At first I thought someone was holding our parking meters hostage

Then I remembered that with all of the construction on campus, we had open parking for everyone. No faculty reserved spaces and no need to feed any meters.

Search easier

With these dozen Google tricks. Here's a couple of them from Time.

Google Tricks That Will Change the Way You Search

2. Use an asterisk within quotes to specify unknown or variable words
Here's a lesser known trick: searching a phrase in quotes with an asterisk replacing a word will search all variations of that phrase. It's helpful if you're trying to determine a song from its lyrics, but you couldn't make out the entire phrase (e.g. "imagine all the * living for today"), or if you're trying to find all forms of an expression (e.g. "* is thicker than water"). 

3. Use the minus sign to eliminate results containing certain words
You'll want to eliminate results with certain words if you're trying to search for a term that's generating a lot of results that aren't of interest to you. Figure out what terms you're not interested in (e.g. jaguar -car) and re-run the search.

Reading this summer

From Visually.

Happy Memorial Day!

From Visually.

Happy National Wine Day!

From Visually.

Summer Learning Programs

We should do something like this for our students

From Visually.

Since we left TBR

I don't get to Nashville anywhere near as much as I used to. There was a time I made a couple trips a month. Still, it's good to know some different

places to eat for a change. From Parts Unknown.

EATING THE WORLD IN NASHVILLE

Though you can spot the city’s skyline from where this road begins, Nolensville Pike is not a glamorous stretch of Nashville. Unlike downtown, it does not have neon bar signs in the shape of cowboys or flying pigs. And unlike 12th South, it does not have hip boutiques owned by celebrities. Rather, it’s a four-lane road lined with tattoo shops, fast-food restaurants, and used-car lots. 

Look closer, between the Burger Kings and Waffle Houses, and you’ll spot the clues to this road’s status as an international corridor. Taco trucks permanently post up at gas-station lots, and lines of Latino workers can be spotted waiting for lunch. Kebab shops tout their flatbread bakeries with a flourish of Kurdish script. 

Nashville’s community has grown more diverse of late. It now includes the nation’s largest Kurdish population, and there’s no better place to sample the tastes of that demographic boom than along Nolensville Pike. Follow along with the list below, and you’ll see at least a dozen countries in a five-mile stretch.

Save the date

Infographic Friday

The poorest town in Tennessee

Is Lafayette, sorta in the top middle of the state. Yes, I had to Google it. I wonder how they pronounce it? From 24/7 Wall St.

Poorest Town in Every State

42. Lafayette, Tennessee

• Town median household income: $30,586
• State median household income: $46,574
• Town poverty rate: 16.4%
• Town population: 4,909

Educational attainment among a population is often a good indicator of income levels. Lafayette, Tennessee’s poorest town, has one of the least educated populations in the country. Just 68.8% of Lafayette’s adults have a high school diploma, and only 10.1% have a bachelor’s degree. For context, 86.0% of Tennessee’s adults have a bachelor’s degree, while 25.4% of state adults have a four-year college education. 

Private universities

With large state grants. That pretty much describes public higher education anymore. At least at the university level. I hadn't really thought about the impact of diversity on the whole thing--I just blamed the Great Recession. From The Atlantic.

American Higher Education Hits a Dangerous Milestone: As younger generations become more racially diverse, many states are allocating fewer tax dollars to public colleges and universities

Drawing almost no attention, the nation crossed an ominous milestone last year that threatens more economic polarization and social division: For the first time, public colleges and universities in most states received most of their revenue from tuition rather than government appropriations. 

This historic shift away from tax dollars funding the bulk of public higher education comes precisely as the nation’s youth population is crossing a succession of milestones to become more racially diverse than ever. As statisticians would say, it’s an open question whether these twin trends represent an example of causation or just correlation. But whether resources are shrinking because diversity is growing, or the two trends are proceeding independently, their convergence is still a dangerous development—not only for higher education, but also for the nation’s economic future.

More diversity among students means higher education is drawing more deeply on those who have faced economic and academic inequities that reduce their odds of success. And yet the taxpayer resources that public institutions are receiving to guide them to completion are diminishing. That’s a recipe for widening economic inequality and declining national competitiveness, as kids of color comprise a growing share of the future workforce and tax base. 

Over the past several decades, demographic and financial changes have already profoundly reshaped the higher-education landscape. As recently as 2000, white kids comprised over three-fifths of all K-12 public-school students in the United States. But the National Center for Educational Statistics calculates that kids of color became the majority for the first time in 2014, and it projects their share will reach 55 percent within a decade. By June 2025, kids of color will, for the first time, comprise the majority of high-school graduates, the center recently projected. And soon after 2030, minorities—who represented just 30 percent of post-secondary students as recently as 2000 and constitute almost 40 percent now—are expected to become the majority on college campuses, too.

Textbook savings for ETSU students

Good news! Your campus store is partnering with Cengage to offer their new student subscription service: Cengage Unlimited. It will be available this August for Fall courses.

How it works: When you adopt Cengage products, students can choose to buy a Cengage Unlimited subscription, giving them access to the entire Cengage catalog of eBooks and more, for one term–or up to two years. A single, set rate subscription covers students across all their courses using Cengage materials. The more courses adopting Cengage, the greater the value for students using Cengage Unlimited. How much: With one $119.99 Cengage Unlimited subscription, students get complete access to over 22,000 Cengage eBooks and digital products, like MindTap, WebAssign, OWLv2 and SAM, for a full 4-month term. Multi-term subscriptions are available too. Print textbooks: Cengage Unlimited grants access to digital course materials for active courseware users. A FREE Cengage print rental is also available –students pay just $7.99 for shipping. All Follett stores are equipped to fulfill Cengage Unlimited this fall, and are excited to offer this cost-saving option to our students! Learn more at cengage.com/unlimited

A growing adult education provider

Offers more that just the education. All the support services as well. And tuition-free. There's one in Memphis. From The New York Times.

A Chance for Dropouts, Young and Old, to Go Back to School

The class in Anderson taught by Ms. Hamlin — or Ms. Elysse as she is known by her students — is at a Goodwill Excel Center tuition-free adult high school. There are 15 such schools in Indiana and one each in Austin, Tex.; Memphis; Washington; and Little Rock, Ark. They are all under the umbrella of the nonprofit Goodwill Industries International and are for anyone over 16 or 18 years old, depending on the state, who dropped out of high school before receiving a diploma. 

Five more, four in Missouri and one in Muncie, Ind., are scheduled to open by 2019. 

Although there are many other programs around the country to help adults get their high school diplomas, the Goodwill Excel school model stands out because it accepts students of any age — most other schools cap their enrollment at age 25 or younger — is growing nationally and offers intensive support to overcome the obstacles facing most people trying to go back to school. 

Kimberley, left, and Kalijah Kennebrew, mother and daughter who are students at the University Heights Excel Center. Credit Whitten Sabbatini for The New York Times
Each school provides life coaches, who serve as a combination guidance counselor and social worker, drop-in child care, transportation assistance and other benefits. Students work toward a regular diploma and dual college credit or industry-recognized vocational certification in any number of fields, such as pharmacy technician, information technology or welding. And any Excel Center in any state is required to incorporate all those elements. 

Rigorous research has shown that that kind of wraparound support “has the potential to have the most impact,” said Elizabeth Zachry Rutschow, a senior research associate with MDRC, a nonprofit research organization. “This comprehensive support model is very unusual. Adult education programs are often really strapped for funding.”

Infographic Friday

From Visually.

Lifelong learning

Rears its head again in workforce development. Just like we argued twenty years ago. Also just in: bow ties and baby-doll dresses are back in style. A good read from The Atlantic.

The Third Education Revolution: Schools are moving toward a model of continuous, lifelong learning in order to meet the needs of today’s economy.

“Like many colleges, we tended to be more reactive and slower to respond to training needs,” said Julian Alssid, who started last summer as vice president of workforce development. The college would typically wait for displaced workers to come to the campus to receive retraining instead of intervening before they were laid off. It had advisory groups of employers to provide guidance on certificates and degrees, but they met infrequently, so it would take months or sometimes years to tweak existing programs or start new ones.

Now, the college is in the process of reorganizing its continuing-education division to build ongoing partnerships with companies to keep it current on industry trends and operate training programs responsive to and in sync with the labor market. The alliance with Infosys is a good example of this new strategy as the college works with the company to figure out how the school can help in recruiting and training 500 workers who will make a median salary of $79,000. 

The problem with many existing workforce-training programs, Alssid said, is that employers, colleges, and local workforce boards responsible for doling out federal funds “all operate separately, calcified in their own silos.” In this new economy, he added, “those worlds will blend together.”   

The world of work is undergoing a massive shift. Not since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries and the Information Age that followed in the last century has the scale of disruption taking place in the workforce been so evident. An oft-cited 2013 study from the University of Oxford predicted that nearly half of American jobs—including real-estate brokers, insurance underwriters, and loan officers—were at risk of being taken over by computers within the next two decades. Just last fall, the McKinsey Global Institute released a report that estimated a third of American workers may have to change jobs by 2030 because of artificial intelligence.

. . . Now a third wave in education and training has arrived, argue economists, educators, and workforce-development officials. The level of preparation that worked in the first two waves—adding more time to education early in life—does not seem sufficient in the 21st-century economy. Instead the third wave is likely to be marked by continual training throughout a person’s lifetime—to keep current in a career, to learn how to complement rising levels of automation, and to gain skills for new work. Workers will likely consume this lifelong learning in short spurts when they need it, rather than in lengthy blocks of time as they do now when it often takes months or years to complete certificates and degrees.

Those zany--wait, I shouldn't generationalize...

I always knew the science was a bit lacking, but still fun. Just like personality profiles...From Slate.

Can We Please Stop Talking About Generations as if They Are a Thing?

We spend a lot of time debating the characteristics of generations—are baby boomers really selfish and entitled, are millennials really narcissists, and the latest, has the next generation (whatever it is going to be called) already been ruined by cellphones? Many academics—and many consultants—argue that generations are distinct and that organizations, educators, and even parents need to accommodate them. These classifications are often met with resistance from those they supposedly represent, as most people dislike being represented by overgeneralizations, and these disputes only fuel the debate around this contentious topic. 

But the science on “generations” does not back up these distinctions. In fact, solid evidence supporting generations, their characteristics, or even their existence, is lacking. In short, the science shows that generations are not a thing. 

It is important to be clear what not a thing means. It does not mean that people today are the same as people 80 years ago or that anything else is static. Times change and so do people. However, the idea that distinct generations capture and represent these changes is unsupported. 

What is a generation? Those who promote the concept define it as a group of people who are roughly the same age and who were influenced by a set of significant events. These experiences supposedly create commonalities, making those in the group more similar to each other and more different from other groups now and from groups of the same age in the past. 

In line with the definition, there is a commonly held perception that people growing up around the same time and in the same place must have some sort of universally shared set of experiences and characteristics. It helps that the idea of generations intuitively makes sense. But the science does not support it. In fact, most of the research findings showing distinct generations are explained by other causes, have serious scientific flaws, or both.

Happy National Teachers Appreciation Day!

From Visually.

Drama at UT

I suspect this makes her the highest paid communications professor in the Southeast. Football related, it seems, but there's been other conflicts, evidently. Since UT closes its Evening College, I don't have access to the rumor mill there like I used to. From Inside Higher Education.

Tennessee Chancellor Ousted, Blasted

Beverly Davenport's tenure as chancellor of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville almost fell apart a few months in, when a firestorm around the hiring of a football coach linked to Penn State's Jerry Sandusky brought calls for her resignation. 

She survived then -- but no longer. University of Tennessee System president Joe DiPietro fired Davenport Wednesday in an unusually public way 15 months into her term. 

Her immediate dismissal was accompanied by the release (to The Tennessean of Nashville) of a brutal termination letter from DiPietro, which criticized Davenport's "lack of trust, collaboration, communication and transparency" in her relationships with him and other leaders, "very poor" communication skills in many settings, and "unwillingness" to use a professional coach, among other things. 

Davenport, the university's first female chancellor, will earn $439,000 -- three-quarters of her $585,000 pay as UT's leader -- to become a tenured professor of communication at UT Knoxville.

Tomorrow is National Comic Book Day!

by COLOURlovers.

From Visually.

Get ready for Commencement

By looking through the Buzzfeed list of decorated graduation caps.

15 Graduation Caps That Are So Clever, You Wish You Thought Of Them Yourself

I had a hunch

The cutest town in Tennessee would be just a few miles down the road. Used to be a speed trap. We used to offer credit for students attending the Storytelling Festival, back in the day. From MSN.com.

The Cutest Town in Every U.S. State

TENNESSEE: JONESBOROUGH 

History buffs will love a visit to Jonesborough. Nicknamed “the little town with the big story,” it was founded in 1779 (before Tennessee was even a state). The home of President Andrew Jackson, Jonesborough was one of the biggest supporters of the abolitionist movement within the Confederate States. Today, it draws thousands of visitors every October for the annual National Storytelling Festival.

Don't worry, Tennessee

Be Happy. Unfortunately, there isn't a city to be found in the top 100 happiest in our state. Nashville just misses out at 104. Check around using the interactive map below. From WalletHub.

Source: WalletHub