DAILY LOBO new mexico
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February 1, 2012
wednesday The Independent Voice of UNM since 1895
Legislature cares about Lottery Scholarship by Luke Holmen holmen@unm.edu
College students statewide have lobbied for legislation that would save the dying Lottery Scholarship fund, and their efforts may pay off during this year’s legislative session.
“This is a promise we made in 1996 to New Mexico students, and I think we have to find a way as a state not to go back on that promise” ~Sen. Cynthia Nava D, Doña Ana chair of the Senate Education Committee The Legislative Finance Committee has predicted since July that the fund will run dry as soon as 2014, but House Joint Memorial 14 and Senate Joint Memorial 27 both propose creating a task force to prevent that from happening. Rep. Ray Begaye (D, San Juan) co-sponsored HJM 14 and said the memorial aims to develop a solution by the 2013 legislative session. The House Education Committee passed HJM 14 on Monday and it is the first item on the House Calendar for Wednesday. SJM 27 is currently in the Senate Rules Committee. “Several NMSU students and students from other universities said, ‘Let’s look at this, put a team of experts together and find a solution by next January so we can save the scholarship,’” Begaye said. Begaye said possible solutions include finding alternative funding sources, increasing the
Luke Holmen / Daily Lobo Students at UNM Day show off Lobo hand signs at the Roundhouse on Tuesday. More than 150 students traveled to Santa Fe to advocate for legislation that would benefit UNM. amount of funding going directly from ticket sales to the scholarship or making the academic requirements for qualifying for the scholarship tougher. Begaye said another suggestion is to stop awarding the scholarship to freshmen, because scholarship funding has been spent in the past on students who dropped out of school. “It used to be we would give the lottery to any incoming freshman and they would go for less than a full semester and then drop out, and that is money lost on the back of taxpayers,” he said. Sen. Cynthia Nava (D, Doña Ana), chair of the Senate Education Committee, introduced SJM 27. She said she served in the legislature when the Lottery Scholarship was instituted in 1996. “This is promise we made in 1996 to New Mexico students, and
I think we have to find a way as a state not to go back to on that promise,” she said. Nava said she doesn’t agree with making the scholarship’s eligibility requirements more rigorous. “You can’t cut your way out of the problem,” she said. “We may have to raise (eligibility requirements) to some degree, but the lottery can’t continue to serve the state if we cut without adding any more money.” Florencio Olguin, director of ASUNM Governmental Affairs, met with Nava on Tuesday to discuss the memorial. He said ASUNM advocated for a Lottery Scholarship task force, which would include students from colleges around New Mexico. The memorials propose a task force that would include at least three students from three different state colleges.
UNM Day highlights More than 150 students traveled to Santa Fe for UNM Day at the legislature on Tuesday to advocate for legislation that would benefit the University. The following are the bills and issues they supported: — House Joint Memorial 14 and Senate Joint Memorial 27 These would create a task force to find a solution to the depleting funding of the Legislative Lottery Scholarship. At its current revenue and expenditure rates, the scholarship will run out of money by 2014. HJM was introduced Jan. 24, passed by the Education Committee Jan. 30, and will be introduced to the House on Feb. 1. SJM was introduced Jan. 24 and is currently under debate in the Senate Rules Committee. — The elimination of the tuition credit, effectively a tax on student tuition. (No current legislation in process.) — $150,000 for improved lighting on campus to improve safety, especially near Zimmerman Library. — $175,000 for a new commuter shuttle to replace one bus in UNM’s aging bus system. ~Renee Schmitt
Classroom technology receives mixed response by Jessica Hitch jehitch@unm.edu
Use of technology in the classroom is on the rise, and if it’s up to UNM’s Chief Information Officer, chalkboards will soon become obsolete. Chief Information Officer Gilbert Gonzales said his office administers student and faculty surveys each year to track and respond to technology trends on campus, and has been systematically renovating UNM classroom technology since 2008. “If technology doesn’t work in a classroom, that is a high priority,
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not a, ‘Get back to you next week’ thing,” Moira Gerety, deputy CIO, said. “Technology must work. We’re committed to it working, and we’re going to give support.” Gerety said the CIO office is also creating campus-wide guidelines that will set the minimum standards for technology in classrooms. But according to the most recent surveys, only eight percent of UNM faculty use blogs as part of their curriculum and just 11 percent want to use blogs in the future. One-fifth of UNM faculty is interested in making their lectures available in a podcast form, according to survey results.
Gonzales said updating classroom technology and helping professors use the technology has been a challenge. “There were wired networks present before 2008, but they were placed more randomly in the room,” he said. “Faculty members would trip or not have a cable. A port is only useful if the instructor doesn’t trip.” But many UNM professors said the recent technological developments have improved the classroom experience. Professor Vera Norwood said the Internet has created “an exciting portal” for her classes.
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“A student or an instructor can go to the website and link to the reading or activity; post a blog in response …link to web resources to dig deeper into the topic; and review notes from previous classes — all in one place,” she said. “We continue to work as a learning community outside the class meeting times.” Librarian Christy Crowley said the “Drupal” open-source content-management system she uses allows students to distribute their research worldwide. “It furthers the notion of ‘open science,’ which lets researchers explore and repurpose data from oth-
er researchers,” she said. “We will make our data open to the world as we search for other data out there that will inform our projects.” Laura Crossey, who has been a professor at UNM for 27 years, said she doesn’t think the developments in technology are more trouble than they’re worth. “Xeroxes can break down, too, so there aren’t any more critical disappointments or surprises with this kind of technology than with going into the classroom and having the chalk be gone,” Crossey said. “Mishaps can happen with any technology.”
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