The academic life

Brief review of Matt Reed’s “Confessions of a Community College Administrator”

I recently read Matt Reed’s Confessions of a Community College Administrator, which was released earlier this spring. Bottom line: read it if you want a good description of community colleges today and an administrator’s perspective on the dilemmas of the public 2-year college sector.

Stacked bar chart -- note how this chart stacks percentages for different populations.

How to kill a good report by using Excel

My brain is hurting this afternoon, because someone decided to use a stacked bar chart for two figures in the brand-new Georgetown Center for Education and Workforce report on employment and salary data for different undergraduate degrees, written by Anthony Carnevale and Ban Cheah. Here is the chart on unemployment data for different clusters of [...]

Lashon hora, microaggression, and the academic asshole

There are three forms of social aggression that can infect an academic department or college and be hard to root out.1 I have been mulling these for a while and have only half-formed thoughts; it’s probably best to think of the following as a tentative classification. I hope to have time to discuss possible responses [...]

Open-source ed tech software wish-list

In response to the LTI App Bounty challenge issued yesterday by several LMS companies, here is my wish-list for software that has a simple function, does not yet exist, but should: A mashup of the Creative Commons search tool, Zotero, and simple image editing that would allow one to search for a CC-licensed/PD image, snag [...]

Semester debriefing

We’re at the end of the semester here at USF, and this is a short debriefing of the semester. My particular form of craziness this semester was teaching three courses while serving as department chair. Technically, I was teaching four sections of our undergraduate Schools and Society course, but two of them met in the [...]