On the horrible state of math education, esp K-12. (I now feel extra-lucky to have taken the after-school math classes I had in high school, instead of the standard ones.)

seems like good advice, rings true with what I've seen/experienced.

Deserves sharing as widely as possible.

random thing found online while looking for something else... (My national merit scholarship!)

Public data! (Boggled to discover that my successor at Pierce is making less than I made 5 years ago. WTF?)

"I’m not writing you to educate you about free speech or police brutality. I assume you’re smart enough to understand both, and to see clearly that the University was badly on the wrong side here. I’m writing as a fellow higher ed administrator."

"This stupid little Facebook photo is not only ill-informed, it’s harmful. Nothing on it has anything to do with reality."

"in the end it’s a “follow your dreams” speech, and as such is quite a contrast to another Internet event of the moment" - on the Steve Jobs graduation speech everybody's posting.

"what the heavily politicized trade associations in Washington are saying does not correspond to the real challenges facing both large and small businesses, even as they themselves perceive them."

"For all the outrage, the real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited, it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—“amateurism” and the “student-athlete”—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes."

Words & colocations (sp?) that are much more frequent in modern fiction.

sad & appalling

Project Euler and the process of learning how to program.

(zombies in the library!) cute.

"Reflections on the use of Wikipedia in the University of British Columbia's course SPAN312, "Murder, Madness, and Mayhem: Latin American Literature in Translation," Spring 2008."

Damn.

pure distilled awesome. :) (also, whatever community college she went to needs to contact her to use in promotional materials!)

"if we look closely, we can find a striking parallel to our own time: what Western Europe experienced in the wake of Gutenberg’s invention of printing"

quirky article by Dylan. it makes a weird amount of sense.

"I don’t know which is more dangerous, that religious beliefs force some people to choose between knowledge and myth or that pointing out how religion can purvey ignorance is taboo."

"The flaw in our character is our insistence on separating blue-collar jobs from white-collar jobs, and encouraging one form of education over another. Why do we value one above the other, when our future depends upon both?"

"That none of their projects is grounded in any research seems not to be a hindrance to these big donors."

Dylan's HighEdWeb presentation.

so sad.

"I'm happy that scientists are noticing, but what seems like a sudden crisis is more easily likened to the Thirty Years' War, and it has been pretty bleak here in the trenches for a long, long time."

if you don't have time to read Diane Ravitch's latest book, take a few moments to read this.

"Strangely enough, none of these books suggest that the federal and state governments should once again subsidize higher education at the rate it did during the Cold War, nor do they advocate ripping out computer labs and IT departments, which are the two biggest reasons college costs more than it used to."

via Robert A Hunter -- may have response to this (and the as-usual sometimes appalling comments) later.

:(

I would pay cash money to see some school do something like this.

"Ref. 52 will put people to work repairing schools across the state — on projects like replacing the roof on an elementary school. At the same time, the school will undertake energy-efficiency projects"

advocating for technical colleges, basically.

"DCKX indexes science topics in xkcd, so that you can use them to illustrate your syllabi, assignments, etc." I'm just sad that it doesn't include the often awesome alt/title text.

A lovely essay. "In my experience, librarians almost always pass the beer test: They are among the most likeable people you'll find at any college."

"software programs developed by the GeoDa Center and affiliates (R-Geo)" ASU, more academically oriented

"his case is so vapid and superficial it’s as if he’s seen the postcard and that’s all the data you ever need to judge a place" awesome post from Dylan.

yay! (don't care abt state names, but "website" FTW!)

"But while voice and speech recognition and commands have gotten a lot better, generally the trend has been in the other direction - instead of talking to our computers, we’re typing on our phones."

"Any Drupal dev willing to learn about Fedora's view of the universe and reverse-engineer some of UPEI's code can do it." oooooh.

"he wants the entire deployment to be 'mayor-proof'"

Student loan lender trainwreck almost derailed our mortgage app. I ::heart:: Direct Loan. (again: personal opinion.)

"Nonpartisan congressional budget analysts project that the measure would save about $61 billion over 10 years." Hell YES. (reminder that this is a personal opinion & not opinion of my employer.)

includes awesome pic!

on the RWW/Facebook train wreck and more. (I've known Gus/Jill since jr high, BTW.)

"Several areas of the college are still functioning only because a dwindling number of staffers are doing heroic work, and you just can't keep doing that."

"The decades-long saga of Southeastern’s perpetual dysfunction and ultimate demise exposes a gaping hole in America’s system of consumer protection for higher education."

I've always been in favor of public education, but it seems like everything I read now is just 100% f'ed up.

Fascinating: "Industry would prefer to hire "developers" fully trained in the latest tools and techniques whereas academia's greatest ambition is to produce more and better professors. To make progress, these ideals must become better aligned."

"Elementary education majors have been found to be particularly afraid of math—more so than any other college major—but often have little chance to overcome this fear because the math requirements of their programs are usually minimal."

"these organizations are themselves large, lumbering beasts, lacking the agility, flexibility and luxury to push the envelope and explore the fringes. The poor folk who work there instead have to rely on and comply to STANDARDS, not specifications that shift like sand in the desert, but codified, nailed down, no-way-but-this-way STANDARDS." the era of web standards consolidation was incredibly powerful for improving sites in big orgs. don't f--- it up, people.

"Ms. Flanagan has chosen to ignore the core purposes of these gardens, only one of which happens to be cultivating a respect for hard work, and only one other of which is a healthy respect for real food."

"In the 18th and 19th centuries, children were taught geography by making their own maps, usually copies of maps available to them in books and atlases at their schools or homes." fascinating. cool drawings!

not a surprising finding to me. (of all the PE teachers I had over the years, only two ever stood out as NOT being horrible.)

amazing story of the Queen Susan Shawl, a group knitting pattern project based on a museum's archive photo.

"I believe deeply that integration does not work when it’s practiced only by 8-year-olds. It must (why is this such a hard concept?) be practiced by their parents as well." Integrated *neighborhoods* are vital to an integrated school and society. (True story, so far as I can tell: in high school I was, in fact, bused as if I were a black kid.)

y'know, if it wasn't for a scholarship, an inheritance from a great-uncle, and a VA stipend, it's conceivable that I might have dropped out during my disastrous sophomore year.

I love this. if only all profs were so straightforward!

From the study: "The principal trend that emerges from the papers reviewed here is that clearly-marked, bike-specific facilities (i.e. cycle tracks at roundabouts, bike routes, bike lanes, and bike paths) were consistently shown to provide improved safety for cyclists compared to on-road cycling with traffic or off-road with pedestrians and other users." The CW trail can actually get pretty dicey in nice weather in the afternoon, lots of walkers.

"Contrary to what many marketers claim, most adult Americans (66%) do not want marketers to tailor advertisements to their interests." on a statistical note, interesting that they mention survey included cell phones.

also, from the wikipedia link: "Underwater Basket Weaving is a trademark of the US Scuba Center, Inc[22], which offers a specialty class designed to improve diving skills from which participants can "take home a memorable souvenir"." WTF?

"This seems [...] like a good time to recall the words of H. L. Mencken: “There is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible and wrong.”"

I love his writing. "opens up like an umbrella" is how someone describes it in this article, and that seems like a reasonable description.

@UWdigiCollec is collecting caption ideas. :) I'm trying to think of something that includes "kick to the nuts" -- that's what the expression on the right brings to mind, unfortunately.

"Bobbitt-Zeher found that the choice of major explained 19 percent of the income gap between college-educated men and women for the high school class of 1999" also "We've already succeeded in getting more women into college, only to watch men flee from majors with increasing percentages of women, as if those subjects were infested with cooties." see also: history of teaching, librarianship.

funny-sounding articles from PubMed.

Sounds like a solid book for a web generalist

"No, I woke up early this morning—rather painfully early, in fact—and knew what I wanted to give myself: this post, in which I hang up the keyboard on old CavLec for good. Not a spangly gift, or an easy one to wrap, but what price peace of mind?" wow. Dorothea is part of the first group of bloggers that I read and interacted with. (ugh, awkward sentence!) I find myself sadder than expected, but can understand the sentiment. She's been out there on the front of her field for a while now, saying the unpopular and quite loudly at that. Gotta be tiring. Hope to see her elsewhere on the internets.

The last link prompted me to go look for info about my great-uncle, because I remember mom saying something about him having been head of anesthesiology at UCLA. and no kidding, not just head, but founder, and major contributor to the field. neat!

"A good data munger excels at turning coffee into regular expressions and parsers" :) also, would like to take stats class one of these days. (IMO, they should teach that in HS instead of calc.)

A good listen. (Warning: autoplay!)

Suggestion #2 reminds me somewhat of Evergreen. (From what I know as an outsider.)

"The Mnemosyne software resembles a traditional flash-card program to help you memorise question/answer pairs, but with an important twist: it uses a sophisticated algorithm to schedule the best time for a card to come up for review."

"like hulu for academics" I think is what lifehacker called it. neat!

I think this is a co-project of dylan & featherstone.

to review at some point in the future