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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.

Awesome Coworkers

December 14, 2009 in Work by Ezra S F | No comments

The state gives employees 15 holidays in addition to the generous accrual of sick and vacation. Where I work only schedules 12 of the holidays. So we get 3 to take whenever we wish. I poorly planned and ended up having to take two this month or lose them. Today ended up being one of the better days to take.

Friday I worked on the last test upgrade. One part of that was a script to capture the settings prior to the upgrade. (That’ll be Wednesday’s post, I guess.) Turns out the loss was greater than expected. Instead of just the settings table losing data, we found another half dozen with the similar loss. So I added them to the script and created a new script to restore the lost settings.

This morning was the first production upgrade. My coworkers took over what I was doing Friday just like it was me doing it and kept me apprised of the changes.

Back when it was just me at another job, my taking holidays or vacation meant working really hard just to leave and upon coming back having to work harder to deal with the unforeseen in my absence. It caused me more stress to take a vacation than to just stay at work. I had to go into the hospital just to take a decent vacation.

It also helps that I can follow their work and pick up where they left off when they take vacations.

Disclaimer

December 8, 2009 in Wordpress, Work by Big Eazy | 1 comment

At the request of my boss, I added this disclaimer. Positive things I say here about Blackboard are okay. Negative things require distancing my employer from me so the defamation lawsuit comes to me not them.
:)

This is a personal weblog. The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer.

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.

Stalking Students

July 13, 2009 in Education, Privacy by Ezra S F | 2 comments

On the BLKBRD-L email list is a discussion about proving students are cheating. Any time the topic comes up, someone says a human in a room is the only way to be sure. Naturally, someone else responds with the latest and greatest technology to detect cheating.

In this case, Acxiom offers identity verification:

By matching a student’s directory information (name, address, phone) to our database, we match the student to our database. The student then must answer questions to verify their identity, which may include name, address and date of birth.

…
The institution never releases directory information so there are no Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) violations.

However, to complete the course work the student is forced to hand over the information to Acxiom, an unknown and potentially untrusted party. Why should students trust Acxiom when institutions cannot be trusted?

Due to the decentralized nature of IT departments, higher education leads all industries in numbers data breach events. Acxiom’s verification capabilities were designed so that student and instructor privacy is a critical feature of our solution. Institutions never receive the data Acxiom uses in this process. They are simply made aware of the pass/fail rates.

In other words, high education institutions cannot be trusted to handle this information. No reason was provided as to why Acxiom can be better trusted. Guess the people reading this would never check to see whether Acxiom has also had data breaches.

This Electronic Freedom Foundation response to Acxiom’s claims their method is more secure was interesting:

True facts about your life are, by definition, pre-compromised. If the bio question is about something already in the consumer file, arguably the best kind of question is about something that is highly unlikely to be in one’s consumer file and even useless commercially–like my pet’s name.

Answering these kinds of questions feels like more of violation of than a preservation of privacy.

Too Hot Out There

July 6, 2009 in Education, Work by Ezra S F | No comments

When I saw online school enrollment soars in summer in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, I thought Duh! Our traffic this summer is way up. Normal enrollment pattern is Fall term peak, 90-95% of Fall term in Spring,  60% of Fall term in Summer. By contrast, our online system usage until 2008-2009 had a Spring term peak. The 2008-2009 school year showed a pattern consistent with the normal enrollment pattern in the Spring without as much drop off as expected in the Summer.

We run a higher education online learning system. The article was talking about K-12. Maybe for the similar reasons our usage is way up as well?

Email Harvesters

June 24, 2009 in Photography, Work by Ezra S F | No comments

Good Sign I missed the story about brothers convicted of harvesting emails the first time. Well, I noticed a followup.

Back around 2001, the CIO received complaints about performance for the web server. So, I went log trolling to see what the web server was doing. A single IP dominated the HTTP requests. This one IP passed various last names into the email directory. Some quick research revealed Apache could block requests from that IP. That calmed things down enough for me to identify the owner of the IP. The CIO then bullied the ISP to provide contact information for the company involved.

Previous little adventures like this landed me a permanent job, so I jumped at similar challenges.

Well, a few years later, it happened again. This time my boss had made me develop a script for the dissemination of the anti-virus software package to home users. Basically, it used email authentication for verification if someone could get the download link. So, I applied the same technique to the email directory. Well, this upset some people who legitimately needed email addresses. So the human workers would provide email addresses to people with a legitimate need.

I’m glad since I’ve left, VSU no longer looks up email addresses for people. (I thought some of the requests questionable.) Also, my little email authentication script was before LDAP was available to the university. I think the new solution much better.

One the more vocal complainers about my having stopped non-VSU access to the email directory was my current employer. We apparently list email addresses for employees freely. Which makes me wonder how much spam we get is due to the brothers described at the beginning of this story? Or other email harvesters? Just hitting the send button potentially exposes the email address.

No worries. I’m sure Glenn is protecting me. :)

TED Talks: Liz Coleman’s call to reinvent liberal arts education

June 1, 2009 in Education by Ezra S F | No comments

About this talk from the TED site:

Bennington president Liz Coleman delivers a call-to-arms for radical reform in higher education. Bucking the trend to push students toward increasingly narrow areas of study, she proposes a truly cross-disciplinary education — one that dynamically combines all areas of study to address the great problems of our day.

She goes further than this blurb would indicate. She claims the drive towards professional degrees, aka “learning more and more about less and less”, results in a toxic brew dismantling Liberal Arts education. Losing this cross-disciplinary approach results in an inability to tackle the country’s and world’s problems which often require more than one discipline to understand them.

Focus on higher education as a means to a profession ignores these questions:

  • What kind of a world are we making?
  • What kind of a world should we be making?
  • What kind of a world can we be making?

Parents are sending their children to college to get a good job. Solving the world’s problems isn’t part of the American dream. Well… outside of academia.
:)

We’ve Got Rats?

May 15, 2009 in Photography, Work, from LiveJournal by Big Eazy | No comments

Rat Snake This little snake was found in the hallway at work. I thought the commotion was a continuation over the geyser in a sink until GH asked if I brought my pet to work. Went over the see and snagged this before maintenance took it away. Hope he enjoys life on the other side of the road.

I wish I had brought my dSLR. It really would have broought out the details. This okay I guess for automatic fash.

Here is this one large.

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