University

You are currently browsing the archive for the University category.

Supply and Demand

December 21, 2009 in University by Ezra S F | No comments

Here is a shocking idea. People get college degrees because graduates are valued. This leads to parents sending more kids to college who get degrees. Eventually higher education reaches the point where the overabundance of graduates decreases the value of a degree.

Weak students have been admitted for years. Universities struggle to identify who will become the strong students so the net is cast a little wider than it ideally would be. The weak students drop out of school. Somehow it became the school’s fault the weak students were dropouts. So people scrutinize retention numbers and implemented programs to identify the under performing students and help them graduate. Now the schools are at fault for letting so many people graduate.

This concept that a college degree didn’t automatically prepare me for a job was brow beat into me by my advisor my freshman year of college over a decade ago. The prescription then was to spend every summer working an internship so I would have experience upon graduating. Of course, my major at the time was engineering where only the retirement or death of Baby Boomers would result in getting a job.

Naturally if most to all college freshman are getting experience for graduation, then that means employers will need to find something else to still be selective.

I’m tempted to make the same mistake as the Social Darwinists: Over time kids will have to get more and more education in order to be competitive. For my grandparents, 8th grade was the baseline of education to get a decent job. For my parents, a high school diploma became the new baseline. For me it was a bachelor’s degree. For the kids born today will it be a Master’s degree? This reminds me of the Red Queen concept in that one has to perform faster and better just remain in place.

Students First

September 30, 2009 in Blackboard Vista, University by Ezra S F | No comments

Yesterday Gina, a coworker, joined me for lunch. She asked about where GeorgiaVIEW’s attention is focussed since we recently completed our upgrade to Blackboard Learning System Vista Enterprise 8.

She pointed out students are the most affected by and most important constituent for any decisions we make. Yet the student point of view is almost never considered. Capturing what is good for students might mean installing all the possibilities where students and faculty could compare. It might mean surveys, however, I think self-reporting provides so much erroneous data we could do without it.

My job’s focus is more toward what is the most efficient, least problematic system for me to start/stop, install, upgrade, and review logs. I am still mulling what job position we have who would focus on ensuring whatever we do will provide for the best student experience. Guess really that should be all of us.

Turnitin.com

August 6, 2009 in University by Ezra S F | No comments

I’m surprised I have not blogged here about the student lawsuit against Turnitin.com? An anti-plagiarism service, Turnitin has students or faculty members upload papers into the database. By comparing new papers to the database, it gives ratings as to whether it is likely a student plagiarized.

Now the search goes out for any student who has a paper that’s being held by TurnItIn that they did not upload themselves. Students Settle with TurnItIn

In theory I could be someone in this situation. Back in 2005, a coworker asked my mother if someone by my name was related to her. This coworker was taking some classes at the university I attended. Turnitin had threw up a cautionary flag on the Originality Report because it was somewhat similar to something with my name on it. The problem is this product came into use at the university after the time I was a student. So I never submitted anything to it. The department from which I got my degree kept a copy of my papers (many submitted by email) and used this product at the time.

Another possibility is this tidbit about the product: Over 11 Billion Web Pages Crawled & Archived. I was actively blogging before and at the time of the incident. Assuming it could identify my name out of all that content, this match could have come from my blogging.

When I contacted Turnitin about this back in 2005, they told me I would have to remove my paper. I re-explained that I didn’t submit the paper. So Turnitin explained that whoever did put the paper in the system would have to remove it. The guy acknowledged the difficulty of the situation in identifying who posted it.

Information Should Be Free

February 15, 2009 in Interweb, University by Ezra S F | 1 comment

Mark Guzdial makes the point teachers add value to the learning process. Normally, I would agree. However, I got hung up on a misquote from a Walter Isaacson article How to Save Your Newspaper in TIME offering micropayments as the solution to newspapers finding a working model to survive since advertisements are not the right one.

Mark said it was ”information must be free.” TIME said, “[T]he Web got caught up in the ethos that information wants to be free.” Mark correctly attributed it to Steven Levy who said, “All information should be free,” but in the context of: “Access to computers — and anything which might
teach you something about the way the world works — should be
unlimited and total.” 

Higher education provides such access. However, we hide the access behind beaucracy and tuition. Is it worth it?

Another thought on all this came from a Dorothy E. Denning quoting Richard Stallman:

I believe that all generally useful information should be free. By ‘free’ I am not referring to price, but rather to the freedom to copy the information and to adapt it to one’s own uses. … When information is generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity wealthier no matter who is distributing and no matter who is receiving.

This reminds me of the concept of Creative Commons and open source. Restrictions to information like copyright ensure the creator makes money. At the same time copyright provides some opportunities for reusing it. (CC and open source just do it better than the Copyright Office.

Most Wired Teacher

January 10, 2009 in Blackboard Vista, GeorgiaVIEW, Metrics / Statistics, University by Ezra S F | No comments

“Who is the most wired teacher at your college?” (A Wired Way to Rate Professors—and to Connect Teachers)

Although the university runs workshops on how to use Blackboard, many professors are reluctant, or too busy, to sit through training sessions. Most would prefer to ask a colleague down the hall for help, said Mr. Fritz.

Professional support is too intimidating, cold, careless. Support fixes the problems of others who created problems for themselves:

  • choices made in software to use
  • configuration choices
  • mistakes logic in processing

The concept of identifying the professors who most use the system is a good one. We already track the amount of activity per college or university in the University System of Georgia. The amount of data (think hundreds of millions of rows across several several tables)  would make singling out the professors a very long running query. Doesn’t mean it is a bad idea. Just don’t think it is something we would do with Vista 3. We probably could with Vista 8 which uses a clean database.

I’d like to see two numbers:

  1. Number of actions by the professor
  2. Number of actions by the all classes the professor teaches

Ah, well, there are lots of other reports which need to be done. Many more important than this one. 

Some questions from the article: “Will colleges begin to use technology to help them measure teaching? And should they?” At present, to create such reports, IT staff with database reporting or web server skills are needed. Alternatively, additonal applications like Blackboard Outcomes System can provide the data. The real problem is the reliability and validity of the data. Can it really be trusted to make important decisions like which programs or employees are effective.

Merge Historically Black Colleges With White?

December 6, 2008 in Gov't / Law / Politics, University by Ezra S F | 1 comment

Retention is one of those numbers higher education leaders tend to review to determine how effectively the faculty reaches the students. Historically black colleges and universities were created because students found it difficult both to get into “neutral” colleges and graduate from them. That latter part sounds like they were created in part to solve a retention issue.

Enter Georgia Senator Seth Harp who suggests a couple HBCUs in Georgia should merge with their neutral neighbors. The idea is to save money by not having more than one college in a town. Are black students as successful at “neutral” colleges as their white counterparts? If not, then the reason these schools exist has yet to be solved.

If we want to eliminate HBCUs, then we should have colleges and unviersities where all students succeed regardless of race (or gender, religion, or other factors).

Merge Historically Black Colleges With White?

December 6, 2008 in Gov't / Law / Politics, University by Big Eazy | No comments

Retention is one of those numbers higher education leaders tend to review to determine how effectively the faculty reaches the students. Historically black colleges and universities were created because students found it difficult both to get into “neutral” colleges and graduate from them. That latter part sounds like they were created in part to solve a retention issue.

Enter Georgia Senator Seth Harp who suggests a couple HBCUs in Georgia should merge with their neutral neighbors. The idea is to save money by not having more than one college in a town. Are black students as successful at “neutral” colleges as their white counterparts? If not, then the reason these schools exist has yet to be solved.

If we want to eliminate HBCUs, then we should have colleges and unviersities where all students succeed regardless of race (or gender, religion, or other factors).

What does a CIO do?

August 3, 2008 in University by Ezra S F | No comments

I guess it depends on who you ask.

Well, the CIO’s thought they were most effective as classic IT-support providers. That’s basically putting PC’s on desktops. But their managers thought that CIO’s were most effective in explaining and determining the college’s technology course into the future. Managers really want their CIO’s to be “informaticists.” Wayne A. Brown, Johnson County Community College Are College CIOs Thinking What Their Bosses Are Thinking?

Self-reporting is a notoriously bad means of measuring behavior. So I take these sorts of things with a grain of salt.

I have read many times the view CIOs need to educate higher education administrators about technology to help shape the vision of where higher education is headed. When Joe Newton at Valdosta State took over as CIO, he found Ronald Zaccari, expected more than just “putting PCs on desks”. Ron also expected seamless services, a data warehouse, IT to work with every facet of the university, and even to help the cabinet shape its direction by providing how technology can help. The previous president didn’t even check his own email. So to have one who better understood technology meant having to step up to a higher standard.

Another aspect I found interesting was about degrees. Wayne suggested a positive direction was CIOs having degrees in technology management. A commenter preferred CIOs having a Ph.D. in an academic discipline and secondarily “technology qualifications” so they would understand teaching and learning. I find this hilarious because all too often I hear complaints Ph.D. programs teach people how to do research and present… not teach.

Also, the comments make a distinction between presidents and provosts versus deans and department heads. The latter are the “academic administrators”.

All that said, I just want a CIO to figure out what management wants done, prevent them from having too high expectations, and provide the resources for me to do it.

UGA Pres defends speaker choice

April 23, 2008 in University, from LiveJournal by Big Eazy | No comments

Judge Clarence Thomas is the perfect choice to speak at UGA’s graduation. He is from Georgia. He has a unique view of national coverage for sexual harassment scandals. So Judge Thomas shows it is possible for stupid scandals of the past to net awesome book deals.

Study Groups Violate Academic Integrity?

March 8, 2008 in Interweb, University by Ezra S F | 2 comments

Maybe I need to add a “What were they thinking?” category?

A student created a Facebook group for chemistry students to ask peers for help. As these students already collaborate face-to-face in a study room and use official tutoring services, this was just replicating this online. The students claim to just be helping each other.

So why was the professor upset enough to ask for the student to be expelled? I think it boils down to:

  1. The Internet is used by cheaters.
  2. An invite talked about posting solutions.

Probably like all other cases I’ve seen there is more to the story than what is being reported.

« Older entries