joseph martin stevenson

How many times have you heard a potential college bound student say, Sure, I want to go to college, but right now, I have to make a living for myself and help my family? Or, I want to go to college, but I don t know what I want to study. On one hand, I love to read and write about literature; on the other, I also like doing physical things outdoors with my hands. Or, I learn better in smaller classes and I would feel lost in a large classroom setting. Or, I love to help people at my church with repairing things, but I also want beyond my church one day to learn more about different cultures around the world. This scholarly driven, yet practical, book is pointedly and purposefully titled, EMPOWERFUL INFORMATICS, to help students, parents, families, communities, and institutions of higher learning find the balance for personal empowerment, academic enlightenment, and economic efficiency. The authors have found that, too frequently, many families have misconceptions about the benefits of and the return on an investment in higher education. From the authors collective experiences, too often, families perceive higher learning based on inaccurate data, incomplete data, no data or information about options not far from their homes, neighbourhoods, and communities. The phases and points of progress for EMPOWERFUL INFORMATICS are discussed in this guidebook through the eight points of futuring, philosophy, anticipation, goal-setting, measurement, renewal, resource alignment, and human purpose/circling back over three phases. The book is quite timely, given the national conversations and movement concerning the cutting back and the curtailment of federal financial support for lower income students many of whom are first generation higher education seekers. This book is intended to reach the potential student as an idealist and the pragmatist, the dreamer and the doer, the farmer and the philosopher; and the scientist and the artist. As authors with over three decades of experience in adult, continuing, lifelong, higher, and other postsecondary education, we asked ourselves four fundamental questions in preparing and finishing this very timely book in today’s unpredictable, uncertain, unsure, and chaotic global economy.

Higher education is undergoing profound change at an unprecedented pace in today’s academic marketplace. This accelerating and precipitating change has motivated these distinguished authors -- passionate observers of academe -- to read well-chosen publications about meeting demands and responding to needs among our nation’s historically Black universities and colleges (HBCUs). We have captured the essence of expediting the critical analysis to confront the challenges of academic administration, finance, student life, technology, and other areas in the academic enterprise. Today’s administrators and academicians must be able to make balanced decisions based on a methodology that is compendious, intelligible, unambiguous, clear, and credible. The authors have provided this methodology based on their collective experiences in perhaps the toughest sector of the marketplace – the HBCU sector. The timing of this savvy book could not be better. Given recent media coverage of controversial and debatable decision-making at institutions of higher learning, this book can serve as a resource for meeting institutional challenges, approaching them with sequential structure, involving stakeholders in analytics (patterns) & informatics (processes) and formulating recommendations for future arbitration. The active research process for making these tough decisions provides a collaborative convergence to advance the process from a collegial examination of facts and issues. This process supports widespread advocacy in higher education for fostering organizational learning, leveraging human capital, institutionalizing human empowerment, and growing learning communities of practice for success.

Higher education is undergoing profound change at an unprecedented pace in today’s academic marketplace. This accelerating and precipitating change has motivated these distinguished authors -- passionate observers of academe -- to read well-chosen publications about meeting demands and responding to needs among our nation’s historically Black universities and colleges (HBCUs). We have captured the essence of expediting the critical analysis to confront the challenges of academic administration, finance, student life, technology, and other areas in the academic enterprise. Today’s administrators and academicians must be able to make balanced decisions based on a methodology that is compendious, intelligible, unambiguous, clear, and credible. The authors have provided this methodology based on their collective experiences in perhaps the toughest sector of the marketplace – the HBCU sector. The timing of this savvy book could not be better. Given recent media coverage of controversial and debatable decision-making at institutions of higher learning, this book can serve as a resource for meeting institutional challenges, approaching them with sequential structure, involving stakeholders in analytics (patterns) & informatics (processes) and formulating recommendations for future arbitration. The active research process for making these tough decisions provides a collaborative convergence to advance the process from a collegial examination of facts and issues. This process supports widespread advocacy in higher education for fostering organizational learning, leveraging human capital, institutionalizing human empowerment, and growing learning communities of practice for success.

The authors of this book workbook précis or primer are senior professors, dissertation advisors, and seasoned administrators for a research university in the Deep South. Our title INQUIRY reflects the book s aim to help readers with the principles of research scope concerning investigative (examination); nuances (meaning); questions (evoke); in (throughout); research (scientific) yield (return). The book was generated from many discussions over the years about the quality of dissertations and the organizational challenges experienced by doctoral students before, during and after the dissertation prospectus or proposal stage. The content of this book was driven, motivated, and derived from formative feedback given by some of our doctoral students who completed a series of pre-dissertation proposal workshops. We have attempted to address all of their typical inquiries, concerns, challenges and issues in the pre and post dissertation proposal process. We have attempted in our short book to capture these challenges and address them in a very succinct précis by identifying ten basic digits for planning the dissertation proposal process and beyond for the lifelong researcher. However we also spend a great of time making suggestions in the preplanning process prior to the ten step process. We recommend that doctoral students seek out separate readings for some of the fundamental components of traditional qualitative research relative to areas such as varying research designs, biography, case study, ethnography, grounded theory, phenomenology, and other elements of conventional quantitative research like instrumentation, sampling, variables, testing, and other statistics. We call our digits finger tip because the writing and word processing of the dissertation are the manifestation of work from the finger tips of the human hand based on the thinking constructs generated from the mind. Therefore, research derived from the process of dissertation thinking, engaging and writing is the result of cognitive and relational symmetry between the human mind and the human hand. An exercise we have used with our students involves each student putting on latex gloves and writing the chapter initials and numbered digits at the bottom of each finger. This allows the student to look at all finger digits that represent the all sections of the dissertation proposal, while typing about the dissertation on a computer key board. Given this profound psychological, physiological and metaphorical synergy, mind-to-hand coordination, we have chosen each finger of the hand to symbolize each step in our précis. The left and right hands each have five digits, thumb, index, middle, ring, and little. The scientific designation for each, the thumb, index, middle, ring and little fingers are the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th. The final dissertation has five chapters and five finger digits from the hand can intersect the psychological, physiological and metaphorical dimensions. After a comprehensive introduction, our book chapters are organized in a way to engage students of the dissertation process from looking at their hands beginning with the left thumb as the first digit to symbolize the stage of thought or idea provocation; the second left index digit as the literature review; the third left middle digit as the theoretical framework; the fourth left ring digit as the research questions; and the fifth left little digit as the hypothesis stage (or step). The right hand fingers represent the remaining key five chapters. The right thumb symbolizing research design ; the right index for instrumentation ; the right middle for data collection/coding ; the right middle for data analysis; and the right little for data findings.

Malcolm X remarked that "education is the passport of the future." This book, developed for aspiring and forward-thinking college students, identifies future careers and future skill sets for the global marketplace and workspaces on the horizon. These future careers include occupations in artificial intelligence, information technology, wearables, virtual reality, genomics, cryptocurrencies, connected homes and others. The skill sets presented include complex problem solving, critical thinking, emotional intelligence, cognitive flexibility, detail orientation, creativity, and others anticipating future competencies. The concepts of factual knowledge, conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge, and meta-cognitive knowledge are also discussed to foster the undergraduate learning experience in American higher education.

Malcolm X remarked that "education is the passport of the future." This book, developed for aspiring and forward-thinking college students, identifies future careers and future skill sets for the global marketplace and workspaces on the horizon. These future careers include occupations in artificial intelligence, information technology, wearables, virtual reality, genomics, cryptocurrencies, connected homes and others. The skill sets presented include complex problem solving, critical thinking, emotional intelligence, cognitive flexibility, detail orientation, creativity, and others anticipating future competencies. The concepts of factual knowledge, conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge, and meta-cognitive knowledge are also discussed to foster the undergraduate learning experience in American higher education.

As recognized by Schmidt(2005)and Dumas-Hines et al (2001)many institutions of higher learning are facing the challenges of finding ways to diversify their campuses. This work by leading minority educators aims to answer the challenge by creating philosophical statements that reflect a national consensus, setting goals to diversify students and faculty, examining best practices, and implementing activities and action plans. The authors discuss how both historically majority and minority institutions need to broaden and deepen their efforts. Attention is paid to Latino/ Asian-Pacific Islander faculty and student populations and motivations. Action plans that emphasize incentives and transnational and global realities are discussed. This work discusses past research, emphasizes present day opportunity and planning and discusses potential academic solutions to the pressing issue of diversity in both classroom and faculty offices. Contributors to the work include Professors Walter Crockett, Mark Hardy, Arthur Jefferson, Della Posey, John Sullivan and Darlene Thurston.

This collaborative book by five distinguished scholars in overlapping fields suggests that fruitful living is extremely hard work and that social harmony requires the unlocking and the emancipation of the human brain– the core cerebral source for advancing human coherence, connectivity, cohesion and civility. The stakes are simply too high for stakeholders across our country not to respond to the ongoing and escalating crisis of human division and the desperate need for engagement, enlightenment, and acceptance of human diversity. The authors strongly encourage academic and practitioner psychologists, as well as other students and social scientists, to join a timely framed narrative for greater progress in diversity. Neurodiversity aims to encourage dialogue, discourse, and discovery about what may be obvious to many but avoided by most – because its forces us to look inward instead of outward. We can make such inward observations, through the lenses of psychology, cognition, mindfulness, and underleveraged brain capacity amid modern cultural neuroscience. This is critically important – particularly in a time marked by the widespread amplification of ambiguity, angst, ambivalence, and anger. This book focuses on “crucial thinking” versus “critical thinking.” The authors pose fundamental questions -- about what we are calling a form of cognitive “levitation” and taxonomical “climbing” (CBDT) -- to think about purposes of intellectual discourse, not necessarily to seek empirical evidence. A special feature of this book is the inclusion of sample student learning outcomes as “provisos” throughout the narrative. We have attempted to integrate the student learning outcomes in the text’s narrative and connect them to the sections where they are inserted for the reader. The book’s embedded taxonomies can also facilitate the instruction, composition, and conceptualization of targeted student learning outcomes.

Universities and colleges are increasingly recognized as having a key role in national and regional development processes (Goddard et al 1994 ;Keane and Allison,1999;Chatterton&Goddard 2000). The role of universities in this respect is likely to further increase given the development of a “knowledge-intensive” economy and society. Entrepreneurialism and venture capitalism have served as the historical backbone and economic back drop for this country’s past, present and future prosperity. Many, notably America’s immigrants, have come to see education plus entrepreneurship as the “American Dream.” Given this historical and demographic reality, how should college campuses be changed with creative and responsive curriculum? The modern campus should be exciting, engaging and empowering for students and faculty. The purpose of Drs. Stevenson and White’s study is to contribute strategies and methodologies to the international conversation, the growing body of research and the expanding field of study concerning the future campus in higher education. Important arguments with supporting research are made for a much needed reappraisal of the role of entrepreneurship in higher education and a way forward is presented for colleges and universities to reinvigorate key areas of curricula to reflect the global changes in economics and education taking place today.

THEORRY -- The Higher Education of Research Resource Yield --is written for the modern college or university student scholar. THEORRY empowers undergraduate students to be renaissance scholars and apply academic data driven decision making as research leaders and apply practical logical model decision making as resource managers before, during and after the college experience. The Work includes three important Chapters with sections concerning leadership empowerment through research literacy and management development through logic modeling for today s renaissance student scholar on the modern college or university campus. We embraced the varying definitions of the renaissance person to conceptualize our unique definition. Generally, a renaissance person is defined as intellectual, cultured, well rounded, well grounded, experienced, educated, accomplished, or a person who draws from wide ranging bodies of knowledge. Specifically, we define the modern renaissance student as modern scholar who is well balanced from being: (a) empowered with knowledge about research leadership from seeking competence in research literacy at the freshman, sophomore, junior and senior levels of college and; (b) engaged in skill development about logic modeling from seeking competence in resource management during and after college education to support the process of lifelong learning. This is book about academic, logical and practical decision making. In today s challenging and complex society where and when managing life for results must be part of habitual orientation for intellectual decision making and data-driven analysis in everyday living, students from all stations and stages should plan ahead, organize well and evaluate daily activities on the job, at home, in the global community. This is especially true for students in today s higher education who seek ongoing intellectual growth, student life management, and continued lifelong learning.This book provides a framework for decision making before college, during college, and after college. After all, daily student management should be a lifelong commitment; not just an experience, activity, or exercise that illuminates from challenges in our lives. Often, daily life with unanticipated issues, concerns, challenges could be the result of illogical thinking, inessential preparation, inadequate information, ineffective conceptualization, inefficient organization, failure of being proactive, failure in not seeing all the parts of the whole, or personal poor planning. This phenomenon accounts for many students inability to choose major, a minor, or a degree. The management logic matrix introduced in our second Chapter, entitled THINK, (called ZOOOM ) can be an effective and efficient resource for confronting daily these challenges. We use real-life (academic and practical) examples to illustrate the application of our logic model. To broaden practical thinking to academic context, our book includes references for some best practices and lessons learned in the business (private sector) and public administration (public sector). Especially in today s global economy, these challenges fall under all kinds of managing situations Particularly in the present economy, we have found that students with limited time, limited resources, and limited support need systematic structures to manage the simplest of tasks as well as other tasks with more compelling complexity. All management challenges require the organization of the resources, the identification of outputs and outcomes, and the measurement of the work completed. The work empowers students and other readers to meet these daily life management challenges. The study provides a framework for decision making before college, during college, and after college.