I was thinking over the session coming up at Blog Indiana by John Oak Dalton titled “Chancellor 2.0″ which promises to address “existing and emerging obstacles of CEO-grade context” [sic? Was that supposed to be "content"?] for Twitter. In other words, it sounds like the session will be about how to get your college’s upper administration up and running with blogging and tweeting. I’m curious to see what Dalton makes of this, because his home institution seems to have embraced blogging and Twitter at a scale you don’t normally see from a university. Even the chancellor tweets.

I’d love to see more college administrators blogging or twittering, using their real names, making no secret of their institutions, and writing honestly about their successes and struggles in the work that they do. There’s no faster track to giving higher education a measure of transparency that it badly needs than this. That transparency is needed both inside and out.

On the inside, faculty benefit from having a window on what the administration is doing, rather than having an administration that lives and works behind a wall of separation. Students, for whom college administration is especially important but also mysterious, would benefit too. And as faculty have a tendency to objectify administrators and turn them into lay figures to complain about — a mirror image of what many students do to faculty — anything that administrators can do to show people their human side (up to a point, of course; there’s still such a thing as “too much information”) helps the organization operate better.

On the outside, the general public has cultivated such a distrust and dislike for higher education — and can they be blamed, the way we act sometimes? — that giving them that same window on administrative operations would be an honest, unilateral step towards reestablishing the trust that ought to be shared between town and gown. And if I were a parent with a child about to start college, the administrator and faculty blogs would be a valuable source of information about what the college is really like.

If I were a college administrator (not that I’m looking to become one), not only would I be blogging and Twittering regularly, I’d encourage the people who work under me as well as faculty to do the same. I’d be trying to make sure the resources are there to make it happen — dedicated server space for faculty and staff to have their own WordPress installations, and so forth — and most important to make sure that they have permission to speak freely. Imagine what it would be like if your official college blog posts or tweets could be used for your benefit towards tenure.

Are there other college administrators out there who blog or tweet? Or any administrators out there reading this post who don’t, and would care to explain why not?

Over at the Young Mathematicians’ Network, I have an article today on four revealing questions that young faculty should ask about tenure. Since you have to have an account to post comments at the YMN web site, and since some readers who aren’t mathematicians might want to discuss this stuff, I’m going to reprint the article below the fold and open comments for it. Enjoy!

I’ve been fortunate to be on the Promotion and Tenure Committee at my college for the last three years and to be the chair of that committee this year. I did indeed say “fortunate”, because despite the large amount of work we have to do on the committee and the high-stakes nature of that work, it’s been a fascinating and highly educational job to examine what, exactly, tenure entails and how, exactly, we want faculty to prove they deserve it.

Part of that job has involved looking at the promotion and tenure processes of other colleges like us. I’ve also been reading and thinking about the processes of schools in the news and of those I’ve known in the past. I’ve found in doing so that there are some schools which have a healthy process and some that, well, are not so healthy — and some schools where there is really not so much of a “process” at all but rather a decision that might as well have no connection to the faculty’s work. I think you can tell a lot about the organizational culture of a college or university — which is so important for job-seekers and new faculty, but so often unexamined by them — by looking at how the institution handles the promotion and tenure process.

In particular, I can think of four questions that job seekers and new faculty should ask when looking at a school’s promotion and tenure process. Job seekers should ask these questions of each school at which they interview. The answers — or lack thereof — will reveal a lot of information about the school.

1. What’s the overall workflow and timeline for the tenure process? Ask a person in charge — usually the Vice-President for Academic Affairs — for a brief, clear synopsis of what happens each year and how the whole process fits together. There are two reasons for asking this. First, quite simply, you need to know that information and have it readily available. Second, if the VPAA can’t answer this question in a clear and concise way, watch out — it usually means that the process is byzantine in its complexity, or there is no process to speak of (just a decision based on whether the VPAA, or whoever, likes you or not), or else the VPAA doesn’t know what s/he is doing. Red flags either way. A promotion and tenure process that, for whatever reason, is not well-understood by the major players in the process is not one you want to enter into.

2. Who gives input about me as I go through the tenure process? Ideally, a promotion and tenure process uses a multiplicity of viewpoints from several stakeholders in your tenure process. Having more sources, and sources from several different areas of your professional life, will create a more balanced and believable review when it’s time. By contrast, if the only people who review you are the Dean and your department chair — or even just the Dean — then the likelihood of a stilted review is greater. A healthy P&T process includes regular reviews in which more than just a couple of the stakeholders in the process get their say, and you get to hear what they say.

3. How are tenure decisions actually made? Importantly, you want to determine who makes the decision and what information that person (or those people) use in making it. Does the VPAA make the decision unilaterally, or is it done in concert with the president or the P&T committee, or what? And is the decision based on the portfolio provided by the faculty member, or is there some other means of arriving at the decision? Here again is a place where a less-than-clear answer, or 2-3 contradictory answers, to this question will reveal some (rather disturbing) information.

4. How does the promotion and tenure process fit into the overall picture of professional development? Having worked so closely with promotion and tenure cases, I’ve come to believe that tenure is not an isolated event but ought to fit into a larger fabric of professional growth. Tenure shouldn’t be an isolated event used as a weeding-out process or as an initiation into an old-boy’s club. Tenure instead ought to reward and pronounce professional excellence, and therefore the tenure process ought to serve as a means of attaining that excellence through structured, evidence-based reviews and meaningful feedback from stakeholders. In other words, faculty ought to get more out of tenure than just tenure itself. If it looks at a school like the tenure process is just a game which you either win or lose, rather than a means of becoming an outstanding professional, then that school’s process has issues.

As you’re looking for jobs or finding your way in the job you have, ask these questions. Schools at which they’re happy to answer those questions and can do so in a clear and sensible way are usually just the kind of places where you’d like to get tenured.

• Walking Randomly has an interesting discovery about the Fibonacci sequence and linear algebra.
• The Productive Student offers up some advice on how to be a leader and conduct killer team sessions. It’s good stuff not only for students who are doing collaborative work but also for anybody who goes to meetings. Are there people who don’t have to go to meetings?
• InsideHigherEd reports on an interesting setup to attract Chinese students to study in the US — the 1+2+1 degree, which involves one year in China, two in the US, and then the final year back in China. (Unfortuately, as the article notes, you can’t Google “1+2+1″ because all you get is “4″.)
• Also at IHE and a lot of other places, Rice University is now using an open textbook for its elementary statistics course which is not only free but open for rearrangement and adaptation by any user. A shot across the bow of traditional textbook companies?
• Study Hacks offers advice to students on cutting out the single biggest source of stress (according to them) — the killer course load. There’s something to be said for having an unbalanced course schedule — I found grad school to be easier in some ways than college because I was only taking math courses — but I do remember the worst semester I ever had as an undergrad had me taking three senior-level math courses… plus German, orchestra, and concert choir, with a 20-hour work week at a donut shop to boot. Balance is important.
• Reasonable Deviations writes about a hack of the Boston subway system by three MIT students (for what appear to be purely academic purposes). Predictably, the subway authorities have sought legal action against the students. They ought instead to be thanking them, or hiring them outright, for pointing out a security flaw that eventually could have cost the company millions.
• Java is the most popular programming language in the world, but some are saying that using Java as the language of choice in intro programming courses (as is currently done, for example, in the standard AP Computer Science courses) is hurting students in the long run. To me, this article raises the question of just what computer programming is these days.
• A new Zogby poll is indicating that online university programs (meaning, it seems, online programs offered by existing brick-and-mortar universities as opposed to online universities) are rapidly gaining mainstream acceptance, despite the perception (possibly justified) that they offer less academic rigor than traditional university programming. Unfortunately you have to drill down into the Chronicle article mentioned at the above link to discover that the Zogby poll was administered online! So much for unbiased sampling. But at any rate, the trend seems to be limited mainly to older adults who are looking for college coursework, which makes sense. I think if you restricted the polling to a traditional college population — for example, high school seniors who are looking at colleges to attend — I don’t think you’d see nearly as much of a trend toward online programming.

When you’re teaching a class and students are having trouble understanding the textbook, usually the responsible thing to do is provide them with some form of clarification in the form of a handout or some web links to additional resources. But apparently that’s a firing offense if you’re an adjunct faculty at Indiana’s Ivy Tech Community College:

Pejman Norasteh — like many adjuncts — didn’t have much control over the material he was supposed to cover [in his statistics class]. But students started to send him e-mail saying that the textbook was unclear. One student said he was getting “depressed” and giving up when he didn’t understand the required assignments. Another student wrote: “As usual, our textbook does a poor job of explaining concepts. I am adding this chapter to my list of examples of how poor our book is….”

In response to the e-mail messages and personal requests, Norasteh started handing out supplementary materials to cover the same subject matter as the textbook, but with his own explanations. While the students who complained were happy, some others were not. They sent e-mail messages to the division chair saying that they were being asked to do extra work on top of the syllabus because the supplementary materials were not mentioned on the syllabus as required reading. That of course was true, since Norasteh didn’t start the course thinking he would add to the reading beyond the textbook.

At that point, Norasteh received an e-mail from Mark Magnuson, division chair for liberal arts and sciences, and general education at the campus. Magnuson wrote that it was clear to him that “you are not using or following the syllabus or textbook,” adding that “all instructors, adjuncts and full-time, are required to use the syllabus and textbook in each course to meet the statewide agreed upon course objectives. Individual instructors do not have the option of straying from the syllabus and/or textbook.”

Ultimately, Noratesh was not kept on at the college. Never mind the fact that Noratesh was not “straying” from the textbook but merely doing his job as an educator to clarify the textbook and maximize the students’ learning experience.

There are actually two appalling things about this story. Perhaps foremost is the fact that Noratesh lost his job because he was doing his job, which is to teach students and give them the best learning experience possible. Apparently, according to Ivy Tech — which here in Indiana serves mainly as a transfer institution where students take courses and then transfer the credits to four-year colleges — the need for consistency in coursework trumps the need for clear exposition of the course content, which might (and frequently does) involve the instructor using his or her best judgment and creating materials of his or her own to supplement the standard materials. What’s more important here, Ivy Tech?

The other appalling thing is the reaction of those students who got upset because they were “having to to extra work”. God forbid that you should have to work harder than the absolute minimum to understand the course content — even if the absolute minimum, which involves using an impenetrable textbook, gets you nowhere. Will these same students be raising the same objections on their jobs after college if their bosses give them “extra work” to do or if they have to do “extra work” to make their clients happier? Shame on that attitude.

Final note for full disclosure: Jeff Fanter, Ivy Tech’s communications director who is mentioned in the original article, happens to be my next-door neighbor. He’s a good guy.

UPDATE Monday, July 7: This blog post was picked up by the student newspaper at the University of Toledo. I welcome all the readers who might be visiting CO9s from that newspaper article. Unfortunately, despite my requests and the reporter’s assurance to the contrary, the newspaper article contains the name of my employer and the rank which I hold at my college and identifies me not as the blogger at Casting Out Nines but as a professor at my college. I want to reiterate: Casting Out Nines is a private blog which is in no way affiliated with my employer. I do not speak for my employer on anything here, and my opinions are my own. The fact that my rank and affiliation were “outed” at the Toledo article was the fault of the editors there and was against my wishes. I have submitted an email of protest to the reporter and the paper about this in which I ask for my rank and affiliation to be removed from the online version of the article, and from the print version if possible.

…and I had a Dean working under me that was highly unpopular and received a no-confidence vote from the faculty, I’d find that situation difficult to deal with. But I don’t think I’d handle it like they did at the University of Toledo:

In an April 27 e-mail, for instance, President Lloyd Jacobs indicated that he would be open to getting rid of the embattled dean if he didn’t think that doing so would validate faculty critics.

“For several days I thought the best thing to do was to throw [Lee] under the bus and get on with our agenda,” Jacobs wrote to Rosemary Haggett, the university’s provost. “Maybe thats [sic] still the best thing – input please …

“However, we probably can’t do that because we can’t reward the bad behavior that the [Arts and Sciences] folk have displayed, I think.”

Sounds like Pres. Jacobs not only needs to work on his people skills, but he and the Provost also forgot the First Law of Email, which states that whatever you put into an email will become public information at the worst possible moment.  Administrators everywhere: whatever it is you really want to say about somebody in an email, don’t.

The same lesson about people skills could be learned by the UT faculty who put up the Arts & Sciences Council blog. I’ve never seen a semi-official outlet of a public university take such an publicly antagonistic stance towards administration, and it’s shockingly unprofessional. Faculty may have a legitimate bone to pick with administrators — all faculty do, and it’s just a question of how frequently — but putting up a blog to publicly vilify your president can’t be the best possible way to deal with it.

Makes me glad I don’t work there.

Martin Weller of the UK’s Open University notes in this blog posting that there is an emerging cultural conflict between the world of higher education and the world of Web 2.0:

[T]he challenge is this – when learners have been accustomed to very facilitative, usable, personalisable and adaptive tools both for learning and socialising, why will they accept standardised, unintuitive, clumsy and out of date tools in formal education they are paying for? It won’t be a dramatic revolution (students accept lower physical accommodation standards when they leave home for university after all), but instead there will be a quiet migration. The monolithic LMSs will be deserted, digital tumbleweed blowing down their forums. Students will abandon these in favour of their tools, the back channel will grow and it will be constituted from content and communication technologies that don’t require a training course to understand and that come with a ready made community.

It’s difficult to say whether how accurate this is, given that students’ knowledge of, and ability to use, those tools is questionable at best. But I think Weller is right that students — faculty, too — are increasingly aware of and irritated by the clumsiness and inflexibility of the tech tools that higher education currently uses. It wouldn’t bother me at all if the Angels and Blackboards of the world were left behind in favor of simpler, more decentralized tools that can evolve throughout a semester according to the needs and capabilities of the members of a class. (This adaptability is a real strength of using a wiki as a course management system, as I am finding out right now in my summer calculus course. More on that later.)

Universities and colleges do seem to face a twofold mandate from students: not only to get in the game regarding technology in the first place, but also to do so in a way that keeps things simple and flexible and student-centered. That can be a tall order for higher ed, which is used to doing things in a highly top-down kind of way.

Fascinating story in InsideHigherEd this morning about graduation day at the University of Alaska’s Chukchi campus, located in Kotzebue, Alaska — 33 miles above the Arctic Circle.

Today, at commencement, it is a sunny and crisp 33 degrees. Younger residents don T-shirts and shorts.

The college, in Kotzebue, a settlement of 3,000 people, clings stubbornly to a gravel outcrop on the edge of the Chukchi Sea, where flat snow-covered tundra meets icy waters. Kotzebue is accessible by boat or air during three summer months; and by air, snow machine and sled in the winter. Residents, students, and faculty live peacefully without ordinary facilities such as a dry cleaner, saloons, discos, or a car dealership. There are more snow machines and dogs than cars in Kotzebue. The town includes an airstrip for bush pilots. People headed to the landfill must pause for incoming and outgoing planes the way most students in America pause at a stop sign, looking for approaching vehicles. An itinerant hairdresser visits once each month and folks desiring a haircut schedule appointments. Only in late June and July are seagoing barges able to deliver gasoline. [...]

On the graduation platform, as caribou meander outside, each graduate tells a story, each becoming a commencement speaker. Some depict amazing journeys through time and distance. Words are also spoken by students born into a U.S. territory, prior to Alaska statehood in 1959. There are palpable signs of relief and joy about obtaining degrees, even as the changing physical environment forebodes a warning more immediate than the tight job market.

Go read the whole thing.

Having been on the Promotion and Tenure Committee now for two years, and having the job of reading reams of course evaluations for not only myself but many of my colleagues to determine how good a job (or not) they are doing at teaching, I have a new appreciation for just how bad of an evaluative instrument the typical student course evaluation really is. I say let’s ditch the whole system and start over.

I suppose I should elaborate. The whole point of any kind of evaluation on anybody is to gather information. And I think of information the way Claude Shannon did, i.e. information is that which reduces uncertainty. Alice does an evaluation of Bob for some official purpose because the people in charge do not themselves have a clear idea of what Bob is doing, and it would be a little biased to have Bob evaluate himself, so Alice goes in to provide some kind of substantive information that clears up the picture and reduces the uncertainty of the people in charge. Maybe it’s not a single Alice but a whole roomful of Alices, all of whom have been taking a course from Bob for the last 9-10 weeks. With all that information, you might have some outliers in the positive end (“He’s great!”) or the negative end (“He’s awful!”) but on the average you should get a pattern of information that provides a little more certainty as to the kind of teacher Bob really is.

Except most of the time, you don’t get the kind of information you want, or for that matter any kind of information at all. There are all kinds of problems with the evaluation form itself most of the time. The questions that ask students to give a numerical response are often ill-posed, inappropriate for students to be answering, or simply absurd. Examples:

• Ill-posed: “The professor handed out a syllabus on the first day of class.” This (or pretty close to it) is a question on our evaluation forms, and students are asked to give an answer on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). But this is obviously a binary question — either I gave the syllabus out on the first day of class or I didn’t. You don’t “strongly agree”. Or what if I don’t hand out a paper copy but rather post it to our course web site and show students where it is? This question is kind of innocuous, so the fact that it yields no useful information due to its ill-posed nature is OK in some ways because you can just ignore it if you’re the prof or the P&T committee. But if we’re ignoring it, why is it on there in the first place?
• Inappropriate: “The professor’s teaching methods are appropriate for this class.” Another item off our evaluation form, and I have a hard time believing most students have any idea what’s an “appropriate” teaching method or not, unless they are junior or senior education majors who have done some crossover thinking about what high school teaching techniques work for the college classroom (and what teaching techniques are ineffective in K-12 but still effective in college). If I were a student, I’d interpret “appropriate” to mean “amenable to my lifestyle”, which is not what the question has in mind at all. So again, you might get a strong pattern of data from a question like this, but it actually increases uncertainty rather than decreases it. If a prof gets evaluated really badly on an item like that, does it mean that his teaching methods are really inappropriate, or that they are but students don’t care for it? We don’t know. More uncertainty.
• Absurd: I could go on and on. I’ll mention my favorite, which was mercifully removed from our course evaluations some years ago: “My instructor senses when some students are not understanding.” Pardon me? Sensing? I’m not a frickin’ Betazoid, folks.

Written comments are a little better but not by much. You get some very useful written comments sometimes, but you also get very many comments that are way out of context or simply unintelligible. A student may have gotten a test back with a bad grade the day of the evaluation — possibly even in another person’s class — and walk in with a chip on his shoulder and selectively ignore a semester’s worth of hard, quality work on the professor’s part just to make a point on the evaluation. The professor gets this and wonders who this person is and what class they thought they were evaluating. The P&T committee reads this and wonders what the deal was, and there are lots of questions about what really happened and what was really going on — again, the uncertainty level is raised, not lowered.

In the worst cases, students will create a meme that continues throughout all the comments on the evaluations for a single class. It’s easy to spot because it’s as if the students were copying down the same slogan onto different evaluation forms. “The professor thinks this is the only class we are taking” is one you see, verbatim, multiple times on the same evaluation — a sure sign that students have decided to group-think rather than honestly give their reasoned assessment of the course in light of everything that has taken place. This is just as bad when the meme is positive as it is when the meme is negative. When students, many of whom have been studiously avoiding being honest with the professor about their difficulties with the course or coming to office hours to talk about things, get together and adopt a slogan rather than give their own honest opinions, it raises rather than reduces uncertainty for the professor and the P&T people.

So like I said, I advocate a wholesale, unilateral rejection of the student evaluation system as we know it. There’s no point in holding fast to an information-gathering system that actually requires more information to interpret the results of the system than the system itself generates.

I do think students need to have a voice in evaluating their professors, so I wouldn’t recommend simply not having student evaluations in any form. But my ideal form sounds a little like what I used to do when I worked for the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University. My job was to go do a “small group analysis” (SGA) for TA’s in different departments. We’d have the TA end class 20 minutes early, and then I would go in and lead a discussion among the students where they had to voice, in person and out loud, their thoughts on a series of well-designed questions about the TA’s teaching. (I’ll try to go find a copy of the questions I used.) I took notes and directed traffic. The SGA’s were great because the students who had issues which were merely personal issues disguised as real pedagogical problems were often shouted down by other students who felt those issues were as ridiculous as they sounded. For example, a student would complain that homework wasn’t returned fast enough. “What are you talking about? He hands them back within four days, and anyhow you don’t even come to class but once a week, so what do you know?” the others would say. I saw exchanges like this, usually less pejorative but always very revealing, almost every time I did an SGA.

That’s information — a comment arises from one student and is put into context by another, and it all appears on one set of notes that the TA gets. And it takes no more time from class than the usual evaluation session. (At Vandy, students did traditional course evaluations too.) You have to hire and pay for people to run the SGA’s, but personally, I’d do it for free at my current job if I knew that I’d be getting a more sane and informative evaluation process out of it.

Jackie asked a series of good questions about the textbook-free modern algebra course and some of the student outcomes I was seeing in it. I tried to respond to those in the comments, but things started to get lengthy, so instead I will get to them here.

Do you think the results are only a result of a textbook free course?

To repeat what I said in the comments: I think the positives in the course come not so much from the fact that we didn’t have a textbook, but more from the fact that the course was oriented toward solving problems rather than covering material. There was a small core of material that we had to cover, since the seniors were getting tested on it, but mostly we spent our time in class presenting, dissecting, and discussing problems. We didn’t cover as much as I would have liked, but this is a price I decided to pay at the outset.

Most traditional textbooks don’t lend themselves well to this kind of class design. The ratio of text to problems in a typical textbook is probably something like 5:1 — a lot higher than that in some books. When you have a book in the course, it almost forces itself into the center of the class universe and everything tends to revolve around it, and take on its flavor. When the book spends most, almost all, of its pages on stuff for students to read rather than on problems for students to solve, then I guess it’s possible to have a problem-solving oriented class, but you’re going to be swimming upstream the whole way.

It works better, I think, to have no central book — and instead, provide problems via the course notes with just enough information to solve the problems. And if the students need more information, make it an assignment for library research or web queries.

Were there any negative outcomes? Anything you didn’t like as a result of choosing to structure the course in this manner?

There are some important algebra topics, in rings and particularly in fields, that are not going to get the time they really deserve. And I had to cut short or cut out some topics in group theory that are normally standard fare. At least, I see this as a negative; whether it really makes a difference in the long run is yet to be determined.

The way I select students to do course tasks in class basically involves randomly ordering the students and having them attempt the problems one after the other. It seemed like several times, students who had not presented much ended up first on the list on the days they didn’t have something and last on the list on the days they did. Call it bad luck or Murphy’s Law or what-have-you; but I didn’t like how there was no mechanism for making sure the lower-scoring students got more chances to work.

Some students in the class still struggle with basic problem-solving skills and writing proofs. I think they have enough education to carry out successful problem-solving on proofs most of the time. But not having me lecture has meant that they don’t get to see professionally put-together proofs very often unless they go do some reading.

And I think that this course structure caused stress and even ill will among the students who were not used to having so much personal responsibility in their college work. I think that’s an unintended consequence of implementing a course design that is basically sound; I regret that it happened, and I’d like students to have a more uniformly positive experience in the class, but I’m not going to change the basic course design.

Would you do this again?

You bet, although I believe this way of running the class works in some situations and wouldn’t work in others. I thought about running my differential equations class next semester like this, but that course is so focused on methods that a blind application of this course structure onto that course doesn’t seem appropriate. Maybe I’ll come up with some variant that works.

What would you keep the same? What would you change?

I would definitely keep my method for assigning problems to students, my rubric for grading course tasks, and just the overall procedure for running the class sessions that I used. And I’d keep the feature where students get to choose the weights on the various assessments.

I’d do a little more with the course wiki. Right now students are expected to write up their solutions to course note tasks on the wiki, but there is no point value in doing so nor a penalty for not doing so. The exams are open-wiki, though, so there is some incentive for writing results up well. But I think I would make the posting of solutions mandatory and enforce the rule.

I’d also try to have a complete set of notes before the course began. I have been writing things as I go, and it’s led to some snafus I could have avoided.

I might try writing the course notes so that rings and fields come first.

I’d seriously consider having proof techniques be offered as the subject of weekly help sessions or additional course work. Some students are still struggling with basic problem-solving techniques, and they really need more help than what they are asking for.

That’s that for the questions. Any more?

We’re on Fall Break right now and the living is easy — if you count being a temporary stay-at-home dad with two girls under 4 “easy”. So in lieu of real content for the time being, here are some links for you.

• At Ars Technica’s Apple section, Jeff Smykil is wondering what the deal is with the shrinking size of Apple’s educational discounts. I’ve noticed this phenomenon too. They don’t offer discounts on iPods any more, and the discount for the forthcoming OS X Leopard is just $13 for the single-user license. Even Amazon.com is offering it for less.That’s a far cry from when I bought my iPod and Mac mini a couple of years ago, when I seem to remember getting a discount of something like 15%. (I should note that TUAW is reporting that college bookstores will be selling Leopard for around $69, and that Apple is moving away from offering educational discounts online, where it’s hard for a person to identify themselves as a bona fide member of an educational community. Great, but what if your bookstore doesn’t sell Apple stuff and the closest Apple store is 90 minutes away?)
• Referring to the recent incident at Columbia University where a noose was found attached to the office door of a faculty member, John McWhorter has suggestion for how to handle incidents like this: Ignore them. (This was pretty much my approach to handling class on the morning of September 11, 2001, too.)
• Homeschool2.0 gives us the heads-up and the trailer for a new documentary called Two Million Minutes. Sounds like an interesting premise and project; I hope it’s not too depressing for us Americans.
• Here’s an Australian wondering whether college is suited for everyone and whether the university system wouldn’t do better with a lot less students.
• By contrast, here’s an op-ed in USA Today suggesting that the Federal government should step in and force universities to spend a certain percentage of their endowments on tuition reduction so that more people can go to college. And here’s a response to that op-ed. I think the writer of the op-ed should listen to the guy from Australia.

Finally, not a link but a long-range announcement: I’ll be attending the International Conference on Technology in Collegiate Mathematics in March 2008. I’ll be submitting a talk on wikis in upper-level mathematics major courses and generally soaking up anything I can learn. Also soaking up that wonderful San Antonio atmosphere (and food). If you’re planning on going, let me know and maybe we can have a blogger meet-up.