College: What I Did Right and Where I Screwed Up. Great piece by DJ recounting his four years at USC. In an epic set of comments, I react to points that resonate and points that contradict.
Highcharts. Interactive JavaScript charts free for non-commercial use. (via NICAR-L)
The University Has No Clothes. Data point one:
Nearly half of all students demonstrate “exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent” gains in the skills measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, even after two years of full-time schooling, according to a study begun in 2005 by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa.
Data point number two:
In the past 30 years, private- college tuition and fees have increased, in constant 2010 dollars, from $9,500 a year to more than $27,000. Public-college tuition has increased from $2,100 to $7,600. Fifteen years ago, the average student debt at graduation was around $12,700; in 2009, it was $24,000. Over the past quarter-century, the total cost of higher education has grown by 440 percent.
Mull those two together.
If students were taught effective collaboration in school, we’d reduce the number of meetings in the working world by 85% (or thereabouts). Instead, we invent new ways to ensure isolation during tests.
Context: dinner conversation about testing centers with individual video surveillance and biometric scanners.
Colleges run by anti-college people. I did not know the new head of MIT’s Media Lab, Joi Ito, dropped out of college twice. That is awesome.
This gallery contains 5 photos.
These images are slides from a short (10 minutes) presentation I gave at this evening’s #NYEdTech meetup. Our conversation revolved around WordPress as a learning management system, with supporting appearances by Moodle and Blackboard. In the interest of capturing more … Continue reading
It would be sweet to have capability within a support ticketing tool or CRM to track the “cost” of a given client or topic. When the agent logs a transaction, they’d record their perceived cost to the transaction. The system would capture this information against client, topic, and type of support. A type of support might be “one-on-one” or “workshop.”
Obviously the former is a lot less efficient way of supporting. If the system logged this information, it would be much easier to see when we’re “in the red” for one-on-one support, and that we should host a workshop for a given topic.
What makes a great teacher? Data and takeaways from Teach for America’s constant monitoring. Effective teachers continuously iterate.
BigBlueButton. Open source video conferencing and web collaboration built for higher education (via CUNY Academic Commons)
