Tag: issues


  • Literacy

    Before we react to the lower amount of reading, what exactly is the problem we seek to solve? Is the problem declining student reading scores? We need to improve reading comprehension. Students may need to learn how to read more effectively so increasing the quantity may not help that much. Is the problem half of…

  • Blackboard Vista tracks student activity. This tracking data is viewed as a critical feature of Vista. Our instructors depended on the information until we revoked their ability to run reports themselves due to performance issues. Campus administrators can still generate reports (though some still fail). We doubt the solution to this is Blackboard improving the…

  • My employer does not pay for my cell phone or Internet service. When new administrators interview or schedule time a forum to talk to us, the question of them paying for one or both services usually is asked. Usually the response is something about it being complicated with a ton of paper work and an…

  • Dumbfounded By The Numbers

    Chancellor Eroll B. Davis Jr told the Georgia Board of Regents, “We grew essentially by a large university.” The USG gained 10,077 students (my alma mater has ~11,000) in a year. They calculate these fall term to fall term. In the same fall term to fall term time period, in the same same university system,…

  • I just finished How Doctors Think yesterday. First impression was doctors don’t spend very much time thinking and gathering information to make a diagnosis. That impress struck a very negative chord with me as it sounds like in my profession of database and computer administration we spend hours picking apart the data we have to…

  • Back in mid August I switched to Pidgin as my IM client. I even found plugins like Guifications and Encryption to add back functionality. Starting now, I am going back to Trillian. The painful behavior I cannot stand is Pidgin removing my accounts without any visual notice. What is the use of an IM client…

  • Several of us saw a demo of Coradiant Truesight yesterday (first mentioned in the BbWorld Monitoring post). Most of the demo, I spent trying to figure out the name Jeff Goldblum as one of team giving the demo had the voice and mannerisms of the actor’s characters. Had he mentioned a butterfly, then I definitely…

  • Sunset on Whois

    Whois may die. I’ve used it in the past to determine who owns a web site. I’ve even been frustrated that a very negative web site had a privacy blocker in place so I could not determine who ran the site. At the same time, I have the same protection on most of my domains.…

  • Fear brings out the worst in people. Fear of change or the unknown manifests in criticism, anger, and overreaction. Yes, I am guilty of this like everyone else… I am not somehow above all this. The idea of democracy, I think, where everyone is able to provide input into the making of a decision was…