Ten Reasons Why

Oh my. This hits a little too close to home. :-)

Education

Shakespeare was born today in 1564. By best estimates, that is. There’s no record of his birth, but there is record of his baptism on April 26, 1564.
As a former English prof, I salute you, Billy S.! :-)

Books, Writing & Literature

This article from eSchool News online says,

“Officials from the Detroit Public Schools (DPS) say a groundbreaking $75 million contract to outsource the district’s entire information technology (IT) department to local computer firm Compuware Corp. has paid off to the tune of $3 million in IT-related cost savings per year.”

I’m no IT management guru by any stretch of the imagination, but having worked in the technology departments of academic institutions, I don’t know why more school districts (and colleges and universities) don’t do this. It’s extremely difficult for academic institutions to recruit and retain good IT professionals because they can’t compete on salary, benefits, and job satisfaction with the corporate sector. So outsource to the corporate sector to run the IT and let them absorb the costs through economies of scale that an individual university or district typically can’t attain.

Education

I previously mentioned Stephen Downes’ Edu_RSS page that aggregates edu-bloggers RSS feeds. I’m puzzled why he chose to present it in chronological order (most recent at bottom), instead of the more webloggish reverse chronological (freshest links at the top). Lots of scrolling to get to the new stuff.

Weblogs

Will Richardson, over at Weblogg-ed (why two G’s, man? … oh, wait I get it, a play on “weblogged”?), posts an XML subscription list of the RSS feed addresses for everyone he’s aggregating through SharpReader. Since I just started using SharpReader last week, this is bonus! Thanks, Will!
Note to self: export and post your own SharpReader subscription list to share.

Education, Syndication & Aggregation, Weblogs

From an article in the Seattle Times:

Only 3 percent of the freshmen at the 146 most selective colleges and universities come from families in the bottom quarter of Americans ranked by income. [link via Kairosnews]

That’s a bleak statistic at first glance, but I can’t help wonder what the result of this is. The criteria they used to pick the 146 universities is “most selective,” but I expect that correlates well to “most expensive.”
What would be really interesting is to compare the post-college success of the students from the families in the bottom quarter of income who went to those exclusive schools to those from the same income group who attended less exclusive schools and those who didn’t attend college (probably controlling for those who go on to graduate schools).
I suspect that what one might find is that while college is still a significant indicator of your long-term success, your undergraduate institution probably isn’t a great predictor of that success.
(Of course, I’m sure someone way smarter than me has already thought of this and done that study. I just haven’t seen it.)

Education

Stephen Downes is aggregating education weblogs and presenting the RSS feeds on a single web page. Good idea!

Education, Weblogs

I’m not quite sure I understand Laura Gibb’s ire in this Xplana article, as I’ve always been an advocate of not driving a nail with a saw or cutting a board with a hammer. E.g. right tools for the right goals.
Course management systems are designed to provide an authenticated, protected online environment in which to deliver and manage a course. Every course management system I’ve seen has the capability to make the content available to the public or to link from within the secured environment to content outside that environment. These systems are not designed to be content repositories, nor are they designed to be content-authoring or “website”-authoring tools.
I think it’s important to make a distinction between the course environment and the content or the content authoring. The course management environment uses authentication to assign role-based permissions, deliver assessments, track student assignments and grades, identify users in communication spaces, prevent abusive behavior from people not enrolled in the course, etc. While most have some simple forms-based content authoring tools, the vast majority of content is (and should be) authored outside of the course management environment. Securing the course environment — the virtual space in which the teaching and learning is delivered — doesn’t have to affect the openness or availability of the content unless the only place you choose to store the content is inside the secured environment.

Education

CETIS, a UK-based standards organization, has launched a new pedagogy forum:

The new Pedagogy Forum is specifically set up for the UK FE and HE [ that's "further ed" and "higher ed" --g] communities to look at the pedagogic implications of interoperability standards and provide requirements to the specification process.

This should please George. :-)

Education

So today I downloaded SharpReader, a .NET news aggregator. I’ve tried Radio Userland and didn’t like it for too many reasons to go into in this post, as well as Amphetadesk. I really don’t like a news aggregator that runs in the browser. I’ll probably also test out Syndirella and NewzCrawler, for comparison.
One thing I noticed immediately is that in RSS 0.91 feeds, the posts all have a time/date stamp that is the time the aggregator downloaded the item. That’s ridiculous. Is that a SharpReader problem, or is that part of the RSS 0.91 spec? RSS 1.0 posts actually have the time of the post as the time/date stamp, which is how it should be.
The nice part of SharpReader, which I don’t believe Radio or Amphetadesk have, is the ability to group your feeds, and view them in an aggregate group view. That approaches the “personal newspaper” model, so I get a variety of people’s posts mixed together. Default sort is reverse chronological, but I can also sort by source. Of course, RSS 0.91 feeds screw that all up, because you’ll have a big chunk of those authors posts plopped in the middle, since they’re all tagged with the download time, instead of the actual posting time. :-/
With that in mind, I’m publishing an RSS 1.0 feed for this weblog, in addition to the RSS 0.91 feed I had. I’d get rid of the 0.91 feed, except that some people may have already subscribed to it. I’d recommend the 1.0 feed.

Standards, Syndication & Aggregation