Last night as I drifted off to sleep I was thinking about living my life “unbranded” – was  this was even possible? hmmm??

I woke up this morning to the beeping of the alarm on my Casio watch. I staggered over to the bathroom and brushed my teeth with my Colgate toothbrush using Crest toothpaste. After some more necessary steps my morning routine was completed with the  buttoning up of my Tommy Hilfiger shirt. I headed out to the kitchen grabbing my iPod Touch from my nightstand and proceeded to check my Gmail account – my only email was an offer from Starbucks.

Once in the kitchen I poured a bowl of Cheerios (multigrain of course) and just enough Natrel fine filtered milk to make those little O’s float. I sat down at the table to find my son had left his Tony Hawk Tech Deck skateboard ramp on the table – it made me smile.

After eating breakfast and reading my Bible (ESV) for a bit, I jumped back on my iPod to have a quick look through twitter and facebook – to catch up on life.  I grabbed my BlackBerry from it’s charger and headed out to work. I plopped myself into the drivers seat of my Mazda when the thought returned – could I live my life unbranded?

I’ll have to get back to you on that one…

People come to the Tyndale website in many different ways and from many different places. Some arrive through web searches, some from links on other websites – however they got here – we are glad they are here. Overall we had 147,215 pages viewed on our website in the month of October 2009.

Below is a highlight of some interesting places people came from.

• Over 30,000 page views originated from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
• School finding sites such as schoolfinder.com, gradschoolfinder.com, canadian-universities.net, campusstarter.com, careercruising.com, studyincanada.com, fairs.naccap.org, crosscanadasearch.com, checusout.ca, cccu.org… accounted for about 1,200 pageviews
• Over 400 page views came from Seneca College – most of these would have come from http://www.senecac.on.ca/degreetransfer/guide/tyndale-university-college.html
• 357 page views came from links on Christian Careers Canada – a website run by Tyndale (www.christiancareerscanada.com)
• Almost 300 page views came through facebook
• ATS (ats.edu) brought 261 page views
• Links on denominational websites such as paonl.ca and agcofcanada.com accounted for about 200 page views
• Media sources such as Christian Herald, Christianity.ca, WDCX and Life 100.3 brought in over 300 page views
• 81 page views originated from the Ontario College of Teachers website (www.oct.ca)

Last month it was reported that research from Ohio State University found a link between Facebook use and lower grades among college students. In their attempt to replicate the results of that study, researchers from Illinois-based Northwestern University found no evidence of Facebook use correlating with diminished academic performance. An examination of 3 existing data sets uncovered no significant negative relationship between GPAs and Facebook use. One of the study’s co-authors says more research with more nuanced data is needed to better understand how using of social networking sites may relate to academic performance.

» Read the article
Source: Academica Top 10 (May 11, 2009)
— http://www.academica.ca/node/7528

Research finds link between Facebook use and lower grades: According to a new study from Ohio State University, college students with a Facebook account spend less time studying and have lower GPAs than students who are non-users. Researchers found that Facebook users in the study typically had GPAs between 3.0 and 3.5, while non-users had GPAs ranging from 3.5 to 4.0. Those with Facebook profiles said they averaged one to 5 hours a week studying, while those without accounts reported studying 11 to 15 hours per week. 79% of Facebook users participating in the study claimed the site did not have an impact on their academic performance. OSU Research News | Sunday Times

Source: Academica Top 10 (April 14, 2009)
— http://www.academica.ca/comment/reply/7333

I — along with a team from my church — will be heading to Africa on April 16th for a short term mission trip. We will be working with the Villages of Hope Africa in Kitwe Zambia installing/repairing a computer lab in a community school that serves over 700 kids. Some of these kids live right in the village orphanage (~170) while the majority come to the school from nearby shanty-towns.

First let me say — I have raised all my financial support! This is not a plea for financial help — but rather a plea for your prayers and a chance to answer the many questions I have been getting about my upcoming trip.

We do have a website put together if you would like more details about what we are doing. The site can be found at: www.mymission.ca/zambia

One of the things I am looking forward to the most is meeting 2 of our supported children. As a family we support 3 kids in Africa – 2 of those are in Zambia and 1 lives in the Village of Hope orphanage I am going to work at. The second attends the community school. I hope to meet both of these boys and will be bringing some special gifts for them.

I will be traveling from April 16th to May 3rd – I would deeply cherish your prayers for myself and my family while I am gone.

Noel-Levitz has recently released their latest E-expectations survey of 1,005 college-bound high school seniors in 2009. Rachael Reuben has written a great summary of the report which is available over at .eduGuru. If you would like to read the full report it is available on the Noel-Levitz website here.

We (Tyndale Admissions & Marketing) have decided to defer the public launch of our new website to the week of July 1, 2009. The reasons for this change of the public launch date are:

1. The new public launch date will give us more time to carefully engage the thoughts and concerns of the Tyndale Community. This is especially related to the ongoing discussions concerning the nature of the institution and the proposed marketing language of the website.

2. The new launch time will enable us to have more content ready for the public launch. The various development phases of the website rebuild will not be delayed.

3. We will be able to have dispersed training for content managers to these times: June, September and October.

We want to reassure the Tyndale community that the new website will still be up and ready to impact the incoming class of Fall 2010.