Saturday, August 28, 2010

IHEC Blog will be on vacation next week

IHEC Blog is going on a much needed vacation.  For the most part, I'll be up in Door County, Wisconsin.  I hope to find some time to relax but with kids who are 8, 5 and almost 2 that can always be a challenge.

I will return Tuesday, September 7th and will be back in action.  I hope to prepare some posts to go out next week but my tweets and IHEC Blog Facebook posts will be rare if at all.  I imagine that I will return to a mountain of e-mail, RSS feeds, tweets, (hopefully) blog comments to sift and sort through so it may take me some time to respond to any messages.

Photo credit:  fam89

Friday, August 27, 2010

International Education Blogs & News is looking for new blog subscriptions




Do you manage a blog related to international education?  If so, I would love to add it to my International Education Blogs & News (IEB&N) site which you can visit at http://internationaleducationblogs.blogspot.com/. Please e-mail me at international.ed.consulting@gmail.com with the URL and I'll check it out to see if it is appropriate for IEB&N.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Always nice to see a past Fulbright recipient's picture on the U.S. Student Program website!

I'm entering my 11th year as the Fulbright Program Adviser at the University of Chicago.  I LOVE talking to students about their Fulbright application plans and helping them understand the program to put forward the strongest application possible.  I frequently visit the Fulbright U.S. Student website and I always get a smile on my face when I see the picture of a former student that I worked with on her Fulbright application, and went to Germany on an English Teaching Assistantship grant in 2003, cycle into the site.


Several years ago I was working on the Allabroad.us project for the Center for Global Education at Loyola Marymount University and knew that I had to add Priscilla to the group of mentors answering questions about race and ethnicity issues while studying abroad.  You can access Priscilla's profile here.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Working Theoretical Model of Undergraduate Sojourner Change

Back in 2000 I received my Master of Science in Family Science and I wrote my thesis on Undergraduate Sojourner Change as a Result of a Study Abroad Experience.  In the end, I came up with a working theoretical model of undergraduate sojourner change which I share here in this post. 


Working Theoretical Model of Undergraduate Sojourner Change by D Comp



Groundbreaking research it is not but it was my first dabbling into research and international education and it all took off for me from there.  You can read a shorter version of my thesis here (citation below):


Comp, D.  (2008, Spring).  Identifying Sojourner Change after a Study Abroad Experience: A Content Analysis Approach.  International Topics, 2 (1), 65-87.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Academic Affairs or Student Affairs? ~ Where to House an International/Study Abroad Office?

Institutions of higher education are interesting creatures.  I'm always interested in how they are structured and their history (which lends insight into how they were/are structured and organized).  At some institutions the international/study abroad office is housed under student affairs while other institutions house these operations under their academic affairs umbrella.  Some institutions have one office under student affairs and the other office under academic affairs.  There are certainly positives for housing the international/study abroad office under either of these institutional areas.


I don't necessarily think there is a correct answer to this and it really depends on the institutions themselves and their culture.


What are your thoughts and/or experience with this?  


Photo credit: arisexpress

Monday, August 23, 2010

Grateful Dead Folktales

Grateful Dead folktales, generally, are about a troubled soul who is put to rest by a traveler…further down the road the spirit then helps the traveler with his own quest.  Grateful Dead folktales and other folktales with similar themes are found in folktale collections from all parts of the world. 


The popular "The Travelling Companion" by Hans Christian Andersen (1835) is an example of a Grateful Dead folktale and you can read it here.

Just How International is IHEC Blog Anyway?


Over this past weekend the same tweet (screen shots included with this post) was sent by two different accounts, presumably by the same person, and it brought into question how international IHEC Blog really is if only available in the U.S. [Kindle Edition].  This is a great question and these tweets reminded me of something I’ve been wanting to post about for some time.  The IHEC Blog Kindle Edition is obviously not my main method of delivery as I think posting to the web for anyone privileged enough to have internet access works really well.  In reviewing amazon.com it seems that the company only operates in the following seven countries: Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, United Kingdom and the United States.  Perhaps the IHEC Blog Kindle Edition would be more international if I made it available in these other six markets.  I don’t own a Kindle so I don’t know everything about them…..


I had plans at the beginning of 2010 to summarize where all of the visitors to IHEC Blog are from.  I compiled and posted some data on visitors to IHEC Blog from the United States which you can view here but never got around to posting data on visitors to IHEC Blog from around the world[i].  For calendar year 2010, visits to IHEC Blog have originated from 134 countries/territories and I have listed all of them below (in order of the total number of visits). 
1
United States

2
India

3
United Kingdom

4
Canada

5
Australia

6
Germany

7
Pakistan

8
Japan

9
Philippines

10
Norway

11
France

12
Spain

13
Netherlands

14
South Korea

15
Russia

16
Malaysia

17
Indonesia

18
Portugal

19
Vietnam

20
Brazil

21
South Africa

22
Italy

23
Turkey

24
United Arab Emirates

25
Ireland

26
Ukraine

27
Switzerland

28
New Zealand

29
Singapore

30
Mexico

31
Hong Kong

32
Chile

33
Sweden

34
Tunisia

35
Belgium

36
Poland

37
Egypt

38
Romania

39
Thailand

40
Bangladesh

41
Senegal

42
Saudi Arabia

43
Taiwan

44
Denmark

45
Argentina

46
Nigeria

47
Finland

48
Estonia

49
Colombia

50
Iran

51
Sri Lanka

52
Israel

53
Austria

54
Lithuania

55
Greece

56
Iraq

57
Hungary

58
Haiti

59
Puerto Rico

60
Yemen

61
Kenya

62
Czech Republic

63
Latvia

64
Costa Rica

65
Cambodia

66
Morocco

67
Tanzania

68
Lebanon

69
Serbia

70
Trinidad and Tobago

71
Bahrain

72
Nepal

73
Georgia

74
Croatia

75
Ghana

76
Oman

77
Algeria

78
Qatar

79
Cyprus

80
Uganda

81
Jamaica

82
Bulgaria

83
Slovakia

84
Armenia

85
Mongolia

86
Namibia

87
Venezuela

88
Fiji

89
Albania

90
Kuwait

91
British Virgin Islands

92
Jordan

93
Guatemala

94
China

95
Macedonia

96
Honduras

97
Maldives

98
Mauritius

99
El Salvador

100
Afghanistan

101
Malta

102
Moldova

103
Rwanda

104
Zimbabwe

105
Cameroon

106
Barbados

107
Slovenia

108
Côte d’Ivoire

109
Libya

110
Bosnia and Herzegovina

111
Panama

112
Uzbekistan

113
Congo [Republic]

114
Uruguay

115
Ecuador

116
Macau

117
Azerbaijan

118
Sudan

119
Luxembourg

120
Guyana

121
Kyrgyzstan

122
Angola

123
Brunei

124
Congo [DRC]

125
Nicaragua

126
Djibouti

127
Kazakhstan

128
Gambia

129
Bolivia

130
Aruba

131
Iceland

132
Ethiopia

133
Dominican Republic

134
Netherlands Antilles



[i] Note that I removed all visits from the IP addresses that I access IHEC Blog from so that my visits don’t skew the data.