Why the “college hunt” genre is unrepresentative, and the shame of the College Board Profile
This morning’s blog entry by Valerie Strauss is typical of the genre: a perspective on what it’s like to apply to a number of selective colleges and universities and hunt for financial aid. And it’s all wrong, both from a policy perspective and (I’d argue) even a hypercompetitive parents’ perspective. Policy perspective: the colleges most […]
Horizon 2010 report mostly wrong
At least this year’s EDUCAUSE Horizon report on emerging IT doesn’t predict the tremendous growth of Second Life. But it has plenty of misjudgments in what it predicts will be Big Higher-Ed IT in the near and medium term. Below are my quick judgments of what Horizon 2010 thinks will be big: Semi-correct: the impact […]
Florida legislative session education preview
Former Miami Herald reporter and current free-lancer Gary Fineout has a solid legislative session preview on education policy in this morning’s Sarasota Herald-Tribune (hat tip). I may disagree with his predictions on the margins, but on the whole I think he’s on the money in identifying the obvious issues. Fineout was starting his analysis from […]
Ebook readers and markets
At the beginning of the month, one of The Big Things at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was the proliferation of electronic readers (or ebook readers), and as someone who bought a Sony ebook reader a few years ago for work purposes, I have a few thoughts that are different from the standard […]
Collegiality: It’s harder to separate ideas from people than you might think
As the president of the USF chapter of Florida’s statewide faculty union, it’s part of my job to defend the academic due process rights of That Guy.* If you’ve worked at a college or university, you’ve had to deal with That Guy, a generally prickly personality more commonly male than female who may have some good […]