Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Month: October 2010

  • Dorm, Major, or Race

    “College freshmen are more likely to make friends with peers they share a dorm room or major with than they are to befriend those from similar racial backgrounds…” I barely remember my roommate from living in the dorm freshman year. He was as much a stranger to me as the person you routinely run into…

  • Anya Kamenetz: DIY U: The Coming Transformation of Higher Education

    The solution to the upcoming fall of higher education is openness of content and sell the services beyond the content. Lower the cost by sharing. Will be interesting to see whether higher education would actually go in this direction. Instead what I have seen is colleges trying to figure out how much of a premium…

  • Organization Relationships

    A friend of mine who I used to work with once remarked (2007-ish) the University System of Georgia does not really work like a system so much as a loose confederation fighting over money. Given I have no access to budgets, I would not know. GeorgiaVIEW works remarkably well given there are only a few…

  • Haunted

    I really enjoyed the Haunted comic authored by my friends Steve(n). He’s always been fascinated by Halloween: both the movies and holiday. So creepiness is right up his alley. So this makes for perfect October reading.

  • Please Don’t Write Off the LMS Just Yet

    Found the Educational Technology Trends 2010 quite interesting. Especially the part which predicts yet again (still?) the death of the LMS. Both learning and learning content are moving away from traditional centripetal models, in which everything happens at set locations and is controlled at the institutional/publisher level (top-down), and moving toward centrifugal models that are…

  • USG Annual Computing Conference

    Some of you may have noticed me posting on Twitter using the #usgre10 hashtag. This was the recommended tag to use when posting about the conference. In talking to a director at a university in the University System of Georgia, he said something interesting which had been said to my CIO, “More good for the…

  • Report Just Usernames

    Occasionally I’ll want to see the usernames who use something like a user-agent property or were doing something during a range of time. Rather than report all the log lines and pick them out of the data, I use this which Blackboard (or maybe BEA added). Note  we’ve added user-agents to the webserver.log. The double…

  • TV Schedules

    It seems to me television programmers between college and professional football there would be at least 1,000 games per year which would provide the necessary data points for understanding how long these games typically last. Yet, consistently the games which start on time still run about an hour or more longer than the 3 hour…

  • Smart Groups

    We started in a conversation about an interesting grant seeking to help students from low-income families through OpenCourseWare and providing them better information. An Open Source LMS != open coureseware. OSLMS is running students through online classes. OCW is providing the content so anyone can download and use it. The better information section sounded to…