Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: University

  • Students Should Start Protesting Now

    Obviously students have the Zimbabwe government running scared. They have ordered the schools not to re-open in two weeks and only re-open in two months after elections. There has been demonstrations in the past over rigged elections. So… Rather than go to every effort to make sure the elections appear legitimate, the approach is to…

  • Dumbfounded By The Numbers

    Chancellor Eroll B. Davis Jr told the Georgia Board of Regents, “We grew essentially by a large university.” The USG gained 10,077 students (my alma mater has ~11,000) in a year. They calculate these fall term to fall term. In the same fall term to fall term time period, in the same same university system,…

  • Everything to Everyone

    This is intended to be a more thoughtful response to Laura regarding Course Management Systems and the need for innovation. Currently, Course Management Systems are bloatware. They got this way by trying to provide everything to everyone. One instructor wants a feature, the university presses for this feature, the CMS programmers put in the feature.…

  • What is in a Program Description?

      The B.S. in Professional Studies online program will enable students to acquire expertise in significant areas of contemporary professional life, and is equally relevant in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. Coursework for the major is constructed around five areas of study – social science (understanding people in a diverse world), critical thinking, creativity,…

  • Love of Life Long Learning

    Found this quote interesting. I’d guess the same is true for most college graduates. Tell me, what’s the point of spending 60-80 hours a week learning things that you immediately forget? Why I regret getting straight A’s in college College is about developing a love of life long learning. Hopefully, after four years of intensive…

  • Public Performance and Universities

    Since restaurants get sued for not paying royalties for public performances of copyrighted music, it seems likely playing a song at an athletic event is a public performance. I wonder how much the UGA Athletics or just UGA pays ASCAP for the ability to do this? Certainly, its not academic use. 🙂 Youuuuuuu – Red…

  • Input Into Decisions

    Fear brings out the worst in people. Fear of change or the unknown manifests in criticism, anger, and overreaction. Yes, I am guilty of this like everyone else… I am not somehow above all this. The idea of democracy, I think, where everyone is able to provide input into the making of a decision was…

  • False Panacea

    I ran across Jon Udell’s post on The once and future university which pointed to Mike Caulfield’s post with the video (Transcript). Technology, I think, is a false Panacea. The role of information technology is to better aggregate information for whatever it is we do. Such aggregation draws disparate sources together, but the sources fail…

  • A More Usable Usability

    Previously I have seen usability describing ease of using a web site. These four essences of usability are interesting. I believe that to satisfy customers, a Web site must fulfill four distinct needs: Availability: A site that’s unreachable, for any reason, is useless. Responsiveness: Having reached the site, pages that download slowly are likely to…