There are currently nearly 1.8 million living women military veterans in this country and over 103,000 have been deployed to Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Women in the military and most especially those deployed to an operation where they may be exposed to combat, creates unique issues and concerns on college campuses. The first half of this webinar is an in-depth exploration of those issues and concerns that seem to be gender specific for the women veterans returning to college campuses.

In the second half, Supportive Education for the Returning Veteran (SERV) will provide insight into what today`s women veterans need, and how to create and run an effective women veterans program. SERV will provide the background information from women veteran peer support personnel so that campuses will know what some women go through while they are in the military and the impact it has on their beliefs, fears, expectations and overall transition to the college campus. This data is critical to understanding the gender specific physical, cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and spiritual (P.C.E.B.S.) reactions women veterans bring to your college campus.

Recorded Session Archive

In this podcast episode we feature a conversation with Marcus Messner and Jeff South both faculty members at VCU's School of Mass Communications. In the course of the conversation we explore how the use of social media has begun to impact their teaching, learning and professional practice.

We begin with a brief description of their work this past summer in the Iraqi Young Leadership Exchange Program, where they explored the use of social media in a course with a group of 25 visiting Iraqi students. Marcus and Jeff then go on to discuss how the use of social media has begun to impact all aspects of their teaching and enhance student learning. They emphasize how social media is reshaping collaboration and providing new opportunities for community building.

Thanks for listening, and we invite you to continue the conversation by sharing your ideas in the comments section below.

Listen to the episode (43 Minutes):

Download File
TeachingLearningSocialMediaVCU.mp3

September's article of the month features a piece by Michael Wesch, that explores the impact of new media tools and practices on teaching and learning. In From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-Able: Learning in New Media Environments, Wesch challenges us to consider how this new environment of information abundance is creating new ways of relating, interacting, sharing, and collaborating. For Wesch, the most revolutionary aspect of these changes "may be in the ways in which it empowers us to rethink education and the teacher-student relationship in an almost limitless variety of ways."

We hope this article generates some thoughts and questions for you, and that you'll consider sharing them in the comment area below.