Here's a picture from inside the Opryland Hotel, site of the ACHE Annual Conference and Meeting www.ache2008.org/. It's a wonderful facility complete with river and riverboat ride. For more information see www.gaylordhotels.com/gaylord-opryland/.
Stopped off in St. Augustine and visited another lighthouse. Here's a picture of the lighthouse and another of me ducking a wasp at the top. It seems it was mating season or some such thing at the lighthouse summit.
We stopped off and spent my birthday at Saint Simons Island. Here's a picture of the lighthouse. It's kind of a special birthday--my age equals the last two digits of the year I was born. I'll let those readers who aren't math challenged figure it out.
Top 10 Obese States
Paula Hogard, Dean of Continuing Education at the University of Tulsa, has been named Chair of the LERN Board of Directors for 2008 – 2009. She succeeds Thom Lowther of the American Institute of Architects in Washington, DC. Lowther was a key proponent and founder of the International Learning Unit (ILU) Commission. http://lern.org/
I hear a few community colleges in Tennessee have offered continuing education wine tasting or wine appreciation courses. And I know more than a few continuing educators who appreciate fine wines. Unfortunately, I am not among them--or is it fortunately, based on research in the Journal of the American Association of Wine Economists. Here's the abstract from Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better? Evidence from a Large Sample of Blind Tastings:Abstract. Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. In a sample of more than 6,000 blind tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less. For individuals with wine training, however, we find indications of a positive relationship between price and enjoyment. Our results are robust to the inclusion of individual fixed effects, and are not driven by outliers: when omitting the top and bottom deciles of the price distribution, our qualitative results are strengthened, and the statistical significance is improved further. Our results indicate that both the prices of wines and wine recommendations by experts may be poor guides for non-expert wine consumers. www.wine-economics.org/workingpapers/AAWE_WP16.pdfWhat could be a cooler job than a wine economist?
USA Today is running a series of articles on our nation's community colleges. I love community colleges and their mission is much the same as ours in continuing education. I was once offered a teaching position at one community college and came close to working as a dean in another, and I remember hearing then that community colleges were disrespected and underfunded. It hasn't gotten better in the last 20 years. Here's an excerpt that touches on continuing education and workforce development:Yet for the last decade, enrollments have been increasing faster at two-year schools than four-year schools. Today, community colleges enroll 6.5 million degree-seeking students, or nearly half (47%) of all college undergraduates. And no one documents the expanding demand nationwide for non-credit courses such as English as a Second Language and workforce training. An estimated 5 million students are enrolled in those kinds of programs, says the American Association of Community Colleges, a Washington non-profit that gets data from its 1,200 member schools. www.usatoday.com/news/education/2008-07-22-comcol-main_N.htm
Brenda White-Wright, seen on the left speaking to the ACHE Annual Conference and Meeting in Los Angeles, has successfully defended her dissertation at ETSU and can now be addressed as Dr. White-Wright. I have known Brenda since I was hired by ETSU to run the Bachelor of General Studies program. She was one of the first students in that program--hoping to get prior learning credit for public speaking while completing her undergraduate degree. Congratulations on finishing the Ed.D., Brenda!You can learn more about Brenda and her consulting service at www.wrightapproach.net/home.html.
The prospect of more wide-awake drunks is frightening....John Cloud writes in Time.com:If you've never heard of such things, your kid probably has. Sold in tall, narrow cans, they carry teen-friendly names such as Sparks, four maXed and Joose. As with other "flavored malt beverages" (the conspicuously boring industry name for fizzy drinks like Mike's Hard Lemonade), alcoholic energy drinks taste like cheap soda--cloyingly sweet and bubbly, with only the mildest hint of booze, all the better for callow teen palates. But alcoholic energy drinks are much more dangerous than regular alcopops like Mike's. First of all, they contain an assortment of stimulants--mainly caffeine but also ingredients like guarana and taurine that can speed the central nervous system and mask alcohol's effects. And they have more booze than other single-serving beverages. Budweiser and Mike's are both about 5% alcohol; by comparison, Sparks Plus is 7%, and four maXed and Joose are about 10%. http://tinyurl.com/5arspb
Hard to believe that anyone could not tell the difference. For more information on the News Channel 5 investigative report (including names) see http://tinyurl.com/News-Channel-5.Spotting diploma mills can be difficult. Below are 10 warning signs. If you see two or more of these warning signs, you may be dealing with a diploma mill.
1. You can earn degrees in significantly less time than at a traditional college or university.
2. The college places a heavy emphasis on offering college credits for life experience.
3. The college sends you a diploma if you pay a fee.
4. The college lets you "buy" a grade point average and academic honors.
5. The college charges tuition by the degree, or offers discounts if you enroll in multiple degree programs. (Traditional colleges generally charge by the credit hour, course, or semester, although some vocational schools charge tuition per program.)
6. The college's address is a post office box or suite number.
7. The college's Web site does not include information that a traditional college Web site might include, such as a mission statement, course requirements for specific programs, library resources, and faculty information.
8. The college provides only vague information about its faculty or has no faculty, only "evaluators," "mentors" or "counselors."
9. The college claims to be accredited by an association that either does not exist or is not recognized by the U.S. Department of Education.10.The name of a college is similar to a well-known and well-respected college. http://tinyurl.com/57c7ay
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"What really got the tax activist," according to the website, "was NewsChannel 5's discovery that professors at some state colleges actually get bonuses for Ph.D.s from unaccredited, fly-by-night schools."
Where can I find a job in typewriter repair? From Jacob Leinbenluft's Help Wanted: If the Federal Government Can't Accurately Forecast Which Jobs Will Grow, Can Anyone Do it? The problem is that education—like any investment—is risky. It costs both time and money to enroll in college or start a job-training program. And if you get stuck in a job that unexpectedly takes a nosedive, you may not receive the payoff you expected. You can hedge your bets in case your chosen field doesn't work out—by, say, getting a more general education rather than a highly specialized course of training. But there are trade-offs to doing that, too; if you have good reason to believe that forensic science technicians are going to be in hot demand, it makes sense to spend all your time training to be a forensic science technician. Schools and colleges—who are measured much more by the students they bring in than what happens to them after they graduate—don't always provide much help navigating these trade-offs. So job seekers are left trying to divine the future on their own—and projections like the BLS' can make them overconfident about their ability to do so. www.slate.com/id/2195688/pagenum/2/
Prior to the TACHE Past Presidents meeting, several of us visited Paul Goldberg at his lakeside home. Paul, who spent over 30 years as the head continuing education honcho at Roane State Community College, is recovering from surgery to remove a brain tumor. Back row, from left to right: Teresa Duncan, me, Susan Elkins, Chris Lefler. From row, from left to right: Hilary Marabeti, Paul Goldberg, Debbie Adams.
Here are my car keys, locked in my trunk in the parking lot of McDonald's at Kingston, Tennessee. I tossed them to DR. Chris Lefler so he could retrieve something from my trunk while I help carry something for Debbie Adams. It took AAA about 20 minutes to get there and another 15 to get it open. That's actually a small pocket knife that I keep attached to my key chain. Could I get any more rednecked than that?
The sign at Frankfort's Dollar Central reads: Most Everything Everyday $1.10.
At the risk of sounding a bit more diverse than I actually am, here is a list of EW.com's Top 25 Best Movie Musicals Ever. My favorite, Chicago, is ranked too low at seventeen:17. Chicago (2002) There's not much left of Bob Fosse's original Broadway
choreography, and not all the John Kander-Fred Ebb songs made it, either. But that's OK, since director Rob Marshall and screenwriter Bill Condon find ingenious ways to make the overtly stagy source material work as a mind's-eye musical fantasy on film. Dandy performances by Catherine Zeta-Jones, Renée Zellweger and John C. Reilly help elevate okay work by Richard Gere, and the
cross-cutting only occasionally gets too busy. By and large, razzle-dazzling. http://tinyurl.com/5sqvow
I don't know why, but I'm really tempted to get these. I expect, though, I'd have to shave my arms...
It took me a while to find a good photo for this blog, and I even started with another one on the first couple of posts. I didn't think there was much significance to it--all I wanted was a picture that didn't make me look too old or too fat or posed in an incriminating fashion. But there's a science to it, according to Slate's Michael Agger in I Look Stupid: How to Take a Web Head Shot. He writes:The more you think about Web head shots, the more loaded a social artifact they become. Scholars have begun to examine "impression management" online. One study posits that people with attractive friends on their Facebook "wall" benefit from a halo effect and are themselves perceived to be more attractive. Researchers have also done interesting things with yearbook photos (the original Web head shot). This study found that whether a woman smiles in her photo (PDF) can predict "favorable outcomes in marriage and personal well-being up to 30 years later." Sort of cool to know, but how does it apply to me? (And could it possibly be true?)
An picture of former presidents of the Tennessee Alliance for Continuing Higher Education, taken about five years ago. Several past presidents are meeting today in Knoxville including Susan Elkins (far left back row), Hilary Marabeti (far right front row), Chris Lefler (not pictured), and me (far right back row).
Writing in the Tennessean, Gail Kerr's 25 Things to Make Nashville Better:City leaders were cheering themselves silly last week when new census figures put Nashville in the top 25 list of the nation’s largest cities.We beat Atlanta! We beat Denver! We’re 25! There’s a reason I’ve stayed in the town I grew up in: Nashville is a terrific place to live. Bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better. But what would it take for us to be the best city in America? Not the biggest, but the best. Here are 25 things we need, in no particular order.See the whole list at http://tinyurl.com/5ew75j
#25 Public schools that are all so good, there’s nothing much to fight about except how high to raise teacher pay
The July ACHE Executive Committee Conference Call tomorrow will be the first managed by our new home office at Oklahoma University. Along with Jim Pappas, new ACHE Executive Vice President, we will also be joined by Ynez Walske, the brand new ACHE Home Office Manager. Ynez Walske was formerly a site director for Oklahoma University's military program office on Tinker Air Force Base. Prior to joining OU, Ynez held positions as a professional writing instructor, reporter/copy editor, and customer service representative in the banking industry. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Mass Communications and Journalism from Texas Women’s University and has completed courses toward OU’s MA in International Relations.
Just got this email from a new--at least to me--diploma mill. If a poor economy does indeed drive folks into higher education, I hope they don't arrive at places like this. 
Number Two: A witty e-mail signature. Quotes and song lyrics should be heard during toasts and karaoke performances, respectively. Don't let your electronic correspondence become the digital version of a motivational poster.
This timetable describes six major phases of the planning and development of the degree, and assumes a launch of the program in 24 months. Each of the phases describes tasks in five major areas of planning a distance-learning program:
Overall Program Design and Business Plan
Target Audience — Learners for the program
Curriculum/Program Plan (i.e., content and performance goals and attitudes)
Instructional team for the program, faculty, mentors, etc.
Environment and infrastructure for teaching and learning
Find the complete Program Planning Countdown at: http://www.designingforlearning.info/services/writing/count.htm
I don't believe I've ever had 24 months to plan a program, and I've helped initiate bachelor's and master's degrees--including our online Master of Professional Studies program. I wonder if this timeline is relevant anymore?
The matches work like this: competitors alternate between three-minute rounds of boxing and four-minute rounds of speed chess with one-minute breaks in between to get the gloves off and hunker down at the chess table. The winner is determined by knockout, checkmate, or referee decision.
What Gandhi did—earning high school and college credits (usually from a community college) at the same time—is called dual enrollment and has long been an option for students who want more rigorous work than their high school offers. It can also help students cut down on the cost of college by transferring credits. But increasingly, more students are enrolling in dual-credit courses because they think it will help them get into a selective college. Admissions officers and guidance counselors are growing concerned about the trend.
Today I'm pleased to be featuring a guest writer. For all of you tired of reading my prose...
Only Alaska and New Hampshire are ahead of us with lower state taxes. We often say in Tennessee that we don't have a state income tax but we do on some items. Tax reform is badly needed to adequately fund our state--especially when it comes to higher education and public health. 
Linking Adults with Community: Promoting Civic Engagement through Community Based Learning--the Summer New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education--is now available. www.josseybass.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-ACE.html. 
Just got the Spring issue of The Journal of Continuing Higher Education. It features the following articles:
Life Coach (what a great job) Susan Lawley:"This probably sounds like heresy," she says, "but if there is something so precious to you that you don't want to be disturbed, like your kid's birthday party or your 30th anniversary, shut off the phone and turn off the BlackBerry. We should safeguard those moments."
My experience with the TACHE Leadership Academy was great! One of the best parts was getting to know my fellow academy members and sharing common problems/solutions. I have new contacts at several institutions across the state that I know I can call on when needed. The mentoring experience was very valuable. There is no way to measure what that was worth. Each session we attended helped me grow professionally from learning more about state government to learning about situational leadership to learning more about TACHE.Then Recey:
TACHE’s Leadership Academy was a great experience for me. I’m new to TACHE and it gave me the opportunity to learn more about the organization. I enjoyed the interaction with the other members of the Academy. We were required to have at least two mentors and I chose four. I learned a lot about my mentors’ positions and their individual institutions. If someone wants to become involved in TACHE, I highly recommend this program.
