Here’s another opportunity to expand the boundaries of the Institute’s globe-spanning campus community by hosting an international exchange student. AFS Intercultural Programs is a world-wide nonprofit organization that has been leading high school foreign exchanges for over 60 years. In August students will be arriving in the Monterey area and AFS is reaching out to local organizations focused on international education in order to contact folks who might be interested hosting an international high school student. Today, AFS exchanges more than 11,000 students each year in partnership with more than 50 AFS Partner Countries. AFS is one of the largest volunteer-based organizations of its kind in the world with 100,000 volunteers worldwide and more than 10,000 in the U.S. For more information about hosting an international exchange student through AFS, see their flier.
Archive for June, 2009
AFS Host Families Needed
Jun 30
Did you know…?
Jun 29
If you live in Monterey County, you can get into the aquarium free on the 20th of each month, through October. Check out the details.
It Takes a Village…
Jun 25
… or, in this case, a campus, to build a web site.
You have seen (and hopefully commented on) some great initial designs, and now, while White Whale digests our feedback and prepares round two, the even more critical task of building content is underway.
We have a tight timeline, with initial content due by JULY 8.
The folks listed below are part of a campus-wide web strategy team charged with organizing content development, but we need all of you to BE THE SOLUTION by telling your piece of the MIIS story. The team members will come to you… or you can go to them!… to engage in the process.
STRATEGY TEAM
Kristen Byers
Lynn McDonald
Jason Warburg
Amy McGill
Leah Gowron
Alicia Brent
Patricia Szasz
Rob Horgan
Gail Lu
Ann Flower
Angie Quesenberry
Nina Dutra
Regina Garner
Linae Ishii-Devine
Bob Cole
Anne-Marie Steiger
Jen Hambleton
You don’t know how to write for the web? Don’t worry… WEB WRITERS Kristen Byers, Rebecca Walters, Chesa Lichauco will shape your content into a concise and compelling narrative.
Intensive and Custom Language Programs — which includes Custom Language Services (CLS) and
the Summer Intensive Language Program (SILP) — has moved. You can now find them at at 419
Pacific Street, McGowen Building, Suite 103. Feel free to stop by on your way downtown!
If you would like any additional information on their programs, please visit online.
Please also note that MIIS is no longer offering the Winter Intensive Language Program (WILP).
The homepage design mockups from White Whale are ready and awaiting your feedback!
Please visit the Middlebury Web Makeover blog to view the proposed designs and leave comments. Be specific; we want to hear about elements you like or dislike and why. Our feedback will be incorporated into future design revisions.
Running One MIIS: Admissions
Jun 18
One June 16, Jill Stoffers provided a great overview of the impact of Reorganization and Integration on Recruiting, Admissions and Student Financial Planning. This led to an excellent discussion, including an idea offered by Bob Cole that MIIS faculty and staff could develop a process for identifying affinities between individual members of the MIIS community and prospective students in order to encourage matriculation. Interested? Stay tuned.
Next up: Accreditation (June 30, 12-1:30, Board Room) – Toni Thomas and Amy McGill
The Monterey Institute will host a summer campus visit day for prospective students on July 17th. To cap off this day, the Recruiting Department will be hosting a wine and cheese reception at Samson from 4-5pm, to provide visitors with an opportunity to mingle with our staff/faculty and to ask questions in a less formal setting. We would like to invite any staff and faculty available on visit day to feel free to attend the wine and cheese event and mingle with prospective students. This is a great opportunity to connect one-to-one with students, some of whom are deciding NOW whether to attend MIIS this fall. A strong class in September is important to all of us, so please support this effort!
As part of this reception, we also thought it would be nice to provide information tables/stations that can provide students a way to learn more about other opportunities on our campus that they might not otherwise know about. For example, the students might like to learn about DPMI, TLC/DMC, Team Monterey, GLOBE, CNS, CLS, the pizza process, student affairs, financial aid, and many others…
If your department or program would like a more structured venue for reaching out to these campus visitors and would like us to reserve a table for you, please be sure to contact Caroline Mansi in the Recruiting Department to coordinate.
If these additions to Visit Day are successful/well received, we might make this a regular part of our program.
Americorps has recently confirmed with the MIIS Recruiting Department that the Monterey Institute will now be featured on their web site and listed as one of a few colleges and universities across the US that match the Segal AmeriCorps Education Award for Americorps students. The Monterey Institute will be one of only four California colleges/universities featured on this listing. Alice Villemaire, Administrative Assistant in the Recruiting Department, spearheaded this effort; and we anticipate this new exposure on the Americorps will generate new interest in our programs among prospective students.
WordPress is extremely extensible due to the wide variety of plugins available
A few useful plugins:
- Feed WordPress allows you to incorporate other articles into your own blog using RSS
- WPTouch transforms your existing WordPress theme into a web-application experience when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch or Android touch mobile device.
- Daggone Sitemap Generator
- Simple Tags
- FAQ-Tastic
- Theme Test Drive allows you to test out new themes without activating it and showing it to all of your blog visitors
Cultural Expectations and Experiences
Participants/facilitators bring to the process of digital storytelling their cultural expectations of authority and ownership.
- Individual and collectivist approaches during production (and other cultural complexities)
- Student voice and identity (as both an individual and a representative of their family/culture)
- Being aware of issues in cross-cultural collaborations in story circles and peer review/feedback process
Imagined Audiences
Storytellers often imagine diverse audiences an anticipate responses to their stories involving diverse languages and cultures.
- Multiple audiences and diverse purposes & use of languages
- Participants as ambassadors for culture
- Participants as individuals moving between two cultures and in borderlands
- Cultural composition and readings of visual elements and soundscapes
Expectations of Power
Students’ and teachers’ educational expectations of curricular goals and student/teacher roles do not usually include sharing power.
- Who controls the elements of the content and the process? What should be learned and who should be teaching?
- Student-centeredness, creative production and the collaborative processes of storytelling in traditional classroom with various cultural expectations
- Assessing and evaluating DS work (evaluating completion of process but not always the product’s content, evaluating 7 elements, using audience response)
- How to structure in advance or decide in the moment when facilitators step in and drive
Stories Shown During Presentation
- ESOL Intercultural Communication Classes
- Somali Bantu Refugees’ Project Voice
- The Charlestown Project
- To view stories shown during the presentation, visit www.umbc.edu/stories