Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: University

  • How Many Vista Users Do You Have this Fall?

    On the measure which pulls from the Who’s Online table, we hit ~9,970 today at the peak. It was over 9,000 from 11am to 7pm. Its been a busy day! I had expected a second peak today at around 8pm. It doesn’t look like we are going to get it.

  • Graduation Rates

    Systemwide, only 48 percent of the students in Georgia’s four-year public institutions earn a degree within six years of enrollment, compared to a national average of 54 percent. Even allowing eight to 10 years, the percentage of students earning degrees climbs only slightly. In contrast, the Georgia high school graduation rate is between 56 and…

  • Obscurity Obsolescence

    Along the same lines as Lacey’s Travel and Usability post, libraries are not really designed to be very usable. Well… unless you think like a librarian. Who gets a MLIS degree in order to use a library. Okay… I would… bad example. The below article’s Digital Natives are kids who have played video games all…

  • Hacking the Test

    In college, I had a professor who gave “Multiple Guess” tests. One of my less than clued classmates asked why he called them such. hahaha I knew, as usually when I took a test I knew less than half the answers outright. He had almost made me conisder studying. Yeah, almost. In The Fallacy of…

  • Scary

    Virginia Tech shootings – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: The Virginia Tech shootings were committed by an unidentified gunman on April 16, 2007, at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States. Government officials have confirmed 32 people (including the shooter) dead,[1][2][3] though school officials report 33 deaths, and most news outlets are…

  • Criminal Scholarships

    The BBC article doesn’t say whether this is a UK only thing, but this is just scary. If it is a US phenomenon as well, then I wonder how many college students are being paid to go to school? On the one hand, the students are getting an education. On the other, the students will…

  • USDOEd’s Turn

    Yikes! These are not the kinds of people who need to have their information disclosed. Students are just building their credit. For them to go through someone trashing them so early could be really detrimental. 🙁 Federal student loan program exposes data on 21,000 users: The U.S. Department of Education has disabled its Direct Loan…

  • Cheating in an Information Technology Era

    Some quotes from an article in the NYT on cheating. This recently came up on a WebCT Users list (usually at least once every year). Maybe the timing is right because the academic year at many schools just ended? Test administrators are usually one step behind the cheaters. There are lots of technologies that have…

  • ATF rids Univ. of ninja threat

    Who knew the ATF was full of pirates? Always picking on the poor ninjas. redandblack.com – ATF rids Univ. of ninja threat ATF agents are always on alert for anything suspicious — including ninjas.