Learners can now can take the complete Myers-Briggs personality type assessment, verify their types, and receive a high-quality interpretation at one place, completely online through CPP, Inc, at http://www.mbticomplete.com. While personality tests have been widely available on the Internet for years, some of the more complicated, more statistically valid ones, have been costly, or have required one to hire an expensive service for evaluation of the results.
For decades, individuals, corporations, the military, and other organizations have used personality tests, usually in the form of questionnaires, or “inventories,” to determine an individual’s personality profile. Matching a personality profile with a job can result in a better “fit” between the tasks and an individual’s interests. Creating teams with individuals who have complementary personality traits can lead to enhanced productivity. Finally, supervisors and fellow team members can begin to understand, and have more tolerance for, trait differences.
I sometimes wonder if we're running the risk of forgetting how similar the stories of those who came to the U.S. in the early years of the 20th century are to many of today's immigrants. We like to think that arriving in the U.S. means instant American Dream, but for many, it's a life of fear, secrecy, discrimination, and low-wage work.
One writer whose story is often overlooked, is that of Carlos Bulosan (1911?-1956), who came to the United States from the Philippines. A dedicated reader, Bulosan completed a book a day. He translated his passion for the written word into poetry and prose.
Perhaps his most celebrated work is his memoir, America is in the Heart, published in 1946, which details his experiences of work, love, and life in California. Bulosan is the outsider’s outsider who does not feel a sense of belonging, even within certain ethnic subgroups. No matter how much he may yearn for his family and his home country, Bulosan cannot return to the Philippines, due to violence and threats to his personal safety. Yet, America has not been the safe, comfortable dream he had hoped for. Instead, his experience of America is that of a series of menial jobs, short-term friendships, jail, marginalization, and economic insecurity.
Bulosan describes his mindset during the first years of life in the U.S. as one of confusion and defiance. He feels himself to be voiceless and powerless, and the world around him refuses to acknowledge his viewpoint. He dislikes the labels society has put in place, and in one instance, while he is working at a restaurant in Buellton, California, he reacts: “When a Filipino and a white woman came to the restaurant to eat and were refused, I flung my apron away and attacked the headwaiter with my fists” (America is in the Heart).
He was fired. No one bothered to ask, however, why he erupted in anger. Some of the history of Filipinos in the U.S. can be found at an online exhibit for Carlos Bulosan.
Bulosan writes to inform readers of the experiences of Filipino immigrants, and the sadness that accompanies a longing for home. Bulosan believes he has a common bond with other immigrants – he describes a conversation with a French immigrant who became sad upon hearing the wind through peach trees because it reminded him of the sounds of his native Normandy. There are life lessons to be learned in this. One of the most compelling is that bonds are remarkably difficult to forge once one considers oneself ostracized or outgrouped.
Yet, it is precisely the sense of longing, nostalgia, loneliness, and the seeming randomness of one’s own existence that unites individuals. Bulosan speaks to the fact that individuals can find kindred spirits and thus bond in that way. S
hort Answer Questions: Carlos Bulosan
1. How did the author’s environment affect his mindset?
2. What community has the author identified himself with, and how?
3. How did the author’s ethnic background influence his mindset?
4. Why did the author continue to work at trying to rehabilitate his brother when he admits that he felt that it was futile?
5. Explain the stereotyping that accompanied the author’s brother and the effect on both his brother’s and his own life.
6. Although Carlos seemed to have a sense of loyalty to his brother, Amado did not seem to share the same sense of loyalty. How did Amado’s sense of connection with a particular group or community effect where his loyalties lied?
7. Why would a man who came to America to make his fortune, and apparently succeeded, advise Carlos to go back home?
8. Why wouldn’t the author take the man’s advice and go home even when he was continuously discriminated against in the US?
9. List all of the ways in which the author and others of his same ethnicity were discriminated against in this reading.
For more information and instructional materials, please contact Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D. and Elaine Bontempi, Ph.D.
Effective Annotated Bibliographies: Virginia Tech example
This video discusses how to develop an effective annotated bibliography. Included is a step-by-step approach applied to the example of paper that is investigating school violence, and the examples of Virginia Tech, Columbine, and theories of emulatory violence (Bandura), sociological pressures, psychological consequences of abuse, etc. How to develop categories for your annotated bibliography is discussed.
One of the Marshalls needs to come forward and settle it once and for all that J. Howard Marshall II's frozen sperm was used to impregnate Anna Nicole Smith, and the father was not one of the twenty or so pretenders, even if one is Zsa Zsa Gabor's Prince (formerly known as Hans Robert Lichtenberg). ...
[cut]
...Anna Nicole Smith utterly effaced the boundary between the real and the unreal, the constructed and the re-constructed. She embarked on an endless reification process, an ourobourous-like self-swallowing, self-devouring metamorphosis. We could see the transformations occur as she bloated, shrank, bloated and shrank again, and as she slurred, stumbled, and drooped her eyes.
In the end, though, something strange happened. Anna Nicole Smith, although she was ostensibly simply a self-constructed copy of a self-construction (the Gatsby-esque Marilyn), seemed more real.
We are ignoring and/or imposing ineffective distance education strategies for our bilingual and non-English speaking populations. Right now, we have an urgent need to provide the kind of education and training that will benefit bilingual and non-English speaking populations in the United States, and we need to do it as quickly and effectively as possible in order to develop human potential, communities, and economies across the spectrum of socio-economic and demographic groups, professions, and vocations.
There are more than 35 million Spanish-speakers in the United States. This is a conservative figure, because there are no ways to accurately record the actual number of Spanish speakers, and by some accounts, that number increases by as many as 1,000 people per day. The USA has the fifth-largest population of Spanish speakers in the world.
As you write paragraphs, it is important to have a topic sentence or a controlling idea. Otherwise, your reader won’t know what you’re writing about. Your paper will be hard to follow.
How do I write a good topic sentence? x Be sure to think about your message. x What do you want to say? x Think about how to communicate with your readers in a nano-second. x Know your audience.
Here are some attributes: x clear x precisely worded x can appear anywhere in the paragraph x relates to the other sentences in the paragraph x relates to the other paragraphs
Sometimes it is effective to tell a story or narrate events in your essay.
Narratives occur
x throughout the entire essay x in each paragraph
Narratives tell a story.
x capture your audience’s interest x engage readers’ emotions x suggest a beginning-middle-end x invoke archetypes x make your readers recall archetypal narratives (myth / fairy tales)
You can support your argument by supplying details. Details make your argument convincing, and they help your audience connect their own experiences and perceptions to what you’re saying.
What kind of supporting details are helpful?
x choose details that relate to your topic sentence x find data that provides evidence that what you’re saying is plausible x provide a solid foundation
What kinds of support are out there?
x observations x personal experience x examples x facts x statistics x testimony / quotes
As you write paragraphs, it is important to have a topic sentence or a controlling idea. Otherwise, your reader won’t know what you’re writing about. Your paper will be hard to follow.
How do I write a good topic sentence? x Be sure to think about your message. x What do you want to say? x Think about how to communicate with your readers in a nano-second. x Know your audience.
Here are some attributes: x clear x precisely worded x can appear anywhere in the paragraph x relates to the other sentences in the paragraph x relates to the other paragraphs
As a student, instructor, or e-learning institution administrator, are there ethical issues in mobile learning? If so, are they the same as ones one might expect in e-learning? This post discusses several of the more worrisome ethical issues that could accompany mobile learning and suggests approaches to raise awareness. The goal is to avoid ethically problematic design or behaviors. Some of the other issues are not as easily addressed.
1. Privacy issues. Mobile devices can invade privacy. Guidelines need to be set. They need to be clear and they should be enforced.
2. Uniformity of access. Ethical constructs that deal with justice and the administration of justice suggest that all individuals who participate in an activity should be able to do so with equal chances of success; which is to say they should be on a level playing field.
3. Non-biased, culturally equitable delivery and expectations. Signs and symbols can be subtle, and people may not be aware that a particular sign, symbol, or content item could be offensive to some groups. It is important to have focus groups and beta test the courses as well as the mobile learning devices. It is also important to expand the rules of proper mobile learning behaviors and to makes sure that students are not photographing or recording invasive or offensive items and then posting or sending them to fellow students.
4. Language barriers. Multiple delivery modes / redundancies. Are colleges ethically obligated to provide training, mentoring and support to learners who may not have the background or language skills to succeed in mobile learning? I would argue "yes." They are also legally obligated.
5. Learning preferences. Some students who sign up for mobile learning may not realize that they do not actually learn or retain content as well through audio as via other modalities. For example, they may be a spatial learner who needs to organize text. Will they be penalized for having learning preference differences? This is an ethical consideration.
6. Equity of instruction. Are some instructors trained more effectively than others? Does a difference in training and teaching philosophy result in uneven, inconsistent instruction within the same college or university? These are concerns, particularly when technology is an issue, as is the case of mobile learning.
7. Posting and other concerns. "Neti-quette" notwithstanding, impulse control is often lessened in an environment where one feels safe and fairly anonymous. One way to combat rudeness in the discussion board is to attach a real identity and impose social control.
8. Recognizing consequences of actions in an impersonal and sometimes invisible world. It is not always easy to be aware the consequences of one's actions when the action takes place "off the screen" and in the real world (rather than the virtual world). In the future, m-learning will help bring the "real world" more readily into the virtual world by means of video, images, and sound captured on location.
9. Cyber-bullying and cyber-stalking. According to utilitarian ethics, what matters most is the amount of discomfort one causes another. This puts the burden on the course creator or provider to assure an environment where individual learners are not caused discomfort or anguish through the actions of others. Harrassing instant messaging, posts, comment-spam, etc. are definitely off-limits.
10. Types of serious games, simulations. This topic could be a book in and of itself. While some games and simulations are clearly for the public good, others can be more questionable. Simulating crimes and violence, even if it is for historical re-enactment, can be ethical thin ice. Examples include JFK Reloaded and Grand Theft Auto Vice City.
11. Gender issues - relationships vs. justice. According to Carol Gilligan (1982), women have been conditioned to privilege care-giving, care-taking, and relationships over the execution of laws and justice. How this plays out in an e-learning or m-learning environment could be quite interesting, particularly when it might come to grades and performance. Females may express themselves differently in the m-learning environment, and may take on the roles of facilitation and relationships. Their responses may be more "gray area" whereas men may tend to have a more cut and dried approach, and may become impatient with the discursive strategies employed by women to facilitate relationships.
Getting the Most from Audio in your Online Course Topic: New Technologies
Watch the video snippet! Tips for using audio in your online course -- how to make it work for you so that you are able to achieve learning outcomes and succeed in your online or hybrid (face to face plus online) course.
Susan shares a few tips after a nice hike on a gorgeous August day in Waterford, New York. Enjoy! The snippet is only about 30 seconds long.
Here's a meditation on what might happen if the Blackboard lawsuit ends up inadvertantly killing off the LMS as we know it... Blackboard vs. The World.
When the young teen-ager, Elizabeth Smart, had the misfortune of being spirited away in the middle of the night from her Salt Lake City home in by what was, at the time, an unknown abductor, the nation erupted in wild speculation. Beyond the justifiable fear of abduction by a serial pedophile rapist, tabloids and serious journals alike erupted in lurid depictions of lurking polygamists who were always scouting for additional candidates for their communities. It was, after all, Utah, and the home of Mormons, whose history of sanctioned polygamy, is a source of embarrassment for some, titillation for outsiders.
In a terrible case of "no good deed goes unpunished," a homeless man for whom the Smarts felt sympathy and employed in order to help him, kidnapped Elizabeth and forced her to become his second "wife" in his own self-designed variant of a polygamous apocalyptic cult.
In the way the story was depicted, and Elizabeth Smart's miraculous return, thanks to her sister's observations, it became fairly evident that non-Mormon America continued to be morbidly fascinated by the idea of polygamists in Utah, even though the Mormon church will not tolerate polygamy of any kind.
The truth is, the American public desperately wants polygamy to exist.
When Richard Dawkins and David Dennett first proposed that Darwin's theory of evolution could be applied to culture through the language of DNA (memes), it met a need. At that time, there was no way to easily explain how and why certain robust ideas appear seemingly simultaneously throughout a culture, and then begin to influence the culture and evolve with it, ultimately affecting its survival.
Memes are convenient ways to explain the emergence, influence, replication, and persistence of ideas, even if one does not completely accept the evolutionary theory mechanisms that support the concept.
A meme is an idea, but a remarkably robust one with sufficient complexity to be able to adapt itself to many cultural settings and situations. The elements within the idea have the capacity to produce copies of themselves, and can show up in different forms as they are modified by their environment (Holdcroft & Lewis, 2000).
Now, more than thirty years after the publication of Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene, the concept has entered popular culture. Perfectly illustrated by the movie, The Matrix (dir. Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999), one could think of the Smiths as one meme -- the physical manifestation of or a metaphor for the ways in which society enforces conformity and punishes those who seek the truth behind what lies beyond a glittery false consciousness comprised of consumer products, etc.
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