TOWNSEND – Waterfowl hunting opportunities will be limited on the Canyon Ferry Wildlife Management Area this year during both the youth and general waterfowl seasons due to ongoing extreme drought.  

Pond 2 at the WMA is dry, Pond 4 is expected to be completely dry in about a week, and water levels in Ponds 1 and 3 are also down significantly. There has not been any water going into Ponds 2 or 4 for more than two months, according to Adam Grove, wildlife biologist for Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks in Townsend. 

“There simply has not been enough waterflow in the Missouri River for most of the summer to provide adequate water to the canals that supply water to Ponds 2, 3 and 4 to keep the water levels up,” Grove said.  

Water from the ponds also drains below the surface into Canyon Ferry Reservoir when the reservoir’s water levels are lower than the ponds, which has been the case all summer. Canyon Ferry Reservoir did not come close to reaching full pool this year due to drought conditions, according to Grove.  

Waterfowl hunting opportunities on the WMA will likely be limited this fall. However, low water levels this season may provide some habitat benefits for next season by aerating the soil. If next year is a normal water year, it’s likely the ponds will see positive responses in aquatic vegetation and invertebrates, enhancing habitat for waterfowl.  

The digital revolution, globalization, and competition for talent have led to a relatively new trend in the construction of higher education systems - personalization. What needs to be done to make personalization not just a trend, but the reality of the modern university? We will find out the answers in this article.

Universities are increasingly seeking new ways to customize learning content and educational technologies, academic and career support to meet the group and individual educational needs of students, their cognitive styles, and career aspirations. Cheap writing services experts claim that today's generations of students are no longer prepared to receive standardized educational services designed for the average student. And in this context personalization has taken on a broader meaning and understanding than the long-known individualized and differentiated approaches to learning.

What is personalized learning?
Personalization is a key trend today that permeates all aspects of the student experience. Personalized learning involves, at a minimum, an individualized educational trajectory designed in conjunction with a mentor. And the trajectory changes dynamically during the course. In addition, the students themselves determine the individual learning rate. At the end of the educational module, they can think about where and how to apply the acquired knowledge and skills in practice, to do practical work for some time. Then return to learning again when the need for new knowledge arises.

Individual training is much more than just putting together a puzzle from a set of training courses by a student. Right now, this kind of personalized interaction is only possible at the graduate level. But that does not mean that personalized learning is unrealistic to begin at the undergraduate level. At the same time, the responsibility falls on the teacher to teach the student not only and not so much the fundamental knowledge, but also to teach how to learn, to convey the necessity of lifelong learning concept, to help develop emotional intelligence.

Peculiarities of the personalized approach and future trends
Personalized training modules become highly customized to the particular student. This approach takes into account the initial level, the time available for learning, the preferred type of learning - visual, verbal, individual or group, online or offline, with practical tasks in the chosen direction. Students will be able to choose a teacher, a team, an educational environment, and a location for the duration of the training with the support of artificial intelligence recommendations.

The main trend in the education of the future is individual lessons. It will not be possible to provide all students with a personal tutor. But everyone can be given a smartphone or computer.

With the help of big data, machines are already tracking the amount of time spent on assignments, analyzing answers, and creating individual recommendations. Smart technology on a par with professional writers can provide 8 tips on how to format an admission essay. In the future, artificial intelligence will select educational content and teaching methods that are effective for you.

Gamification
Experts predict that in 15-20 years games and teamwork will be the main forms of education.

Gamification will change attitude to mistakes - they will become a part of the process, not a failure. The possibility to go through the mission all over again is an important principle in computer games. You can look for a solution as much as you want and find new options every time.

The game in the online education of the future will solve the problem of student motivation.

The level system
This system allows you to choose the level of immersion in a particular subject. Therefore, students can decide which subjects to study at the basic level, and which at a more in-depth.

Immersive learning
In the education of the future, there will be no outdated textbooks and monotonous lectures. Children will study school subjects using virtual and augmented reality technology. For example, by putting on a VR helmet, a child will be able to watch historical events and even participate in them!

Such learning is called immersive, it creates an "immersive effect" and allows you to experience that are impossible in the real world. Since the brain does not distinguish between real events and high-quality simulation, there is a high probability that VR and AR technologies will solve the problem of "live" communication in online education.

Project and research activities
Project and research activities allow students to put what they've learned into practice immediately and thus better understand and grasp new material.

Individual and group work
Working in groups and solving joint tasks allows you to develop the ability to interact as a team. As well as a culture of joint activity in the educational and extracurricular processes. Students will be able to write collaborative essays. Working as a team, it will be easier for them to understand the intricacies of writing this type of paper and excel at it. And if in doubt, check these 5 steps.

Interdisciplinarity
The educational process is designed so that the subject matter and educational content, in general, are not perceived by students as a multitude of disparate elements, but form a coherent picture.

Future competencies
With the development of technology, specialists will need new competencies. In the future, approximately 35% of the skills required for employment will change. These include programming, creative and critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and lifelong learning.

Changes in the labor market will also affect school education. It will move away from the industrial model and become more flexible.

Potential hunting regulation changes for 2022 and 2023 are available online for the public to review. The proposed changes are coming now during the normal biennial season setting year to help make Montana’s hunting regulations simpler and easier to understand.

To see the potential changes and make comment, click here.

Over the last several weeks, FWP biologists have worked on these potential changes with a sharp focus on the science behind the regulations. The potential changes focus primarily on deer and elk regulations; however, some regions have included regulations for other species as well. The potential changes include a reduction in the number of hunting districts and the simplification of license structures.

Public comment begins today and runs through Oct. 20.

FWP biologists and other staff will sort through the feedback they collect and develop proposals for all game species for the Fish and Wildlife Commission meeting on Dec. 14. Following this meeting, a second 30-day public comment opportunity will begin on the commission-approved proposals for all hunting regulations for the 2022 and 2023 seasons. This public comment period will also include regional FWP Citizen Advisory Council meetings.

The commission will adopt final hunting regulations at their meeting in early February. 

If you have any questions, please contact your local FWP office.

The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Montana State University will present “Preserving Recreation, Parks and Trails in Gallatin County” for its next Friday Forum on Oct. 8. The event will be delivered online from noon to 1:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public.

The Triangle area of Gallatin County, which is an area between Bozeman, Four Corners and Belgrade, is experiencing significant population growth. In 2016, Gallatin County, the city of Belgrade and the city of Bozeman created the Planning Coordination Committee to focus on issues with development and opportunities within the Triangle.

The Gallatin Valley Land Trust also plays a role in the development of this area, emphasizing planning and expanding the trail network. Chet Work, executive director of GVLT, will discuss the status of the Triangle Trails Plan, which was made available for public comment this year, and the plan’s next steps. It seeks to create a master plan for future trails within the Triangle area. The area has a patchwork of trails and pathways, mostly completed as part of subdivisions. The trails plan will identify key corridors, missing connections and opportunities to build a more complete trail network for this area.

Work will also discuss trail access through Peets Hill. GVLT is leading an effort to purchase land on the southern end of Peets Hill to keep the trail system intact. Garrett McAllister, senior planner with Gallatin County, and Addi Jadin, parks and recreation manager for the city of Bozeman, will participate on the panel and describe local government initiatives to preserve and enhance parks, recreation and trails.

Participants must register in advance and no later than 11 a.m. on Friday, Oct. 8. For more information or to register, visit montana.edu/olli/register or call 406-994-6550. Upon registration confirmation, participants will receive an email with the Zoom link and instructions to join the program.

Friday Forums are offered on the second Friday of each month, September through May, by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at MSU. OLLI at MSU is a program of Academic Technology and Outreach at MSU. ATO works across the university to support and advance its land-grant mission through unique and innovative opportunities for outreach and engagement.

As the Jeremiah Johnson Brewing Company grew from a small Great Falls establishment to one selling craft beer in 10 states, the company faced a challenge common among Montana manufacturers: how to scale up its operations without getting bogged down by debt and old habits.

That’s why the brewery’s namesake owner, who shares a moniker with the legendary mountain man, turned to the Montana Manufacturing Extension Center at Montana State University to help navigate decisions that can make or break a small business.

“We were really at a point where we needed to learn to be efficient,” said Johnson, who earned his bachelor’s in business marketing from MSU in 2004 and acquired the brewery in 2018. “Working with MMEC gave me a chance to sit down and look at the big picture.”

Meeting with Doug Roberts, MMEC’s business adviser for the Great Falls area and northeast Montana, Johnson learned of several opportunities to reduce waste while increasing output, meaning greater profits as the brewery expanded to meet growing demand for its beer, which Johnson said is made with locally sourced barley malt, honey and other ingredients.

Roberts did a thorough audit of the brewery, drawing from his extensive manufacturing experience and the principles of lean manufacturing to recommend improvements. He also connected Johnson with the National Center for Appropriate Technology in Butte, which assessed the facility’s energy usage. MMEC tapped a grant through MSU Extension's Pollution Prevention Program funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to cover most of the cost of the consultations.

“This is really the essence of MMEC, helping Montana companies grow and be more successful,” said Roberts, who worked in a variety of manufacturing industries for 30 years before joining MMEC.

For Johnson, the consultation “has led to a tremendous increase in efficiency,” he said. “And in manufacturing, if you’re not efficient you can go out of business really quick.”

One of Roberts’ recommendations led to a change in how the brewery’s filters are changed, resulting in better filtration of the beer and increasing the yield by multiple barrels per batch. Investment in a new packaging line is paying for itself because the increased volume more than pays the interest on the loan he took out to acquire it, Johnson said. With improvements in things like LED lights, the brewery’s energy use has dropped, reducing utility bills even as production volume has climbed more than 50%. And with Roberts’ encouragement, Johnson negotiated better bulk pricing for the specialty malts that flavor beers like Golden Bobcat Pale Ale, which the brewery released in 2018 to help celebrate MSU’s 125th anniversary.

According to Roberts, any Montana enterprise that’s in the business of making something stands to benefit from working with MMEC, which is housed in MSU's Norm Asbjornson College of Engineering. “When they call me, sometimes these businesses are on the verge of failing, or sometimes they’re on the cusp of growing from two employees to 20,” he said. “My approach is to develop a relationship so they know they have a partner. They may not even have a specific problem, but they have someone to talk to and can find out what resources are available.”

According to Johnson, “Doug was really good to work with, really thoughtful.”

As one of six MMEC business advisers covering different areas of the state, Roberts said he enjoys helping a wide range of manufacturers, whether in Great Falls, Scobey, Glasgow or anywhere in between.

“We work with people who have put everything they have into their businesses,” Roberts said. “It’s extremely rewarding to use our experience to help people succeed.”

Thanks to the Montana Space Grant Consortium, Montana State University students can take part in NASA internships without leaving the state, and this summer, senior Sam Riebling became the first technology education student to join the cohort.

Riebling, originally from Colorado, hadn’t intended to pursue the BOREALIS internship, but after taking courses from Montana Space Grant Consortium flight director Mike Walach, she found herself drawn to the program, which is open to all majors. While most interns come from the Norm Asbjornson College of Engineering, Reibling became one of the first from MSU’s College of Agriculture and the very first from the Department of Agricultural and Technology Education.

BOREALIS, which stands for the Balloon Outreach, Research, Exploration and Landscape Imaging System, runs fully student-designed and -led flights of specialized balloons to near-space altitudes, around 100,000 feet above Earth’s surface. It’s as close as researchers can get to space without using a rocket. 

“You have about 99% of Earth’s atmosphere beneath you and you’re in a spacelike environment,” Walach said. “You have the darkness, the cold, the heat, the radiation. Plus we can see the darkness of space and the curvature of the Earth from that altitude.”

Riebling, who hopes to become a technology education teacher after she graduates in spring 2022, was one of 10 students selected for the BOREALIS summer internship.

“It can look intimidating, but everybody comes in as a novice,” Walach said. “It’s an experience that can benefit everyone.”

Riebling’s internship focused on outreach and education and included planning community events and working with program partners to plan launches. But she also spent time watching and learning about the technical aspects of the balloon flights. BOREALIS uses three types of balloons, each of which expand to be around 50 feet in diameter once they reach a high altitude, where air pressure is very low. The first type, like a large party balloon, is made of strong latex and filled with helium. The second type, called zero-pressure balloons, are also filled with helium but have a hole on the bottom. They do not pop at higher altitudes because they are not under pressure, coming to float when they reach neutral buoyancy. The third type, solar balloons, are covered with charcoal powder so that sunlight heats the air inside and allows them to float.

Riebling practiced going through every stage of a launch and flight with all three types of balloons, a process that requires calibrating GPS systems and checking the balloon’s payload to ensure data is being transmitted to receivers on the ground. Everything must happen in exactly the right order, she said, or the entire flight is wasted. After coordinating with local air traffic control, the balloon is ready to launch.

“The whole process started with little responsibilities and I slowly gained more as I learned more,” she said. “Every launch I would shadow our lead, which ended up being a great benefit because on one of our last launches I was responsible for all of those steps.”

There are generally seven balloon launches each summer, said Walach. For the final launch of Riebling’s internship, the student usually overseeing those technical elements couldn’t be present. It gave Riebling a chance to put into practice everything she’d been learning.

The BOREALIS program is focused on the technical aspects of balloon flight and designing the systems that carry it out. Researchers from all over the country can then reach out to utilize those systems for their own projects. The flight that Riebling oversaw carried a payload from researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico measuring and detecting neutrons in Earth’s upper atmosphere. That payload will ultimately reach the moon in a NASA-directed flight.

Later in her internship, Riebling had the opportunity to blend her technical experience with her passion for education and her degree program in the College of Agriculture. She served as one of the instructors for the MSU Explore: Earth, Space and Science Camp in July, a weeklong camp designed to provide an immersive experience in science to underrepresented students from Montana’s rural towns and reservations.

“We led a workshop that was aviation themed and taught the students about the science of flight,” Riebling said. “By the end of the week they were building and testing gliders, making changes based on how well they flew and learning the elements of some flight engineering. It was really neat.” 

While she had been uncertain at first about joining BOREALIS, Riebling said the experience has made her into a better educator and a better student. She hopes to be able to make careers and research in STEM fields as approachable to her future students as the BOREALIS program made them for her.

“I also want to take the things I learned and put them toward tech ed outreach,” she said. “I think we need to focus on getting kids in our program and letting them know that this is an option for their careers.”

NASA funds space grant consortiums in all 50 states as well as Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., designed to allow all students access to space-related internships and programming regardless of location. To learn more about the Montana Space Grant Consortium visit https://spacegrant.montana.edu/.

“This program allows us to look at a wide range of things,” said Walach. “We have two faculty mentors, but we’re really just there to guide and support. The students are the real driving force for these projects. This program really gives them a lot of things they can utilize both in the classroom and in their futures.” 

La Cuisine Founder Tina Cusker found herself craving fellowship during the COVID restricted months and was inspired by current events to act on designing a store committed to providing social experiences that would bring gathering back to the heart of the home and building a stronger community through our partnerships and endeavors. Enhanced by her European culinary and travel journeys, Tina hopes to inspire La Cuisine patrons to have confidence they can once again open their homes and gather friends and family for an exceptional culinary experience.

La Cuisine offers a curated selection of gourmet cookware, cutlery and gadgets along with locally made products from artisans such as Basiclai, Lulu Pottery and Montana Block Co., and top European brands including Staub, Zwilling, and Denby. La Cuisine features a commercial kitchen for a state-of-the-art culinary learning experience. Tina has partnered with instructors and world-class chefs across the Gallatin Valley to bring forth a kitchen curriculum to serve every level of home cook from the curious beginner to the passionate foodie. Students may choose from a vast array of cuisine, technique focused and entertaining style classes.

Gift giving will be exceptionally easy thanks to gift cards, complimentary gift wrapping and a Bridal registry service.

The kitchen will be available as an intimate event space for less than 25, and commissary kitchen rentals to wholesale food providers, in addition to private cooking classes for unique celebrations and corporate team-building events.
The inaugural cooking class, Let’s Get Sauced! is scheduled for Tuesday, September 28 at 6:00PM featuring Chef Sadie Morales from Sadie’s Catering. It is the sauce that takes your dinner from ordinary to extraordinary. Participants will learn how you can transition three mother recipes into six while they sip on preselected wine pairings. James Beard award-winning Chef Tory McPhail will host the second class on Tuesday October 5th with an autumn harvest, elegant 4-course menu. Tickets for all weekly classes can be purchased online or by calling the store, and wine can be ordered from The Wine Gallery by 3PM on the day prior.

The store will host official Grand Opening festivities and ribbon cutting on Wednesday, September 29 at 4:00PM. This event, free to attend, is co-hosted by the Bozeman Chamber of Commerce and will feature autographed cookbooks, giveaways, complimentary hors d’oeuvres and store discounts.

Soon to be Bozeman’s premier gourmet cookware store and culinary classroom, La Cuisine offers more than 1,000 unique products for the kitchen and operates the most innovative cooking school in southwest Montana, with plans to conduct more than 50 classes yearly taught by local chefs and instructors with shopping also available online at www.lacuisine-bozeman.com.

La Cuisine is located at 2405 W. Main, Ste 6, next door to PhD Skis.

WHITEHALL – Lewis & Clark Caverns State Park will move to off-season hours of operation starting Friday, Oct. 1.  

From Oct. 1 through April 15, 2022, the main visitor center will be open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays. The center will be closed Mondays and Tuesdays and observed holidays on these dates: Nov. 11 and 25, Dec. 24-26 and 31, and Jan. 1.  

Park trails remain open for walking or mountain biking. Though the water facilities are shut off for the winter, the campground remains open, offering both electric and non-electric sites as well as reservable cabins.  

Lewis & Clark Caverns State Park is about 15 miles southeast of Whitehall, along Montana Highway 2. For more information about the park, please visit stateparks.mt.gov/lewis-and-clark-caverns or call 406-287-3541. 

BUTTE – Game wardens with Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks are seeking information on a bull elk that was shot and killed northwest of Butte last week.  

The six-point bull was killed on private land along North Browns Gulch Road about 5 miles northwest of Butte. The bull elk carcass was abandoned in the field after it was shot.  

Wardens interviewed a witness, who reported hearing gunshots around 9:30 p.m. on Sept. 10. The witness observed a pickup truck at the scene, shining a spotlight on the dead elk, then fleeing the area toward Hail Columbia Road. The pickup was described as being dark in color with “Chevrolet” on the tailgate. The truck bed also had a silver Delta toolbox.  

Anyone with possible information is encouraged to call the FWP violation reporting hot line at 1-800-TIP-MONT. Callers can remain anonymous and could be eligible for a cash reward of up to $1,000.  

Anyone with possible information can also contact Butte Game Warden Regan Dean at 406-490-9377.