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Excelling at Excel : Teaching Blog at Baruch College
Should all undergraduate business students study spreadsheet-based modeling?
For the past two years I’ve been thinking about this question, first as a member of the Provost’s Task Force for Quantitative Pedagogy, and now as a member of two follow-up efforts (the Weissman School’s “implementation committee” and the Zicklin School’s “quant group”). If you’ll bear with me, I’d like to share some of what I am hearing.
First, I asked young alumni as well as hiring managers who recruit Baruch’s BBA graduates.
They told me that to compete for the best entry-level professional positions, one needs spreadsheet fluency (some said that PowerPoint presentation skills and Access database skills are key too). And once on the job, according to Accountancy’s Harry Davis, young Excel and Access database “whiz kids” are receiving promotions earlier, especially at smaller firms where such skills are invaluable. Just yesterday someone told me that she perceives a double standard on Wall Street: all else being equal, Ivy League entry-level job candidates can say, “sure, I can learn MS-Excel visual basic macros” whereas a Baruch candidate would probably receive additional scrutiny over such statements.
Next, I surveyed our undergraduate BBA students (i.e., my MGT 3121 students.)
Students tell me that they want stand-alone courses in Excel modeling and they want Excel deeply embedded in business courses where it makes sense. I’ve heard this so many times that it motivated this article for my professional society’s monthly magazine.
Next, I asked Patricia Imbimbo and C. May Reilly at Baruch’s STARR Career Development Center.
They tell me that the need for spreadsheet and modeling skills are so great that they developed their own training program. The two-dozen or so students who qualify for the Financial Leadership Program (FLP; formerly called Wall Street Careers) receive three half-day Excel workshops on shortcuts, pivot tables, if statements, solver, vlookups and visual basic macro programming. In addition, Training the Street
Keene State College | Integrative Studies Program
Integrative Studies Definition, relationship of outcomes.
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The integrative outcomes represent the outcomes faculty has identified as important to student learning, outcomes they identified as being valuable, and outcomes they want students to be able to demonstrate. They also represent the general education principles. The outcomes are purposefully broad to allow faculty latitude in more specifically identifying outcomes that match the intent of their individual courses.
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The purpose of the three sets of outcomes is to provide students exposure to all the outcomes in many contextual settings so that they see how these outcomes are connected to the process of engaging in intellectual inquiry, rather than how the three sets of outcomes relate to one another. The three sets of outcomes are integral to student development. In all courses in the program, students will see what the disciplinary or interdisciplinary outcomes are, what the skills expectations are and what the integrative outcomes are. Each syllabus will identify these. It won't take students long to see how these outcomes are connected to the process of engaging in intellectual inquiry.
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The NCTE Definition of 21st Century Literacies
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- Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
- Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
- Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
- Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
- Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts
- Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments
Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy. Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable. As in the past, they are inextricably linked with particular histories, life possibilities and social trajectories of individuals and groups. Twenty-first century readers and writers need to
- Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
NMLskills.pdf (application/pdf Object)
Play - the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
Performance - the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
Simulation - the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
Appropriation - the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
Multitasking - the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details
Distributed Cognition - the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
Collective Intelligence - the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
Judgment - the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
Transmedia Navigation - the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
Networking - the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
Negotiation - the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms
Visualization - the ability to interpret and create data representations for the purposes of expressing ideas, finding patterns, and identifying trends
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Project New Media Literacies
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The white paper Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Jenkins et al., 2006) identifies the three core challenges: the participation gap, the transparency problem and the ethics challenge, and shares a provisionary list of skills needed for full engagement in today's participatory culture. In the video below, members of the NML team share their thoughts and perspectives on the skills we call the New Media Literacies.
NMLWhitePaper.pdf (application/pdf Object)
The Participation Gap — the unequal access to the opportunities, experiences, skills, and
knowledge that will prepare youth for full participation in the world of tomorrow.
The Transparency Problem — The challenges young people face in learning to see
clearly the ways that media shape perceptions of the world.
The Ethics Challenge — The breakdown of traditional forms of professional training and
socialization that might prepare young people for their increasingly public roles as media
makers and community participants.
Participative Pedagogy for a Literacy of Literacies - Freesouls
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If print culture shaped the environment in which the Enlightenment blossomed and set the scene for the Industrial Revolution, participatory media might similarly shape the cognitive and social environments in which twenty first century life will take place (a shift in the way our culture operates). For this reason, participatory media literacy is not another subject to be shoehorned into the curriculum as job training for knowledge workers.
City Brights: Howard Rheingold : 21st Century Literacies
"Will our grandchildren grow up knowing how to pluck the answer to any question out of the air, summon their social networks to assist them personally or professionally, organize political movements and markets online? Will they collaborate to solve problems, participate in online discussions as a form of civic engagement, share and teach and learn to their benefit and that of everyone else?
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Or will they grow up knowing that the online world is a bewildering puzzle to which they have few clues, a dangerous neighborhood where their identities can be stolen, a morass of spam and porn, misinformation and disinformation, urban legends, hoaxes, and scams? I have collected evidence over the past several decades that suggests the humanity or toxicity of next year's digital culture depends to a very large degree on what we know, learn, and teach each other about how to use the one billion Internet accounts and four billion mobile phones available today. "
Shirky: Broadcast Institutions, Community Values
Communities vs. Broadcast Cultures
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The order of things in broadcast is "filter, then publish." The order
in communities is "publish, then filter."
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