Welcome to IGOR

I got permission from our president to modify and release the College's code for our institutional effectiveness system. I hope to officially roll it out in December at the SACS meeting. I started a blog on it at openIGOR.blogspot.com. The acronym, by the way, stands for Integrated Goals and Objectives Reporting.

Dropping SAT

In my last post I wondered if there wasn't a pool of applicants who are undervalued because of low SAT scores. In our own predictions of college success, SAT doesn't explain much of the variance, yet we continue to use it (although high school GPA is weighted much higher).

This article at Newsday.com talks about Drew University's decision to stop requiring SATs.

With test scores optional, Drew's admissions officers are concentrating more closely on how well applicants did in high school. They pay special attention to whether students took tough classes, and for leadership qualities.

Their enrollment is up, which may have something to do with their decision.

The Myth of Talent

There's an article in the New York Times by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, authors of Freakonomics. This article is about the reality behind what we commonly call "talent." They reference Anders Ericsson, whom they describe as the "ringleader of what might be called the Expert Performance Movement" who conclude that:

[E]xpert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect.

And because people will naturally spend more time practicing things they like to do, Ericsson concludes that there are implications for education.

Students should be taught to follow their interests earlier in their schooling, the better to build up their skills and acquire meaningful feedback.

This raises some interesting questions. First, it confirms what any teacher knows--making learning more interesting is more effective. My 8-year-old daughter used to love math. After her bedtime story, I would give her simple algebra problems to solve, and she relished the challenge of finding two numbers that add to 20 and subtract to give 4. But, now in the third grade, and confronted with things like long division, her attitude about the whole subject is souring. It's not the fault of the school, which is a very good one, or the teachers. It may be that the whole way we think about teaching rote skills like long division may need to be rethought.

Now for the flip side of the coin. There are indications that IQ, or general intelligence 'g', is partially dependent upon brain physiology. A recent article in NewScientist is one example. Others I've seen recently relate brain volume or physiology of particular parts of the brain to IQ. If we accept at face value that the physical nature of one's brain has a lot to do with academic "ability," it raises interesting questions.

Do admissions criteria like SAT scores or high school GPA derive more from static IQ-like abilities or from a student's potential to become interested in and eventually expert in a body of knowledge? Most teachers have probably had the frustrating experience of having a student who is very quick to grasp new ideas and connections--even brilliant--but who simply will not take the time to develop these gifts by doing assignments. On the other hand, we have found that our predictions of student success, based on SAT and GPA, are rather weak. In fact, students admitted with the lowest possible scores still succeed 50% of the time, some of them quite dramatically. We graduated a student this year with a perfect 4.0 who was admitted under a special program for under-qualified applicants.

This suggests an opportunity for institutions seeking to improve or enlarge their admissions pool. Because instruments like SAT in particular may not give enough weight to the potential of students with high interest/curiosity/drive, this may well represent a distortion in the admissions market.

Students are given scholarships based on their apparent ability. Hence students with high SAT scores must be competed for. But there may well be a group of "underpriced" applicants out there who do not show up on the SAT radar, but who would excel at your institution. How to go about finding those applicants would be a very interesting research project.

Possible actions following this line of thought include:

• Place value on how interesting students find courses, particularly survey courses designed to introduce students to a field of study.
• Try to find indicators like school attendence (perhaps) that may predict positive attitudes in students. Give these indicators weight for admissions purposes.
• Involve students outside the classroom, ideally with faculty.
• Create Web 2.0-like communities of study so that students can feed off of each others' interest. We've had some success in that area by making physical spaces available for Science,Math, etc.

This reminds me of an interview I heard on the radio with a former English teacher who had his best success by asking students to write an excuse why they couldn't do the assignment!

HigherEd BlogCon Link

My article on HigherEd BlogCon is here. It's a tongue-in-cheek account of getting the library and IT to play nice together to help us through accreditation and other natural disasters.

I also have an article on the Commission on the Future of Higher Education and its talk of standardized testing. This article is slated to appear in the June edition of U. Business.

Institutional Repositories

I got an email survey the other day from a group that's studying institutional repositories. One of the questions asked which repository we use. I printed out the list to bring home, but don't actually have the name or URL of the group doing the study. I'll post that here when I get back to work. Anyway, here's the list. The hyperlinking and descriptions are mine. Note that these repositories are mostly designed to hold academic works. They're more similar to online journals than archives.

ARNO From the Netherlands. Designed to archive academic research papers. Looks like open source software.

bePress The Berkely Electronic Press. Journals and institutional respositories (via licensed code, it looks like):

The Berkeley Electronic Press works with universities, research centers, institutes, departments and other hubs of knowledge to create electronic publications series. Many institutions license our repository technology, offered since 2004 in conjunction with ProQuest Information and Learning. Learn more about the DigitalCommons@ Institutional Repositories. Content from the following repositories and publication series are available freely and without restriction to all readers. [link]

CDSWare Cern Document Server:

...to run your own electronic preprint server, an online digital library catalogue or a document repository on the web. It complies with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and uses MARC21 as its underlying bibliographic standard. [more]

ContentDM From their website:

Setting industry standards for digital collection management, CONTENTdm provides tools for everything from organizing and managing to publishing and searching digital collections over the Internet.

The most powerful and flexible digital collection management package on the market today, CONTENTdm handles it all—documents, PDFs, images, video, and audio files. CONTENTdm is used by libraries, universities, government agencies, museums, corporations, historical societies, and a host of other organizations to support hundreds of diverse digital collections. Visit our customers' collections or learn more.

DigiTool From their website:

DigiTool (R) is an enterprise solution for the management of digital assets in libraries and academic environments.

DigiTool enables institutions to create, manage, preserve, and share locally administered digital collections. By improving the integration of digital collections with institutional portals and e-learning systems, institutions running DigiTool provide users with a seamless working environment.

DiVa This one seems like a specific application, not licensed. You can read about it here.

Documentum This looks like it's for really large applications. Probably expensive.

Dpubs Open source. From their website:

DPubS (Digital Publishing System) is a powerful and flexible open-source system for publishing digital documents... (more)

DSpace An open source project developed by MIT and HP. From their website:

DSpace is a groundbreaking digital repository system that captures, stores, indexes, preserves, and redistributes an organization's research data.

Fedora No, this isn't Red Hat. It's another open source solution. From their website:

[...] This unique combination of features makes Fedora an attractive solution in a variety of domains. Some examples of applications that are built upon Fedora include library collections management, multimedia authoring systems, archival repositories, institutional repositories, and digital libraries for education.

GNU Eprints Free software. From their website:

[...] enables research to be accessible to all, and provides the foundation for all academic institutions to create their own research repositories.

Greenstone Open source. From their website:

Greenstone is a suite of software for building and distributing digital library collections. It provides a new way of organizing information and publishing it on the Internet or on CD-ROM.

HarvestRoad This looks like a commercial solution. From their website:

HarvestRoad Hive® is a federated digital repository system that manages sharing and reuse of any form of content in any online learning environment across any number of locations or countries and integrates with any Learning Management or ERP System.

Innovative Interfaces A commercial solution targeted at libraries.

i-Tor Open source. From their website:

i-Tor is an open-source (free) technology that enables you to create websites. They may be straightforward web pages, or information from a database, an Open Archive*, or some other file. i-Tor can also be used to make modifications: the creator of a web page can manage it directly on the site, either alone or in collaboration with others.

Luna Insight Looks like it's mainly designed for images. Commercial.


MyCoRe Open source. From the website:

MyCoRe is an Open Source project for the development of Digital Library and archive solutions [...]

OPUS This seems to be open source, but I couldn't find a home page for it.

Sun SITE From Sun software and the UC Berkeley library. I'm not sure that you can use this for an institutional repository, though.

Virginia Tech ETD Software. ETD stands for electronic theses and dissertations. I'm not sure if you can have their code, though. If so, I haven't found the right link.

While tracking these down, I came across A Guide to Institutional Repository Software. It has details about several of the above.