Larry D. Groppel, John Tucker, Wesley Owens and Regina Youngblood
The Dallas Independent School District (DISD) is the 12th largest school district in the US with an operating budget of approximately $1.04bn and a diverse enrolment of more than…
Abstract
The Dallas Independent School District (DISD) is the 12th largest school district in the US with an operating budget of approximately $1.04bn and a diverse enrolment of more than 158,000 students. The district encompasses roughly 351 square miles, primarily within the boundaries of the City of Dallas, Texas. In November 2001, the Board of Trustees requested a bond election be held to address overcrowding with additions and new construction, and to improve existing buildings. Voters showed strong confidence and trust in the district when, in January 2002, they approved a $1.37bn bond programme to build 21 new facilities and add to or renovate all existing schools. The DISD Board of Trustees has selected competitive sealed proposal as the primary contracting method for construction under the 2002 Bond Programme. This method allows selection of qualified and competent general contractors who can meet the rigorous schedule and complex demands of multiple urban construction and renovation–construction projects. The intent of this paper is to give the reader a brief overview of the competitive sealed proposal process as it relates to school construction in the state of Texas, and how DISD has implemented this procurement method for its recent bond programme.
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Jason McGrath and John Fischetti
The digital technological revolution offers new ways for classrooms to operate and challenges the concept of whether brick and mortar schools should exist at all. At the same…
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The digital technological revolution offers new ways for classrooms to operate and challenges the concept of whether brick and mortar schools should exist at all. At the same time, the changes to society as we move from a knowledge-based economy to an intelligent and innovation-based economy challenges us to reassess the purpose of education. This chapter investigates an overarching counterfactual question, “What if compulsory schooling was invented in the twenty-first century”? We used a foresight methodology, based on “anticipation,” to conceptualize possible models for a future system of compulsory schooling arising from an analysis of contemporary catalysts for remodeling. While anticipation does not predict the future, the concept is that when a current system and a model of a system interplay, they impact each other to change both the present as well as possible futures. The design principles of cities, such as Freiburg (Germany), Poundbury (England), and Christie Walk (Australia), which have been developed around the idea of ecologically sustainable and decentralized cities, are focused on approaches to living that can provide a springboard for exploring the impact of changing employment, economic, technological, and social change on future schooling models. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has opened up a new field of study to investigate neuroscience, which can inform teaching practice. Postmodern and indigenous ways of thinking provide different insights about how schooling might be reconceptualized. Alternative models of future schooling are conceptualized about (i) the role of the learner and teacher, (ii) design of a school, and (iii) the purpose of compulsory schooling. For each area of remodeling, deviations to current practices as well as paradigm shifts are framed as part of scenario building. Related questions include: how schooling might be different if it had been created today for the first time? How might it better meet the needs of contemporary society? What aspects of schooling now might be lost if it was only invented in the twenty-first century? What are possible side effects from any change ideas as part of research practice? A vital aspect of this chapter is to explore the concept of learning as a general concept versus the more specific concept of schooling. We are at the precipice of a new vision of schooling based on a counterfactual way of thinking about the future of schooling as we have known it in the West.
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Spiritual ecology explores the interface of religions and spiritualities on the one hand, and environments, ecologies, and environmentalisms on the other. As an international…
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Spiritual ecology explores the interface of religions and spiritualities on the one hand, and environments, ecologies, and environmentalisms on the other. As an international environmental movement, spiritual ecology involves a multitude of diverse leaders, organizations, and initiatives. They share a common concern and commitment to pursuing the vital role of religion and spirituality in environmentalism to complement secular approaches to environmental problems and issues from the local to the global levels. Here, after some background, spiritual ecology as a component of the phenomena of international environmental movements is exemplified through three cases: the Green Belt Movement beginning in Kenya, the Green Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Alliance of Religions and Conservation affiliate of the World Wide Fund for Nature (formerly World Wildlife Fund).
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Omid Rafieian and Hema Yoganarasimhan
This chapter reviews the recent developments at the intersection of personalization and AI in marketing and related fields. We provide a formal definition of personalized policy…
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This chapter reviews the recent developments at the intersection of personalization and AI in marketing and related fields. We provide a formal definition of personalized policy and review the methodological approaches available for personalization. We discuss scalability, generalizability, and counterfactual validity issues and briefly touch upon advanced methods for online/interactive/dynamic settings. We then summarize the three evaluation approaches for static policies – the Direct method, the Inverse Propensity Score (IPS) estimator, and the Doubly Robust (DR) method. Next, we present a summary of the evaluation approaches for special cases such as continuous actions and dynamic settings. We then summarize the findings on the returns to personalization across various domains, including content recommendation, advertising, and promotions. Next, we discuss the work on the intersection between personalization and welfare. We focus on four of these welfare notions that have been studied in the literature: (1) search costs, (2) privacy, (3) fairness, and (4) polarization. We conclude with a discussion of the remaining challenges and some directions for future research.
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The following is an annotated list of materials that discuss the ways in which librarians can provide library users with orientation to facilities and services, and instruct them…
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The following is an annotated list of materials that discuss the ways in which librarians can provide library users with orientation to facilities and services, and instruct them in library information and computer skills. This is RSR's 11th annual review of this literature, and covers publications from 1984. A few items from 1983 have been included because of their significance, and because they were not available for review last year. Several items were not annotated because the compiler was unable to secure them.
It all began a very long time ago, sometime before 1876, that annus mirabilis of librarianship during which the American Library Association was founded, Library Journal debuted…
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It all began a very long time ago, sometime before 1876, that annus mirabilis of librarianship during which the American Library Association was founded, Library Journal debuted, and Samuel Green published in its pages the first article about reference librarianship. And it continues today. In April 1994, an unidentified library school student from the State University of New York at Buffalo queried the participants of the LIBREFL listserv, asking them, “Can you give a summary of the ‘hot’ library reference issues of the week? I'm working on a project for my Reference course, and would like to find out what is REALLY vital to refernce (sic) librarians out there today.” I was tempted to reply that all of that week's “hot” issues were identified in Green's 1876 article. In that article describing the phenomenon we today call reference service, Green touched on issues such as the librarian's obligation to provide information without injecting personal values, the inability of any librarian to know everything, the need sometimes to refer a patron to another information agency, SDI services, the value of proactive rather than passive service, the challenges of the reference interview, and, of course, what has come to be called the “information versus instruction debate.”