If you are planning an Institute event and would like the extend an invitation to the public and/or members of the local press, please contact Beth McDermott in Institutional Advancement (beth.mcdermott@miis.edu or extension 3509). She can assist you with outreach to local media outlets to build awareness of your event, as well as for the Monterey Institute, throughout the community.
— from the Office of Institutional Advancement
Rodney Smith, our VALIC representative, will be on campus next week to assist you with your retirement questions.
When: Tuesday, September 16, 2008 11:00 AM-3:00 PM
Where: HR Conference Room
If you would like to arrange to meet with Rodney at a particular time, please give him a call on his cell phone at 595-2588.
— from the Human Resources office
In a recent blog post, Golf Digest editor Bob Carney agreed with Clara Yu on the issue of a language requirement for LPGA members (now withdrawn after much public denunciation). He said, “Being an old Peace Corps volunteer myself and a supporter of golf in the Olympics…I liked this letter from Clara Yu, president of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, where they teach lots of languages.” He then includes the full text of Clara’s letter, which both reflects on the LPGA’s position and offers a constructive solution: custom language learning for golfers delivered by the Monterey Institute.
Regardless of whether the LPGA takes us up on our offer, the whole world now knows how we think about languages: … “in this world, whether walking 18 holes, or walking up to a lectern at the United Nations, isn’t speaking another language a worthwhile skill to possess?”
Middlebury News and Events also covered this story.
The HR office would like to remind all employees that the Open Enrollment period for benefits will end on September 19.
Open Enrollment provides the following opportunities:
1. If you or your dependents are not currently enrolled you may add yourself and/or dependents to the medical, dental, or vision plans. Please contact Human Resources for coverage application form(s) if you would like to add coverage.
2 If you are currently enrolled in the medical, dental, or vision plans you may terminate your own or your dependents’ coverage. Please contact Human Resources for coverage change form(s) if you would like to end coverage.
In addition, there is one thing all benefit-eligible employees must do as part of Open Enrllment: return the Section 125 (Flexible spending) election agreement. This plan allows you to do 3 things:
1. If you are on MIIS insurance plans, you can have the premiums deducted from pre-tax dollars.
2. You can have a portion of each paycheck (in pre-tax dollars) deposited into an account that you can draw upon to pay for medical expenses not covered by insurance.
3. You can have a portion of each paycheck (in pre-tax dollars) deposited into an account to pay for dependent care.
If you do not want to do any of these three things, you still must sign and return the form indicating that you do not wish to participate.
As we work to build a cohesive community of professionals collaborating to achieve common goals, effective communication to and among faculty and staff is an indispensible ingredient for success.
This summer, Beth McDermott and Amy McGill convened a focus group of MIIS employees to learn more about how people perceive communications on campus, and how communications might be improved.
MIIS@work* grew out of that conversation.
Because we know that most MIIS employees are too busy to check a blog for news on a regular basis, we plan to email all faculty and staff a linked list of the latest stories once a week.
The blog also includes a list of links to online resources useful to MIIS employees, including the blogs published by student services and the library.
Because we learned from the focus group that there is a strong need for more information about Middlebury, and its evolving relationship with MIIS, we have included links to several Middlebury blogs, including those of the president and provost.
Communication, though, is more than just information transmission. We need to hear your voices. Anyone is welcome to become a contributor. Your contributions don’t all have to be traditional “news items.” Do you have ideas about how we can strengthen the Institute and make it a more vibrant and innovative place to work? Is there a special person or achievement you would like us all to celebrate? Your colleagues want to hear your stories!
If you want to learn how to post directly to the blog, just let us know. If you would rather email your contributions to Amy , she’ll make sure they get posted. You can comment on any existing post by clicking the “comments” link below the title of the post.
* Thanks to Devin Lueddeke for naming our blog!
Patricia Szasz, Director of Intensive English Programs, and Therese Tishakov, GSLEL’s Director of Career Services, have collaborated with Middlebury’s Bread Loaf School of English to develop a workshop for teachers on “Creative Voices in the Classroom, ” offered on October 11 under the auspices of the Steinbeck chapter of CATESOL (California Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages).
Other community partners in this event are the Monterey Peninsula College, Hartnell College, Youth Arts Collective, the Dare to Dream Fund, and the Steinbeck Center. The workshop will be held from 9 am to 1 pm at Hartnell College. Admission is $25 for teachers/$10 for students.
The featured speaker is Andrea Lunsford, Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of English and Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford, and writer-in-residence at the Bread Loaf School of English of Middlebury College.
Monterey Institute TESOL/TFL students and faculty will also have a special session with Prof. Lunsford on October 10 at 1 pm, on campus in B105.
Last year’s “pizza process” led to the creation or strengthening of several programs that contribute to academic excellence and exemplify Monterey Way 2.0 principles of learning, such as open architecture and immersive learning.
This year, the Innovation Incubator will challenge groups to design and implement ideas that respect the various cultures we have on campus while at the same time finding innovative solutions to the divisions and silos that get in the way of the effectiveness of the organization as a whole..
And yes, we plan to feed you lots of pizza! Stay tuned!
— from the Innovations Incubator
The Simul2 interpretation lab now sports two new 32” Plasma screens, soon to be joined by a third unit in the Simul3 lab in the IIRC building.
In addition, each of the three Simul labs will soon receive a Sony SLV D380P – DVD/VCR combo unit, replacing the older VCRs to allow more digital content to be deployed in the interpretation booths.
A second IP-based videoconferencing site will also come on line soon. A new Polycom videoconferencing unit will generally reside in the board room, but is portable within McCone. This will complement the VC service now available in the Fletcher-Jones conference room in the Library.
How do you set up a VC?
1) Ascertain that your videoconferencing partner has comparable equipment.
2) Reserve the space. (Contact the President’s office for the Board Room or Ann Flower in the Library for the Fletcher Jones room, or consult with ITS about other possible locations in McCone).
3) Make arrangements with ITS for VC support. This includes putting them in touch with a technologist at the other end for a test call.
4) Sit down and talk with your colleague on the other side of the country—or the world.
— from Information Technology Services
Town Hall meetings have been scheduled approximately once a month throughout the fall semester, to give the Institute community a chance to hear from President Clara Yu about important new developments and directions for the Institute. The first Town Hall Meeting, on September 18, will also include President Designate Sunder Ramswamy. Clara and Sunder will answer questions from the audience, as well as questions submitted in advance. (Look for a submission box near the Library circulation desk a couple of days before the meeting.)
Additional Town Meetings for faculty and staff are scheduled for October 28 and November 20, and a meeting for students is scheduled for September 25.
All meetings will be held in the Irvine Auditorium from 12:15PM – 1:45PM.
At last count (day 3), our fall FTE of 791 surpassed the most recent record (728), reflecting a large entering class and excellent retention of continuing students. Congratulations to our enrollment managers and admissions staff, and all those students, faculty, staff and alumni who helped to tell our story to the world.
Institutional Advancement will soon be releasing a publication recognizing those donors who made gifts to the Institute during the fiscal year ending June 30, 2008. We are happy to be able to recognize and acknowledge these individuals and organizations and plan to distribute copies on campus in mid-September.
–from the Office of Institutional Advancement
Welcome to the following staff members who are new to the Institute as of this summer…
And a couple of more familiar faces…
We’re pleased to have Tate Miller back on staff after a year away. He recently started a new position as Director of International Program Development, in the Provost’s office.
Sarah Springer, who has been an adjunct faculty member and consultant for a number of years, has joined the regular staff as a CALL specialist with GSLEL and instructional designer working with the Teaching and Learning Collaborative.
MIIS@Work invites each of our new colleagues to comment on this post, telling us all a little bit about themselves and their new roles. And we invite the rest of you to mention any other new colleagues we may have missed.
(If you’ve never posted a comment on a blog, it’s easy! See the About page for some help.)
Tired of archiving your messages every few days? Tired of choking on large attachments? Frustrated with size limitations on mailing lists? Help has arrived!
All faculty and staff at the Monterey Institute now have accounts on Middlebury’s Exchange e-mail server. The accounts are one gigabyte each – 20 times the size of the average FirstClass account. Most staff and many faculty have already begun to use Outlook to access these accounts. (If you’re a Mac user, you’ll need to use Mac mail, Entourage, or the equivalent.) We hope to transition the remaining faculty and staff to their new email accounts as soon as possible, so we can begin the process of converting student accounts.
If you haven’t converted yet, ITS will seek you out, but if you would like to activate your new Exchange email account right away, please contact the ITS Help Desk (x6656) for an appointment. Please leave your name, phone extension, and office number, plus a time when you would be available for an ITS staff member to visit your office, set up your mail client, and highlight some of its features for you.
– from the Information Technology Services Department
New Student Orientation was a great success. We revamped the NSO week to include two new sessions focusing on community building, planned and delivered by students Bree Bacon and Wrenn Yennie, faculty member Peter Shaw, and several dozen highly competent student, faculty and staff facilitators.
The new students were organized into groups selected to ensure diversity of program, homeland and language. One group activity involved expressing a common identity through the creation of group logos. Students also participated in a treasure hunt that helped to familiarize them with the campus and its people and services.
The feedback from new students, facilitators and the MIIS community has been quite positive. Many thanks to everyone who helped make this happen!
–from the Student Services Office
It can be confusing to know how to proceed when you need to hire new staff. HR has tried to demystify the process by publishing new guidelines that provide a step-by-step roadmap of the process. Along the way, we consulted with several veteran supervisors who helped us to see the process through their eyes.
— from the Human Resources Office