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…
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…
Dear computer software companies, Its a waste of my time and yours to bring to your attention a bug in your code of which you are already aware. Several of you are good about disclosure. Several of you really annoy me. You know who you are. Ezra
It’s often argued that the high false positive rate proves the system is poorly run or even useless. This is not necessarily the case. In running a system like this, we necessarily trade off false positives against false negatives. We can lower either kind of error, but doing so will increase the other kind. The…
I’ve been asked for a cookbook of SQL to deal with issues in [WebCT / Blackboard] Vista. This seems like a daunting task. Organizationally, I guess I lean towards “everything is miscellaneous”. Just about everything starts with a few SQL statements I’ve come to memorize. Outside of that, every request has a number of nuances…
Some of my latest work has been in chasing cheaters or “Vista ate my homework” claims. Some background: I work for a project that hosts online classes for 32 of the 35 universities in our system. We have about 125,000 users who have performed at least 100 actions this term. We have had about 50…
Investigating an issue with Blackboard Vista’s Who’s Online feature. Its a chat tool. So why do I feel like a tool by chatting with myself?
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…