, Michel De Montaigne. Then, the rise of the English essay: Abraham Cowley, Addison & Steele, Samuel Johnson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginia Woolf, Orwell, etc.

It is categorized for easy identification of types, style and forms of essays. Excellent collection and reference!...MzRizz

A book that has travelled with me for years and well worth all the space in my limited luggage space. I would definitely take this book to a desert island and it would be a book that I would grab off its shelf if my house was on fire.

Time has made me appreciate the voices contained within its cover greatly.

Though these houses purport to be "country houses and seaside cottages," there's little reason they couldn't have been built in any Victorian small town. They range from a tiny three-room structure to a rambling 10-bedroom Dutch Gambrel mansion (called in those days a "villa") to a "club house" (easily altered to private use), a lakeside pavilion, a Baptist chapel, a "stone rectory in Iowa," and a couple of apartment blocks, one of which eerily reminds me of a building not far from my former home. These buildings are primarily of the Eastlake or Queen Anne style, the original book having appeared in 1883, an era when the front stair-hall was often as big as any other room and used as such. You'll need a magnifier to make out some of the details, but if you have any interest at all in late-Victorian domestic architecture, you need to have this volume on your shelves.

Is a great visually informative book. It gives the reader a better idea of the way homes were built in the late 19th century. The book covers a wide variety of victorian styles and includes plans, perspective views and elevations from a small 4 room cottage, to a huge 36+ room mansion in the Caribbean. I recomend this book to anybody interested in late 19th century victorian architecture.

is a wonderful book that shows how homes were designed and built in the late 19th century. It covers a variety of victorian styles and has floorplans along with perspective views and elevations from a small 3 room cottage to a 36+ room mansion. This is a great way to learn about victorian architecture.

The Enlightenment has met many critics nowadays, which even make people overlook the positive worth of the enlightenment to modren society. This great book can help readers make a comprehensive and positive view to the enlightenment. I recommend it !

Peter Gay needs no introduction, but I still feel that this work needs to be lauded for what it manages to achieve: it provides an exhaustively detailed socio-cultural account of the enlightenment that is as enjoyable as it is informative. The main slant of this work, namely that the 18th century enlightenment was a reprisal/continuation/adoration of classical (hence Pagan) culture is coherent and functions as a solid structure to this work. Highly recommended.

As an intellectual history, "The Rise of Modern Paganism" has few peers. Peter Gay makes sense of a dizzying array of thinkers and their (often dissimilar or even opposing) thoughts. He shows, in prose both clear and elegant, that the Enlightenment was more a phenomenon than a program, albeit a phenomenon tied together by a love of inquiry and intellectual exploration.

I enjoyed this book completely...it really gave me a sense of the human experience of the journey, and made me appreciate just what an incredible accomplishment it was. The illustrations really add to the enjoyment of the book, as do the excerpts from the journals of several of the men. I also liked the background information on what goals were actually behind the exploration and how they worked to meet those goals. There's only one reason that I didn't give this book 5 stars, and that's because it lacks a good map to help understand where they were during some of the events described. But that can be found in other works, and this really is a good introducion to Lewis and Clark...it's a relatively easy read but full of interesting facts and adventures.

I give high praise to this book and this reading. You will learn so much about the journey, and you'll feel the cold of the winters and the wonderment of their adventures. Taken from their actual journals, this book is even better than "Undaunted Courage". p.s. the unabridged is even better.

This audio is a great telling of this amazing journey. Any history buff should order this and play it over and over. The facts of the ride and the aftermath of the characters will leave you in awe.

One of the earliest (1986) accounts from the survivors of the Pol Pot regime, "The Stones Cry Out" seems to have set the style and standard for another more recent child's-eye perspective on the same era, "When Broken Glass Floats". The minute details of everyday life, not abstract poltical assessments, form the basis for our childhood memories. The author's account carries an unvarnished realism which draws the reader into her film-like image of daily life under threat of starvation and execution. This is probably as close as a reader can come to the truth of events in Cambodia during 1975-79. Oral histories such as "The Stones Cry Out" are perhaps the best way for survivors of human rights abuses to indict the perpetrators. Sadly, tribunals driven by international politics are unlikely to have the same impact as the simple testimony of a victimized child. Highly recommended reading for all those with an interest in human rights, Cambodia, and Southeast Asian culture.

Actualy I would rate this 4 and 1/2 stars.

Having read "First they killed my father" by Loung Ung It would be difficult for me to review this book with out comparing it to Loung Ung's memoir.

Both are essentially the same story, a young upper middle class girl living in Phnom Phen in april of 1975 when thier life, family and happiness are torn from them by the khmer rouge.

Many of thier experinces are similar as you might expect (long hours in forced labor, family deaths, witnessing murder ect..) but each has a unique story of thier own.

The writing styles also vary greatly and this is where Loung's "First they killed my Father is the better" book. Molyda tells her story in a very straight foward manner. Her discriptions of murder, torture and rotting corpses are alomost clinical in tone as if she is afaid to visit or express her real feelings at the time (and who could realy blame her) we are giving only hints about her family and life before April 17th 1975 (to be fair this may be in part to spare distant family members still in Cambodia from retalation)

In Loung's book however we are treated to two light hearted chapters discribing her life in Phnom Pehn before April 17th 1975 this gives the reader a chance to feel they realy know her, her brother's, sisters and parents thier strengths and weakness'.

Loung's memoir is far more emotional in tone and feeling leaving the reader almost gasping for air at points.

For those overly squimish that makes "The Stones Cry Out" the better of the two books. It is also the better of the two books if your sole interest is the surrounding history of the killing fields.

But for those just wishing to read a great emotional book "first They killed My father" is the better choice but I would highly recomend both to all.

I am a 12 year old reader, and this book was heart-breaking. It is so sad that something like this hapenned, and so many peoples' lives were destroyed. Molyda Szymusiak's story makes me realize how lucky I am to enjoy my freedoms.