November 2011
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On Borders
I guess I’d ask Stephen the same question he asked on Hapgood a week or two ago about Connectivism — he says people are saying F2F institutions are safe from the effects of the digital, networked revolution — but who exactly is saying these things? Links? It seems to me that most people think some portion Continue reading
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Secretary of Education Urges Colleges to Rein In Costs
Secretary of Education Urges Colleges to Rein In Costs It’s easy to believe that the student protests against tuition, at least at the state colleges, might at least stall the tumble of state appropriations. I think it’s unlikely. In fact, I think the net effect of the tuition protests will be a crackdown on college Continue reading
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The Studying Gap – International Edition
I got interested whether the Humanities/Science study divide held up internationally, so I checked out the excellent EUROSTUDENT report. And guess what? It does (with an interesting student employment twist): (Sorry about the graph… it’s just huge). Here’s what the report concluded: Humanities students tend to study less and work alongside their studies more frequently The Continue reading
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The Studying Gap
Yglesias: People, I believe, intuit that the STEM fields are good majors. But I think that’s not just, or even primarily, because of their intrinsic merits. The fact that these programs are hard and the people in them tend to spend a lot of time studying is an important part of the story. By contrast, majoring in Continue reading
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Canadian students more in student loan debt than American students
From MacLeans.ca: In the U.S., average debt at graduation rose to $25,250 in 2010, according to a Nov. 3 report by the Project on Student Debt. Here in Canada, students were graduating with an average debt of $26,680 according to a 2009 report released by the Millennium Scholarship Foundation. If anything, the Canadian average is higher now. Continue reading
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Rising College Costs Are Due Largely to Books, Room, and Board, Study Finds
Update — I just noticed this was a CCAP study. So forget the study —Vedder’s little conservative lobbyist think tank does the sloppiest work around, and I am pretty sure this study is no different. I regret having given it (mistakenly) any publicity at all. I do wish the Chronicle would stop publishing CCAP’s press Continue reading
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Don’t FEAR the FERPA
The Bava is bavatastic today. From You Can’t Spell FERPA Without FEAR: But thanks to a tweet by Mike Caulfield almost two years ago, I finally had a way to think UMW Blogs’ relationship to FERPA differently. Mike basically noted that by giving students their own spaces online wherein they control their online identities, decide what they Continue reading
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utnereader: The New York City crime rate famously plummeted in the mid-1990s under the watch of police chief William Bratton, who introduced a computerized mapping system called CompStat to help cops track crime hot spots. He later took the system to Los Angeles, where once again crime plunged. CompStat is now used nationwide, reports Miller-McCune, Continue reading
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Radio Lives, But Why?
One of the big surprises to me of the last 10 years or so has been the persistent power FM radio has maintained, now two decades into the web revolution, and a decade and a half after Napster. Here’s a chart of where the “most committed” (e.g. high spending music lovers) learn about new music: Continue reading
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True of Connectivism Too?
From Pinker, How the Mind Works (emphasis mine): Why put connectoplasm under such strong lights? Certainly not because I think neural-network modeling is unimportant — quite the contrary! Without it, my whole edifice on how the mind works would be left levitating in midair. Nor do I think that network modeling is merely subcontracting out Continue reading
Hapgood 