Web Watch
Ed. asked three members of the HGSE community--a faculty member, a current student, and an alum--to share which websites they have been recently visiting:
The website for the Harvard University Gazette includes university-wide news, events, profiles of interesting people at the university, sports, and arts on the Harvard campus. I enjoy reading news articles about the latest cutting-edge research in all of the graduate and professional schools at Harvard; it cultivates my interdisciplinary perspective and fosters a sense of intellectual connection to a community of the world's foremost scholars. www.news.harvard.edu/gazette
The New York Times website covers various events of public interest and has a remarkable capacity in identifying and depicting the latest trends in diverse fields. While talking with people from different schools at Harvard, I have noticed that the Times articles are frequently mentioned by many Harvard professors, students, and visiting scholars from different walks of life. I usually skim through all sections of
the Times. I especially admire the columnists' abilities to use concise and elegant language to explain complicated social phenomena to the general public. Further, the real-life problems depicted in the Times offer abundant important suggestions for future research topics. They always fuel my desire to conduct new research to investigate and solve those problems. www.nytimes.com
--Cheng Zhu, current doctoral student and president of the Harvard Graduate Council, is researching human development and psychology from interdisciplinary and crosscultural perspectives
The website of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Programme for International Student Development provides useful comparative information on the capabilities of students across countries and on the characteristics of instruction and schools. www.pisa.oecd.org
The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement Civic Education Study is a two-phase, cross-national study. The main goal of the study is to identify and examine, in a comparative framework, the ways in which young people are prepared to undertake their role as citizens in democracies. Given my interests in citizenship education, this site is invaluable to my research.
www.2.hu-berlin.de/empir_bf/iea_e.html
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization websites provide comparative information on the educational attainment of students, with much detail on developing countries. The first site listed below generates tables of international education data based on criteria the site visitor indicates. http://gmr.uis.unesco.org; www.unesco.org
--Fernando Reimers, the Ford Foundation Professor of International Education at HGSE and director of HGSE's International Education Policy Program, is interested in educational opportunity for marginalized children, the connections between policy and instruction, and the study and conceptualization of educational quality.
Both professionally and personally, I rely on sloan-c.org for information related to distance learning. The Sloan Consortium maintains a catalogue of degree and certificate programs that cover a wide range of disciplines and are both accessible and cost-effective. They are a great resource for the full-time worker looking to pursue a degree program or anyone interested in professional development opportunities. www.sloan-c.org
I refer to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary on a regular basis. I use it to look up a word I am unsure of, use the thesaurus, or check out the 'word of the day.' www.merriam-webster.com
Now that I am physically distanced from Appian Way, I periodically check out HGSE News to keep up to date on what's happening in and around HGSE and to feel a connection to campus. www.gse.harvard.edu/news
--Shannon Leahy, Ed.M.'05, is the student liaison for off-campus programs at the University of Michigan's Center for Professional Development.
About the Article
A version of this article originally appeared in the Summer 2006 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
