Pittsburg has decided that since they are projected to go over budget, they should start taxing tuition.  Their logic is that students aren’t paying taxes, but they use city services.  I would assume that these students pay quite a bit in sales tax, but the city thinks they need more.  While the tax isn’t ridiculously high–it looks like it will be up to about $400 per year–it still seems a bit odd to me.

I think there is a fundamental problem when governments reaction to budget shortfalls is to look for ways to collect more taxes.  The proper response would be to try to become more efficient or reduce spending.  Looking for more ways to take people’s money doesn’t really serve their constituents.

I’m not saying that governments are always just trying to take money away from the people in their domain, but I think you will be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks they are being governed by an organization known for its efficiency and wise spending habits.

Interesting article about a police officer who sued the police department because to people were promoted based on bogus degrees. He is getting a retroactive raise, his legal expenses covered, and will be retiring effective March 11th.

Kolakowski applied in 2003 for a promotion to the newly created position of deputy chief. The borough ultimately chose John Bouthillette, who was also a lieutenant, to become deputy chief; and promoted John Casey from sergeant to lieutenant.

Bouthillette and Casey, according to Kolakowski’s lawsuit, used college degrees from a fraudulent Internet diploma mill, where college degrees can be purchased without ever actually taking courses or exams. The borough considered those degrees to be legitimate and awarded the men points for the degrees during the promotional process.

Organizations need to pay special attention to how they word their policies when it comes to educational institutions. Just saying that degrees need to come from an “accredited” institution doesn’t help. In this case the “university” created an accrediting institution and then accredited themselves.

link

Do you know how to make African American’s perform poorly on a test? Just make the first question “What is your race?”

Now I realize that the above statement sounds horrible and it is terribly politically incorrect, but it is the actual results of the experiment below. It suggests that we may be hindering people’s performance by focusing on race in areas where it irrelevant.

In “Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans” by Steele, Claude M. and Aronson, Joshua (Journal of Personality & Social Psychology. 1995 Nov Vol 69(5) 797-811) researchers found that blacks from Stanford performed better on a set of SAT questions if they were not asked about their race. The differences were not slight. The group that was not asked to record their race scored 7.7 while the group that was asked to record their race only scored 4.4. This means that on average, participants did 42% worse when race was somehow a factor than when it was not.

If putting an emphasis on race can so drastically alter performance in a test, what impact does it have in the work place? I’ve seen a lot of organizations who put tremendous amounts of effort into “creating diversity”. Generally this means they are trying to hire more black people. I’m sure this is done with good intentions, but is it possible that this focus is actually hurting people in a way similar to experiment above?

In most situations, if an organization is focused on the race of their employees, there is little positive that can result. Granted, there are areas where racism still exists, but in many places an undue focus on avoiding racism is what prevents companies from moving to a state where the color of your skin isn’t something that is even noticed.

KGWN – Cheyenne Police Chief Got Degree from Diploma Mill
The city of Cheyenne has paid for the city’s police chief to earn a masters degree from a suspected diploma mill.

Police Chief Bob Fecht got the degree from Lacrosse University in Mississippi.

I think the big question would be whether or not he got a raise for getting the degree. Also most employers will only reimburse education expenses for accredited institutions. Lacrosse claims to be accredited by some “international” accrediting institutions. They attempt to make it sound as if an “international” accreditation association is somehow better than the regional system used in the US.

Unlike US regional accreditation (which is divided into 6 territorial regions) ADLP is an international association, providing educational quality accreditation services to private high schools, vocational schools, universities, colleges and institutes worldwide.

Lacrosse is a place where they will give you credit for “life experience” as long as you still pay for the class. Their tution and fees page is interesting. A Bachelor’s degree is $2450 and Master’s is $2525. If you get both together they only charge $3000, but only if you’ve already done 75% of the work.

But if you’ve already done 75% of the work needed for a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree wouldn’t you already have a Bachelor’s degree? Oh I forgot about the Life Experience part. Evidently your life experience can give you at least 75% of what will normally require 6 years of hard study for everyone else.

You can Search Harvard’s museum collections. They have scanned and photographed over 80,000 works of art that you can view online. Some of the scans are at very high resolution. If you play around with the URL you can get it to give you images up to 3000 pixels accross.

I’d suggest that you check the box that only shows record with images if you want to browse the art work. This will keep you from sorting through the items that haven’t been digitized yet.

An article
by the guardian talks about how email can become adictive and actually lower your IQ like drugs.

The distractions of constant emails, text and phone messages are a greater threat to IQ and concentration than taking cannabis, according to a survey of befuddled volunteers.

Doziness, lethargy and an increasing inability to focus reached “startling” levels in the trials by 1,100 people, who also demonstrated that emails in particular have an addictive, drug-like grip.

Respondents’ minds were all over the place as they faced new questions and challenges every time an email dropped into their inbox. Productivity at work was damaged and the effect on staff who could not resist trying to juggle new messages with existing work was the equivalent, over a day, to the loss of a night’s sleep.

I think the same thing could be said of any highly distractive activity. People don’t multitask as well as they think they do.

“This is a very real and widespread phenomenon,” said Glenn Wilson, a psychiatrist from King’s College, London University, who carried out 80 clinical trials for TNS research, commissioned by the IT firm Hewlett Packard. The average IQ loss was measured at 10 points, more than double the four point mean fall found in studies of cannabis users.

So I wonder what having 4 small children does to the IQ of an unorganized mother? It seems like it would have a similiar effect. I would like to see a study showing the IQ impact of various work spaces. For example, do shared workspaces where people get interrupted a lot result in a lower IQ than areas where everyone has their own office? If so could you sue your employer for reducing your IQ because they don’t give you your own office to work in?

The most damage was done, according to the survey, by the almost complete lack of discipline in handling emails. Dr Wilson and his colleagues found a compulsion to reply to each new message, leading to constant changes of direction which inevitably tired and slowed down the brain.

One of the advantages of using books to study is the fact when you have to look the book up in the library, go get it, and then find a place to sit down and study you are not going to just jump to anothe r book if it seems tough or if you hit a section you don’t understand. You naturally develop a level of concentration that doesn’t come as easily when using the internet.

If people adopt a process where they either respond, delete, or defer each message as it comes in, the issues mentioned in the article are likely to go away. The big problem comes when you spend very brief amounts of time thinking about each message and perhaps responding, but not in ways that actually moves you to a state where you can delete or archive the email.

If you are looking at getting a degree through Harvard’s Extension school make sure you check out the residency requirement for your program. The ALM in IT degree requires you to spend one semester on campus. The summer session counts as a semester and it is only 8 weeks long.

Although some ALM in IT courses may be taken via the Internet, the ALM in IT requires a minimum residency of one semester in the Harvard Extension School or Harvard Summer School. International candidates holding an F-1 student visa must enroll full time during the resident semester. Other candidates must enroll in at least one ALM in IT course during the resident semester. If the courses in which the ALM in IT candidate enrolls during the residency period are also offered via the Internet, the student must show the ALM in IT Office proof of living within commuting distance of the Harvard campus. Students who plan to be in residence for just one semester are strongly advised to do so after their master’s project has been approved. Such students are urged to arrange for their housing well in advance. Although the Extension School does not provide housing, the Harvard Summer School provides dormitory housing for a fee.
Source

Here are a couple things that I learned during the summer of 2003 while completing my residency requirement:

• Stay near your classes — You’ll be able to concentrate on your studies much more effectively if your classes are nearby. I would find out what building your classes will meet in and find an apartment as close as possible. My classes were all in the Science Center. We rented a very small one bedroom apartment about a 5 minute walk from the Science Center on Kirkland street. This made it easy to quickly get to class even when carrying an armful of books and my laptop.
• Groceries — If you need to stock up on groceries, I would suggest having them delivered. If you are going to be there for eight weeks and have a pretty good idea of what you’ll need, go to one of the online grocery stores and order everything that you’ll want that won’t go bad quickly. The delivery charge isn’t that much if you place a large order and it will save you a lot of hassle of trying to carry a bunch of groceries back to your apartment.
• Look for Corporate Housing — Corporate apartments will usually let you lease places for 8 weeks or less and many come furnished. Obviously it costs more than signing up for a 12 month lease, but there are several advantages. First corporate housing has a higher turn over rate, so you’re more likely to find a place. You might be able to find someone to lease an apartment for just the summer, but we had a lot more luck finding corporate housing. Second, don’t under estimate how difficult it would be do get bring a television, dvd player, table, etc. if you get an unfurnished apartment. Even if you have a way to haul everything you might end up in a place like we were where we could only part for 15 minutes in front of the building. The rest of the time we had to part in a lot about 1 mile away. Third, usually corporate housing takes care of cleaning up when you leave which means you don’t have to go through a long inspection unless you actually damaged something.
• Parking in Cambridge is awful — If you are going to live in Cambridge you probably won’t use your car much. The subway is much less expensive (you can get a pass for $30 per month) and much quicker than dealing with finding and paying for parking. The first time we visited Harvard, we rented a car and stayed in a hotel about 3 miles from Harvard Square. We ended up spending about $60 per day on parking ($20 for the hotel, $20 for our conference parking and $20 for where ever we went in the evening). Even then we had to walk quite a ways to get anywhere.
• Get a good Map — We had a good street level map, but as we were leaving I bought a wall map of Harvard. Several months after we got back, I realized that our apartment was right next to several important sites that I would have really liked to see. It was just on block over in an area that we hadn’t walked through.

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The United States Census has some interesting facts on the education rates of each state. The chart below shows the percentage of adults over 25 years of age who have at least a bachelors degree. The top position goes to the District of Columbia, but since it is such a small area, it probably isn’t really fair to compare it with the other states. If we don’t count D.C. then the most educated state is Massachusetts where you stand a 36% chance that anyone you happen to meet has graduated with a four year degree.

I was surprised to see that Kansas (30%) is so high in the list. Having lived in Kansas and now in Michigan, I expected Michigan to be higher than Kansas. But Michigan is only at 24%. This seemed odd to me until I realised that until recently most of the non-engineering jobs in Michigan were in factories making cars or furniture. Adults who didn’t go to college are less likely to encourage their kids to go. Unfortunately many of the people who worked in factories have been laid off in the past few years and many of them are having a very difficult time finding other work. While a college education doesn’t guarantee you a job, it is sure a good thing to have when there are 200 people applying for each open position.

I’m still not sure why Kansas is so high on the list. I would guess that the past few generations of farmers tried to send their kids to college because they realized that family farms weren’t going to continue to be profitable. I don’t know if this is what actually happened because it seems Michigan would have done the same thing, but I guess downturn in farming started many years before what is currently impacting Michigan factory workers.

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Capella announced that it is going to go public. Capella has always looked like an interesting university. They are a commercial enterprise and based on their requirements it seems that they probably rank a little higher academically than University of Phoenix.

“Capella Education Co. of Minneapolis, one of the few private education firms to offer college degrees exclusively through online courses, said Monday it plans an initial public stock offering that could raise up to $86.25 million.”

“Capella, the parent company of Capella University, will use proceeds from the IPO for working capital and general corporate purposes, which could include expansion, developing new courses and acquisitions, the company said.”

It will be interesting to see how they put this money to use. Developing online courses can be very expensive. If they are able to create a solid infrastructure for creating courses, it could help them leap ahead of the competition. Currently the two places that seem to be successfully doing online education are Harvard and Standford. Their online classes mirror live classes and they do a good job of keeping the experience the same (as much as possible) for both the online and real time students.

Online learning is a growing market into which private companies have raced since the late 1990s, partly because traditional colleges and universities were slow to adapt to online teaching.

One of the reasons traditional institutions have been slow to react is because of the expense of being cutting edge. It is a lot less expensive to put a class online that it was a few years ago, but it is still a major undertaking. I think most colleges and universities are looking at it, but most don’t have the money to successfully pull it off.

Capella attributes its growth partly to growing acceptance of online education and to its relationships with companies, colleges and branches of the U.S. military that have endorsed its online services to their employees or students.

I think this is the key. Capella is not inexpensive. Most people aren’t going to take classes unless they are paid for by their employer. If Capella can sell themselves to large companies as a way for their employees to take classes without needing to be gone from work, they can get a tremendous number of student. I was at a Franklin Covey training session where I met someone who works for GM. He said he was working on his PHD through Capella. I got the impression that a good number of GM employees are doing this as well. A good number of them will probably never complete the degree.

I am concerned about institutions that opt for a cheap way of doing online education where it is basically correspondence school using the internet instead of USPS. A lot of these classes rely on relatively light reading assignments and much of the student’s time is spent on message boards with other students. I don’t think that the message boards is necessarily a bad way to learn and interact, but I think it can keep people from really learning how to concentrate on a subject for a long period of time.

You should be able to assume that a college graduate can stay engaged in a day long seminar because they should have learned that level of concentration in order to get their degree. If their educational experience was primarily reading and responding to short posts, they may never develop the skills necessary to assimilate 3 hours of information from a dense lecture.

Another problem with some of the modern teaching theory is the idea that if you just make a bunch of people interact with each other, their life experiences will rub off and everyone will be smarter. In some cases this is the idea behind using the message boards. I think it is valuable to learn from your fellow students. In fact that is one of the reasons that I really like learning in an actual classroom. But I think that learning that is primarily based on talking with other students about their experiences in life falls short of true education. In most fields of study that have been around long enough to reach some sort of structure, simply talking with other students won’t allow you to cover the material very quickly. A group of freshman music students are unlikely to really understand the fundamentals of music theory just by chatting with each other. That isn’t to say that chatting won’t produce some valuable interaction, but they aren’t likely to learn the majority of what they need to know this way.

I think online courses are most effective when they mirror an actual class with videos of the teacher lecturing. I don’t think this is how Capella is currently doing their classes.

I think the best thing that a company like Capella could do is partner up with existing institutions and re brand the lectures from the top lecturers in each field. Teaching fellows could help facilitate the day to day questions and course management. The professors themselves would need to be available in some capacity as well. If this was done correctly the academic experience from Capella could be better than going to a physical university because students would get to study under the best teacher for each class. Recent high school graduates would still want to go to a physical college or university because the social education is just as important as the academic education, but older students looking to continue their education could have a greater trust in the academic soundness of their university even if it is only a virtual one.

Article: Capella Education going public

Last year Duke gave iPods to all of it’s incoming freshmen. An article came out today that gives a small overview of the program. It sounds like the iPod program wasn’t really studied. They basically just gave everyone iPods to see what would happen. The article has quotes from teachers saying that the iPods helped keep students engaged.

Professors reported that students seemed more engaged in classes where they could use the iPods. They also cited strong student use of the audio capabilities of the iPod in their presentations, and more accuracy in quoting from interviews they did using the iPods.

I guess that is great and everything, but I’m afraid that if iPod’s are what makes the class “engaging” then there is probably something wrong with the class. While I can appreciate the value of being able to record a conversation to reference it later, we’ve had this capability for some time in an obscure device called a tape recorder.

Just for the fun of it, take a look at how the article would look if we replaced the word iPod with tape recorder.

When tape recorders go collegiate
By Elizabeth Armstrong Moore | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

When Kenneth Rogerson walked into his newspaper journalism class on the first day of the school year, the professor could barely contain his excitement.

After a quick introduction he broke the big news: “We got the grant,” he told his class. “You all get tape recorders.”

As if on cue, the students exhaled an audible “whoa” and exchanged elated glances. Duke University in Durham, N.C., had already made many a headline as the first school ever to provide all incoming freshmen with their own 20-gigabyte tape recorders – enough space to store up to 5,000 songs.

Ok so now it sound silly. But why? Pretty much all of the uses described in the article are things that can be easily done with older technology. This is a fundamental problem with the way that technology is implemented in education. When the focus is on a new piece of technology instead of new educational processes, we end being excited about mundane capabilities as can be seen by the following (modified) quote:

Professors reported that students seemed more engaged in classes where they could use the tape recorders. They also cited strong student use of the audio capabilities of the tape recorder in their presentations, and more accuracy in quoting from interviews they did using the tape recorders.

It still sounds silly with tape recorders instead of iPods, but the substitution helps clear the head of technology utopia and puts the focus on what is actually being accomplished instead of what devices is being used. So students are using them in their presentations. That is really nice, but I bet if they gave every incoming student a fog machine professors would start to notice the use of fog in some of the student presentations. If it was encouraged, professors would probably even say that there was a “strong use” of fog in the student presentations. This doesn’t mean that the devices are helping education.

I think that technology is extremely underutilized in education, but usually this isn’t because of lack of technology. Duke’s experiement is interesting, but without a solid infrastructure in place I’m not sure what results they were expecting. They weren’t really giving students anything that they couldn’t do with a tape recorder. Technology only becomes wildly beneficial when the infrastructure is in place ahead of time. For example, putting a computer in every dorm room would be beneficial, but it is 100 times more useful if the dorms have network wiring, access to the internet and library databases, and the college puts all of it’s class assignments and resources online. In fact if a university concentrates on the infrastructure, the students will bring their own computers.

I think Duke should concentrate more on creating an infrastructure that provides content for devices like iPods. Here are some of my suggestions:

• Record Every Lecture — These could be made available using podcasting tools, so students could “subscribe” to classes and they would be downloaded automatically. They could review it from their computer, iPod, hand held computer, etc. Students could increase the playback speed to review a lecture quickly just to refresh their memory or play it back in their sleep to try to benefit from subconcoius learning. (Ok maybe that is a stretch, but I would have tried it in college.)

  If the university made the content available to the general public, you’d have people listening to the lectures on their way to work, while exercising, etc. They could even limit it to alumni which would help keep them connected with the donor base.

• Publish Interviews — Record and make available interviews and conversations related to the class. For example say a journalism professor posted a 10 minute telephone interview with a well known journalist for the New York Times discussing ethics. Content like that could provide a wonderful starting point for a class discussion or just as a way to introduce the topic. Over the years the school could build a very large repository of content.
• Share Lectures with Other Universities — Imagine that biology students at Duke University are studying how DNA is formed. If they could quickly access a lecture from Princeton covering the same topic it could greatly increase their understanding of the subject just by hearing things in a different way.
• Suggested Listening Lists — If a school built up a large repository of audio content and indexed it properly, students could be given suggestions on what to listen to. This could be based on their current classes, but it would be even more interesting if it was based on what questions they missed on quizes and exams. Students could subscribe to their personalized RSS feed with audio enclosures. As the semester progressed they would be given various items to listen to based on areas where they demonstrated a lack of understanding. They could download the items automatically to their computer, iPod, or whatever device they used and listen to them in the evenings, in their car, while exercising, etc.

All in all I think it is an interesting experiment. It is always interesting to give people technology and see what creative things they do with it. If Duke comes back next year with a solid plan for creating a better infrastructure to support portable media devices to help facilitate learning, then I’d say the experiment was a success. If not I’d say that they are chasing shiny objects instead of focusing on real improvements to the educational process.

Regardless, the iPod experiement was probably well worth it. The publicity they recieved with their target audience was worth a lot more than the cost of the iPods. If that was their intention, then the program was a great success.

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