Kill the Darlings

The title comes from standard advice to writers; for origins see this Slate article. It occurred to me during my daily scan of Andrew Gelman's blog:

[I]n science (or engineering, business decision making, etc.), you have to be willing to give up your favorite ideas.  

The full post is here, and worth reading for the cautionary tales of what can happen when we cling too long to beautiful ideas in the face of ugly facts to the contrary.

Transparency Act

In other news, draft legislation on college transparency can be found here. It proposes a student-unit data tracking system (which would overturn current law), with the goal of making outcomes transparent. Here, outcomes include what happens in college (retention, graduation), but we already have those, so the new addition is the effects on graduates. From page 21:

If I read it correctly, the list of categories to be disaggregated comprises:

• (I)  Enrollment  status  as  a  first-time  student,  recent  transfer  student, or other non-first-time student. 
• (II) Attendance intensity, whether full-time or part-time.
• (III)  Credential-seeking  status, by credential level. 
• (IV) Race or ethnicity. 
• (V) Age intervals. 
• (VI) Gender. 
• (VII) Program of study (as applicable). 
• (VIII) Military or veteran benefit  status 
• (IX) Status as a distance education student, whether  exclusively or partially enrolled in  distance education. 
• (X) Federal Pell Grant and Federal loan recipient status

 To make maximum use of this (as yet hypothetical) data, it's interesting to think of a system like the net tuition calculator for predicting future outcomes. You'd enter your information, including prospective field of study, and receive likelihood of graduation, average predicted salary, and so on. The most important predictor missing from the list is a measure of past academic performance, like high school grades and standardized test scores. For collegiate outcomes, it would be important to include GPA bands, I believe.

Higher Ed News

I cleaned up the higher ed news page (link on left,  or click here) to include more news items.  I thought it was time to get rid of the google trends graph on financial aid.  I replace two minor sources with reddit's education page and one from delicious.com.  There are no ads, of course.  It runs on google docs, yahoo pipes, and rss feeds from the sources.

Finding Interesting Stuff

I recently created a dynamic page to grab RSS feeds from higher ed news sources. There are plenty more out there, and I'll probably create another page or two with different themes when I get the chance. For example, assessment deserves its own page. There are a couple more ways to find interesting stuff. These too can be automated, but it's not as easy.

Delicious.com (or del.icio.us) If you don't have an account here, it's a great site, and very useful for bookmarking with tags. The bookmarks live in the Cloud, and so are are available from anywhere. You can follow other people's tags (here are mine), creating a network of interested parties. The idea is that you can restrict searches to a group of experts in a field, so you get quality hits. This can even be automated to some extent.

For example, this link searches for the tags "assessment" and "higher_ed". At some point I'll see if I can filter the results with pipes.yahoo.com to create an RSS feed out of it. If delicious.com provides that service I can't find it.

Technorati.com is designed to index and search blogs. If you have a blog, you can register it with them, and it will be searchable as soon as you post a story. Searches can be tied to an RSS feed, so you can get the information with little effort. Here's a link for the same keywords as before from this source. Unfortunately, their RSS feed seems to be flakey--I haven't been able to get it to work for weeks.

When I get the chance, I'll try to automate these and a few more sources, and create some targetted higher ed topics pages.

Higher Ed News Page

I have an html document on my desktop that contains my most-used links. I find this easier to use and quicker than the bookmark system. But still, it would be nice to have my higher ed news sources all in one spot, I thought. I used to use 24eyes.com regularly to browse RSS feeds, but at some point my cookies must have expired because I lost all my feeds. Also, you can't log in from a different computer, so it's limited. However, it's very slick, and if you want a starter set of higher ed feeds (audaciously including my own blog), go to 24eyes to get a starter page and then click this link to create the Higher Ed tab. I renamed the original "entertainment" tab, and their server still thinks that's what it is. It's not--it's higher ed news with a technology slant. Note: 24eyes currently has a DNS issue in that you have to have the "www" in front or it won't route properly. This is a problem because the automated URLs from the site lack the prefix.

I created a plain HTML file with the same feeds here. It's not pretty but it works. It tried for a good half hour to get rid of the underlining using CSS, but gave up. Enjoy!

Education Feeds

I had some more fun with yahoo pipes mashed up with a google docs spreadsheet, to take the top two RSS feeds from five higher ed news sources, and embed them below. It's not beautiful, but it's live (will update when the feeds do). I'll work on it some more to improve the asthetics, when I get a chance. Sources: insidehighered.com, New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Ed, Wired, and University Business.



I got started using this blog.