Monday, May 24, 2010

Fairfax County School Board Adopts FY 2011 Approved Budget

Fairfax County School Board Adopts FY 2011 Approved Budget
The Fairfax County School Board has adopted the Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) FY 2011 approved budget of $2.2 billion, which establishes new fees for athletic participation and for Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) tests; eliminates more than 200 positions, nearly half of which are from central office support; freezes all employee salaries for the second consecutive year; and creates a three-year priority schools pilot program that designates 30 schools to receive special staff support and financial support to help improve student achievement. 
[FCPS News Releases]

Friday, May 14, 2010

At Least They Didn't Include iFart...

This blog post is for week 5 of RIT’s Human Communication course.

I found this comic online a few days ago and thought I’d share it:

Being in a Human Communication class, this made perfect sense to put on my blog (even though I only found it through StumbleUpon). As you can probably tell, it plays off of the connectedness that many people feel must be present in order to rationally communicate with others. Through the use of social media sites and technology, we have become more “connected” with each other on a certain level that hasn’t been seen in the past. The depth of the interactions we have online, however, seems to be quite different. Many people on Facebook, Twitter, etc. share the type of information shown in the comic and may feel they have an intimate bond with others they talk to online. Does this really mean we’re great friends with those people though? Sharing these types of extraneous physical ideas is a much different beast than sharing actual personal feelings, which is viewed more as what people did in the past. Is there a paradigm shift happening here in the way and manners people communicate? It certainly is happening as far as platform – phone, email, letters, etc. – is concerned.