This book uses a mix of personal narratives, anecdotal evidence, and research-based findings to tell the story of a small, urban community college's efforts to develop and nurture a Community of Practice (CoP) that would galvanize the campus' adoption of Educational Technology. Located in one of the poorest congressional district in the United States, Hostos Community College, a Hispanic-serving institution and part of the City University of New York (CUNY), has a unique history rooted in activism, advocacy, and community outreach, and has built a reputation for technology innovation. This book is a collection of writing from faculty and staff members whose decades of experience integrating technology into the classroom pre-dates many of the official initiatives now in place at CUNY.

This book uses a mix of personal narratives, anecdotal evidence, and research-based findings to tell the story of a small, urban community college's efforts to develop and nurture a Community of Practice (CoP) that would galvanize the campus' adoption of Educational Technology. Located in one of the poorest congressional district in the United States, Hostos Community College, a Hispanic-serving institution and part of the City University of New York (CUNY), has a unique history rooted in activism, advocacy, and community outreach, and has built a reputation for technology innovation. This book is a collection of writing from faculty and staff members whose decades of experience integrating technology into the classroom pre-dates many of the official initiatives now in place at CUNY.

In Political Careers, Corruption, and Impunity: Panama's Assembly, 1984-2009, Carlos Guevara Mann systematically examines the behavior of the members of Panama's Legislative Assembly between 1984 and 2009, an arena previously unexplored in studies of Panamanian politics. He challenges fundamental aspects of scholarly literature on democratic legislatures, with important consequences for understanding democratic politics in Latin America and other parts of the world. The current literature on legislatures assumes that legislators single-mindedly seek reelection or the advancement of their political careers, and that they pursue these goals through acceptable democratic means. Guevara Mann shows, however, that in Panama many legislators also pursue less laudable goals such as personal enrichment and freedom from prosecution, often reaching their goals through means-widespread clientelism, party switching, and electoral manipulation-that undermine the quality of democracy. On one level, Political Careers, Corruption, and Impunity contrasts the political behavior of individual legislators; on another, it compares the actions of legislators under various regimes-military and constitutional. Lastly, it engages in cross-national comparisons that contrast the behavior of Panamanian legislators with actions of representatives elsewhere. Guevara Mann's sophisticated analysis of the military period and the transition to democracy, with an emphasis on the history and functioning of legislative bodies, contains a wealth of new information about a neglected but intrinsically fascinating case.

This book presents current research from across the globe in the study of the fauna, flora and environmental characteristics of desert life. Topics discussed include the conservation status and diversity of fishes, amphibians, reptiles, and bird populations in the Thar Desert of India; desert pupfish in Death Valley; floral diversity, threats and conservation in the Nara Desert of Pakistan; mollusc fauna and its ecology in the Indian desert and sustainable beef cattle production in the desert environment of Mendoza, Argentina.