education-industry

I have benefited from this book a lot, especially while my job search. It is well organized and written. It is the only book in this area. Has lots of practical information and tips. A must read book for hospitality graduate students.

Scribner's collection of thoughts and essays is a must read for any aspiring novelist, publisher, or teacher.

The Internet already has maintenance and manufacturing directories of installers and vendors; drawings, field modifications, and manuals; e-mail; FAQs; library holdings access; news and user groups; online vendor catalogs; parts information and purchasing; software changes; technical bulletins and help; and used equipment and parts. Joel Levitt goes on to say that any Original Equipment Manufacturer webless in the second millennium will lose a lot of business: finding manufacturers these days means using search engines and visiting the superindustrial and trade magazine sites. There are already tens of thousands of equipment and OEM sites, findable by AltaVista or Excite if you want all the newsgroups and web searched, by spider sites if you need specific equipment model numbers, and by Yahoo if you need a major manufacturing homepage or web site. In fact, the yearly fee for a web site pays for a single full-page ad in a leading maintenance magazine. Also, the government originally set up the Internet for communication and research, which are maintenance and manufacturing concerns, and it is now setting the example with powerful, quality maintenance-oriented Commerce, Defense, Library of Congress and NASA sites. So THE INTERNET GUIDE FOR MAINTENANCE MANAGEMENT completes the picture for the author's HANDBOOK OF MAINTENANCE MANAGEMENT and MANAGING FACTORY MAINTENANCE and for Terry Wireman's WORLD CLASS MAINTENANCE MANAGEMENT.

Ivy and Industry is a must-read for anyone who teaches in (or is interested in) the academy in the US. Newfield eloquently and exactingly traces the role of the university in "inventing" the American middle class, and the conflicts that have emerged between critical and independent thought on the one hand, and the discipline attendant in the "managerial condition" on the other. The tension that runs through this book is between the social role of the university in encouraging research, invention and other aspects of "free thought" and the "unfree" and uncritical pressures of the capitalist economy during a century of relatively steady growth. Newfield convinced me that it is not too late for the university to be an important part of a solution to the inclusive society envisioned by the arts and sciences alike. Readable and enlightening!

In their efforts to effect positive local change, universities have long been directly involved in shaping the community agendas of their local milieu. The same is now becoming true as it relates to improving the local technology landscape. Universities are natural partners in community development efforts given the human, intellectual and financial resources they can bring to bear on problems. They are also logical partners in community IT initiatives for these same reasons, and in recognition of the educational and technological resources resident on their campuses. "Mangaging IT/Community Partnerships in the 21st Century" is perhaps the first comprehensive examination of the critical considerations for community-university partnerships involving information and communications technology. From course partnerships to educational and business partnerships to the so-called "digital divide," this book is a must for community practitioners and university researchers alike!

The New Idea Factory got my mind working and came off as a well coordinated effort between a business journalist and a pair of academics-turned entrepreneurs. In addition to bringing to light ways private companies can make profits by exploiting research paid for by the public or by the parents of students, this book has a way of getting one to think outside the box. Thinking outside the box is a creative process and from the creative process comes new ideas. This is a must read for any businessman.

Heather- Jane Robertson is an eloquent voice in the a technological wilderness when she atttacks the current sacred cow in education- IT.

There is no doubt that the 1960s model of education needs to change but Robertson questions the wisdom of attaching the change to the IT wagon.

School administrators who are attempted to think that computers will be education's deux ex machina will find the book thought provoking because we constantly battle the balance of a student's personal development against the imperative of information.

The book has a distinctly Canadian flavour but an international message.

It is well worth a read and would be a great book for educational reading groups.

Neil MacNeill

Nancy Flinn has done some quite incredible work with gardens and prisoners. This book is an excellent guide to starting and running a successful prison garden. People who are locked up in jail for long periods of time often lose their souls while they're "in" and gardens are perhaps the most effective way for them to regain a sense of nature, patience, and compassion. As Ms. Flinn found, prisoners who become very interested in gardening become much less interested in crime. This fine book really ought to be required reading for those people in charge of all the thousands of prisons. The taxpayers would save a great deal of money if they would push gardening as therapy. My husbnd worked in a prison for many years teaching gardening and he had amazingly good results with horticulture and inmates. He and I have nothing but admiration for the job that Nancy Flinn did, which we first read about in the LA Times I believe. This is a fine book and ought to be brought back in print.

Jill Freeze does an outstanding job in explaining the world of shopping online to people who might want to try it, but is concerned about privacy and safety. This is the perfect book to read if you've wanted to try online shopping, but need more information first.

Jill's style is entertaining and the book is quick-moving. You won't realize how much information you've accumulated while enjoying reading about the ins and outs of shopping online!

I highly recommend this book for newbies to shopping online. Jill explains everything clearly step-by-step. She also includes how to shop at Ebay and other online auctions. Most newbies would prefer to start their online shopping experience with something a bit easier, like buying this book at Amazon, for example, but everything you need to jump into the Ebay auction world is there if you decide to do that!

The book discusses how to look at the "big ticket items" online as well - things like houses and cars and colleges! You can do research online even if you end up buying the product at the local mall.

Jill Freeze is visually impaired and she is a perfect example of how online shopping makes life easier for SO many people in SO many different situations. I have been shopping online for a few years now, and have bought stuff from lots of e-tailers, including Amazon (yes, it was the first, and my favorite!), Webvan, Ebay, Half.com, Lands End, Drugstore.com, and many others. There's very little that you can't buy online, actually!

Jill discusses how to research the item you're looking to buy - she gives you lots of websites to check, but I found that she left out a few of my favorites:

BizRate.com - gives detailed reports on the different online stores - comparing on-time delivery, easy navigation of the website, prices, quality of items sold, etc. Yes, Amazon is very highly rated on Bizrate.com!

DealOfDay.com - looking for a deal? Check out what special offers are available at the online store of your choice ($10 off a $50 purchase, for example!)

BestBookBuys.com - My favorite thing to shop for online (and off-line, for that matter!) is books, and this website is the best for finding which store has your book at what price. You type in the title, author, or ISBN number, and it looks at about 30 different bookstores online and comes up with an easy-to-understand chart giving you the price (lowest price first), shipping cost, tax in what states, and best of all - AVAILABILITY of your book! Many shopping bots leave out this important fact. You can see the bottom line price - including shipping, and how soon your book will get to you. If you find that Amazon is your best bet for your latest must-have book (and it often is, all things considered), just click on "Buy" and BestBookBuys.com will take you right to the book detail page on Amazon (or whatever other e-tailer you click on) and there you are! Before buying from a bookstore that you aren't familiar with, check it out at Bizrate first.

Thanks, Jill, for a complete guide to the wonderful world of shopping online!

Funny how the workforce-preparation issue hasn't caught fire in the United States as it has in so many other industrialized nations. Certainly our nation's prosperity in the years ahead is dependent on the degree to which we educate ourselves to take on the challenges of participating in a globalized economy. As Hedrick Smith's Rethinking America (1995) and now Lynn Olson's The School-to-Work Revolution shows, other countries know this already. Yet we in the United States seem to be asleep at the wheel when it comes to education.

We're not talking about getting into a "good" college here, or about trends in standardized test scores among K-12 students. This is about a silo effect that's developed in most of our communities: educators have their agenda, and business and industry have theirs. But rarely does anyone bother to compare the two. That's too bad, because there is plenty of evidence that such willful ignorance of the other guy's concerns is going to have calamitous effects on our economic prospects and our social welfare in the years ahead.

Lynn Olson's purpose in writing The School to Work Revolution is to point a way out of the silos. Reporting on pilot projects in the United States and more established programs in Germany and Japan, Olson shows how school-to-work initiatives are facilitating educator/employer alliances that benefit students and their schools, and businesses and their communities.

Establishing school-to-work programs takes effort -- lots of curriculum and facilities planning, some serious financial commitments, and a perseverance that may be the scarcest resource of all. But the results can be astonishing, lifting a bored student in an aimless curriculum out of a dead-end career path and motivating him or her to levels of effort and achievement that amaze parents and teachers alike. Olson's book is full of such success stories.

Despite these happy results, school administrators don't always jump at the chance to implement school-to-work programs. For one thing, many discount the idea as old-fashioned vocational education dressed up with a new label. As Olson makes clear, this is a misconception. School-to-work is a bridge between what the student learns in the classroom and what the student will need to know in the workplace. (Haven't you ever heard yourself ask, "What are they teaching these kids anyway?" Well, there you have it!).

Practically speaking, school-to-work programs are also extremely labor-intensive in terms of staffing. They require lots of contact hours between students and teachers and often between employers and teachers as well. Moreover, school-to-work is also an idiosyncratic business. In most programs students are encouraged to develop their educational plans on the basis of heartfelt career interests, instead of quickly checking off a menu item on a guidance department form -- not necessarily an attractive proposition for an already overworked high-school staff.

But I think it comes down to this: We can come up with the resources to get this done now or pay a lot more later on. With my car, I've finally learned to fork out the money before things get out of hand. In the case of workforce preparation, Olson shows, the time to pay up is now. It will make for a much smoother ride later on.