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 […]
“Parent trigger” as a pale shadow of community involvement
During the past two legislative sessions in Florida, I have watched debates over the so-called parent-trigger bills with a mix of disappointment and resignation. Have we fallen so low in discussing parent involvement that a petition or plebiscite is considered involvement? Maybe this is the Facebook Era’s version of maximum feasible participation, a sort 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. ((This analysis applies more generally at workplaces, but most of my working life has been in academia, and I’ll restrict my assertions to what I know best.)) I have been mulling these for a […]
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 […]
Quick review of Jeff Selingo’s “College (Un)bound”
Jeff Selingo’s new book, College (Un)bound, came out last week. Very brief version of this post: buy it if you want a compilation of good reporting on higher education. You should expect to enjoy it as long as you bring the salt shaker for when Selingo becomes prescriptive.