College of the Ozarks: Where Tuition is Paid with Hard Work, Not Money

In 1906 the College was founded on two principles. One, to provide an education based on Christian values, was obviously normal of the time. The second, to have students participate in a work-study program to pay for their tuition, was and still is revolutionary. Since that time no students have had to pay for tuition, and they are even given the option to pay the $5,280 room, board, and incidental fees by participating in the school’s summer work program. The school likes to refer to itself as ‘Hard Work U’.

One would wonder how a university can have enough employment opportunities to provide 1,400 students with work. The college can do this because it houses most amenities found in a small town: including a post office, fire department, hospital, print shop, grain mill, hotel, and dairy farm. The school even has positions available for upper-level students that are related to specific areas of study.

In a world of ever-increasing tuition costs this seems like paradise. Needed support for the school is privately funded, and depends on several million dollars each year in endowment income and gifts from, I’m guessing devoutly Christian, friends throughout the U.S. I guess going to church has some payoffs.

Steeves

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Connectivism

Where does the increasingly autonomous learning environment and new social media tools lead to though? Some may not think there will ever be an end to it, but as of now the end is connectivism, ‘a learning theory for the digital age’. George Seimens (2005) developed connectivism as a way to cope with a number of significant trends in learning:

• “The shrinking half-life of knowledge … (which) is the time span from when knowledge is gained to when it becomes obsolete.”
• “Many learners will move into a variety of different, possibly unrelated fields over the course of their lifetime. “
• “Informal learning is a significant aspect of our learning experience. Formal education no longer comprises the majority of our learning. Learning now occurs in a variety of ways – through communities of practice, personal networks, and through completion of work-related tasks.”
• “Learning is a continual process, lasting for a lifetime. Learning and work related activities are no longer separate. In many situations, they are the same.”
• “Technology is altering (rewiring) our brains. The tools we use define and shape our thinking.”

The theory of connectivism is based on several principals:

• “Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions.
• Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources.
• Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning.
• Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.
• Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities.”

“John Seely Brown presents an interesting notion that the internet leverages the small efforts of many with the large efforts of few. The central premise is that connections created with unusual nodes supports and intensifies existing large effort activities. Brown provides the example of a Maricopa County Community College system project that links senior citizens with elementary school students in a mentor program. The children “listen to these “grandparents” better than they do their own parents, the mentoring really helps the teachers…the small efforts of the many- the seniors – complement the large efforts of the few – the teachers.” (2002). This amplification of learning, knowledge and understanding through the extension of a personal network is the epitome of connectivism.”

I believe that this is the way of the future and that in order to truly keep up with new information in certain fields, like social media, you can’t learn from a textbook, because the information written in the textbook nine months before your class began is obsolete by the time you begin reading it. Subscribing to constantly updating web publication is the only way to stay on top of the spread of new information that will eventually help you with your future career.

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For Those Who Thrive Under Pressure

As much as I hate it at the time, I honestly do thrive under pressure. My work ethic, cognitive thinking, and stamina all go through the roof when I have an impending deadline. On the other hand when I don’t, those abilities in me go by the wayside. This leads me to do stupid things like take a paper that’s due in a month and wait until five days before to start; which I think is a pattern most college students follow. Even when something has a somewhat impending deadline, there’s never any shortage of reasons to push it back and feel ok about it. Example: I’m just gonna watch all these episodes of The Office after I do the assignment so I might as well watch them now.

This lack of drive has characterized my entire semester, and leads me to care less about the kid of marks I get on assignments because I feel like I will always have time to work harder on the next assignment to bump my mark up. Last semester while taking 7 courses I didn’t have that luxury, so I had to put my full effort into everything. Having that pressure on me all the time was kind of a good thing because it kept me focused on my courses and life in general. That drive and stamina I had from the pressure of school would carry over to other parts of my life and always keep me productive. Nowadays my regular life is about as productive as my school life. Other than that little bank job we had today, which took about 3 hours, I spent about 3 other hours of the day doing stuff other than laying in bed watching The Wire on my laptop.

sigh…

Steeves

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Day at the Bank

Today a project for Ron Zitron from his BUS 404 class took my teammates and I to Westminster Savings Credit Union in Maple Ridge today. During the lunch rush we observed the teller line-ups and timed how long customers waited in line and how long their transactions took. That part was about as boring as it sounds, and we didn’t exactly get any groundbreaking data from the exercise.

The interesting part was how we kept track of customers. At times there would be up to fifteen customers in the bank at once for the three of us to keep track of. We each sort of took turns taking people to watch but we had to communicate quickly and accurately to determine who was taking who, and at what time every interaction was happening, which was being done on the stopwatch on my cellphone; putting me in charge of calling out times. Determining who we were talking about immediately took the form of our most obvious observations of the person: Old guy with cane, Blue chick, toque, hair, bag guy, Old guy with cane 2.

Picking up on each other’s observations came easily, even when their were two people whom we described the exact same, which happened often as most people were described based on their sex and colour of clothing alone. During busy rushed we would get talking fast and somewhat loudly. People we were describing heard us and turned around, the tall guy in black immediately knew what was up, to see what was going on. I would have been just as creeped out as they probably were by three guys talking about me, pointing at me, and writing stuff down about me in a bank. If we had all been wearing leather jackets and looking somewhat tough I could see someone thinking they were about to be robbed. But it was just a few college making observations to run advanced statistical analysis on.

Steeves

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Gym Culture

Since 2007 I have been a member of Fitness Unlimited in Maple Ridge and have visited it fairly regularly since. I have a love/hate relationship with the gym with both the working out part of it, and the culture.

The gym is basically like prison: a bunch of meatheads posturing around talking shit and eyeballing each other. It’s funny to watch sometimes and make fun, especially when they get intense into sets and start yelling at each other, but mostly it’s just annoying. Then you have the crews of 16 year olds who spend 30 minutes on a single machine working out their mouths a lot more than anything else. And finally there are the women working out in the heavy weight room. There is an entire womens only area, I mean, attention-seeking much? I guess that’s all you can expect though when you throw a bunch of people cranked up on creatine, HGH, and whatever else into a space that enduces testosterone output.

I feel like there is a fine line in working out between doing it to be healthy and doing it just to look a certain way, no matter the effects on your health. I admit I was once part of the latter group, but kind of got past that and now am proud to be working out in order to prolong my life.  Unfortunately, our society values looks though, so the gym will stay what it is for now.

Steeves

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Fake Tanning Is Out of Control

It you were to walk through Fitness Unlimited in Maple Ridge today you’d think it was mid-August. Every person in there is taking advantage of the uber-cheap tanning beds at the gym. To be honest I will do a little tanning myself before summer to work up a base tan and try to avoid burning that first day at the beach; unfortunately I’m rarely successful. These guys though take it over the edge. It used to be that most guys would fake tan but they would try to hide it or kind of be embarrassed about it if they were asked about it because it wasn’t seen as the most manly thing to do. Now how dark you are in March is a bragging point, and is openly discussed in the heavy-weight area. I think it’s a joke and just shows how much the world is turning into Jersey Shore.

As bad as guys are though, girls are at a whole other level. Whereas guys will stop tanning come winter, hopefully because they realize how ridiculous it looks, girls do not. Some will tan on occasion to keep a little glow. Others will look like carrots. I have a theory that they think if they keep tanning forever then people will just believe that their tan is their natural skin colour. Like they are just some unknown ethnicity of people who are born with blonde hair and golden brown skin.

Whatever helps their self-esteem I guess.

Steeves

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iPhone Apps for the Classroom

Smartphone applications are opening up an entire new world for institutions to interact with their constituents.  Stanford University has “released a free iPhone application called iStandard that allows students to register for classes, look up campus maps and be able to view the location of their friends on a map – instant messaging them if need be … Other schools have also introduced similar applications (Duke University, Georgia Tech, U Cal at San Diego, etc.) (Lavrusik, 2009).

Abilene Christian University (ACU) has taken the use of smart phones to the next level by issuing iPhones or iPod Touches to all of its full-time freshmen students in order to stay connected to their school, courses, professors, and fellow students. Freshmen can use their iPhones or iPod Touches to receive homework alerts, answer in-class surveys and quizzes, check their meal and account balances, and watch podcasts of their professor’s lectures.

Access to the iPhones and their prevalence on campus enables students to work with their professors on developing applications for the iPhone, which has become a burgeoning market in the social media sphere. Dr. Scott Perkins (2009) discovered “that pre-class podcasts and autonomous student review of information can effectively replace laboratory-based lectures with absolutely no decrease in student performance. The majority of students in specific courses where mobile devices have been routinely used rate themselves as having improved their academic performance (grades and organization) and engagement (active learning, contact with professors and teaching assistants, involvement and attention).”

Cynthia Powell, instructor of chemistry and biochemistry at ACU, concurred with Dr. Perkins in stating that, “as scientists, our students need to be learning how to collect and gather data on their own, and this is an important way that we can help our students on this path toward independence.” What we want to do with this program,” Dr. William Rankin, Associate Professor of English and Director of Educational Innovation, said, “is tap into each student’s innate abilities. We want to transform the shape of the classroom from that factory model, where everybody sits in ranks, and observes an consumes, to a model of engagement, where each student becomes a resource in the class.”

The above post is an excerpt from a paper about social media use in schools I’m writing for my Professional Report Writing class; in case you couldn’t tell.

Steeves

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Texas Board of Education Chooses to Teach Conservative Opinion of Facts

The Texas Board of Education voted March 11th on new reforms to the textbooks used in grade school classrooms which will change which organizations, people, and ideologies are highlighted as being important to the history of the U.S. The board’s new curriculum demands the inclusion of “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the National Rifle Association.” It hyperbolizes the achievements of Republican heroes while downgrading the achievement of democratic and minority leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Jefferson, and Caesar Chavez. The board even decided to completely remove the word ‘democratic’ from textbooks, in favour of describing the American government as a ‘constitutional republic’.

This will give grade school education an obvious political spin, which should of course be left entirely out of the education of children who should be given the straight facts and allowed to form their own opinion. Unfortunately, this is like creating subliminal messaging in textbooks. Children will grow up believing they are learning their country’s true history, when in fact they are learning the opinion of their esteemed Republican-majority Board of Education. Also, as Texas is a very influential state due to its size, these conservative-leaning textbooks will most likely begin migrating to other states throughout the country.

Countries hyperbolizing their achievements in teachings to their youth is nothing new of course. North Koreans are taught that Kim Jong-Il did numerous amazing things, including inventing the light bulb and walking on the moon. The Soviet Union greatly exaggerated their part in winning World War II through their educational institutions, at times making it seem as though it was them who bailed out the Allies and single-handedly toppled the Third Reich. Even Canada is somewhat guilty of this in our telling of the ’72 Summit Series. I grew up hearing about it believing that we were the underdog to the great Soviet team, when in fact, as I learned later, they were the underdog to us, but humiliated the superstars of Team Canada with total unknowns at the time.

This type of picking and choosing in Texas though will only lead to ignorance and the breeding of more Ann Coulters. But, let’s give Texas some time for their institutions to come to their senses. I mean, they still can’t even agree on whether evolution is a valid theory.

Steeves

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You Can Argue With An Opinion; You Can’t Argue With Ignorance (Ann Coulter)

A person is ignorant when they hold a view that defies factual evidence, which they know of, yet continue to hold the view. A person has an uninformed opinion if they hold their opinion due to the facts they have and know, but are unaware of evidence that disproves their opinion.

Ignorance leads charismatic people like Ann Coulter to spread their views and lead people to believe them; because people believe almost anyone on television has authority on the topic their speaking about. Hearing about what fellow Canadians felt and said about her during her recent Canadian university tour made me feel just that much prouder about being one. Her racial views on Arabs generalize all of them as terrorists. She has been quoted as saying that “If only we could get Muslims to boycott all airlines, we could dispense with airport security altogether.” During Coulter’s speech at the University of Western Ontario, she told a Muslim student to “take a camel”, in response to the student’s question about previous comments by Coulter that Muslims should not be allowed on airplanes.

She’s the epitome of conservative, bigoted, mean-spirited America, trouncing on anyone with a different point of view or background than her with unfounded insults. In an article she wrote in for USA Today covering the 2004 Democratic National convention she referred to female attendees as “corn-fed, no make-up, natural fiber, no-bra needing, sandal-wearing, hirsute, somewhat fragrant hippie chick pie wagons.” What does that even mean? She is just taking stereotypes and negative qualities and branding the women at the convention as embodying them. She’s a child. She comes fast with playground insults that will have a negative impact on the people she is speaking of no matter how little truth there is to them.

There’s no place on Earth for the Ann Coulters of the world, Rush Limbaugh included. I hope she knows now that there is at least no place for her in Canada.

Steeves

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Foursquare at the University of the Fraser Valley

I recently did a pilot study of how well the location-based social networking tool Foursquare would work at UFV. I spoke to a number of students about it and got them into trying it out while on campus. The results unfortunatley were lackluster. One of the reasons was that not a single person had heard of Foursquare of location-based social networking. Many others either found no reason to be doing it without some kind of incentive or saw it as being too intrusive into their personal lives. 

I saw numerous benefits from having an active Foursquare network at UFV like they do at UNC Charlotte and Harvard in the U.S. By having major congregation areas around campus as venues on the FourSquare network, students can check-in at a venue on the network when they are present in it, allowing their friends and classmates to see where they are in real-time, and be able to visit them. By seeing when their friends are on campus during the week, students could setup carpools with one another, it can facilitate team collaboration in group projects, which can be very difficult to coordinate, and even allow for easy access to large groups of students by their peers for activities such as selling used books or finding survey participants. This would even allow administration to watch trends in student activity in order to better understand the student body and what their needs are.

Below are my reccomendations:

As of March 2010, I must be blunt in saying that a full-scale operation like this in the present will most likely be futile and a waste of valuable resources. The concept is too new for the university to be going at it alone in a sense. A Downtown Vancouver campus, which is currently a great Foursquare hub with many participating businesses, would be a perfect place to implement it, unfortunately, our Abbotsford campus is not.

In the near future though, especially if UFV implements the Schools on Facebook application, this will be a viable option that the student body will be open to. Students need to see that the utility of the service will outweigh their privacy concerns, much like they already have with Facebook and online retailers like Amazon. Getting faculty and staff on-board would be the most credible source for getting students interested in location-based social networking, as well as the unlimited potential that the entire social media sphere holds itself. It won’t be long before other B.C. universities tap into Foursquare, and to be thought of as a forward-thinking school it would be better for UFV to be an early adopter than a laggard.

Steeves

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