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A couple of weeks ago, Barb and I were awarded Georgia Tech’s Service Award for our work with Georgia Computes!. At the same awards ceremony, across the table, was David Collard of Chemistry who was getting the Professional education award.  He’s been part of an effort (described below) called cCWCS which teaches chemistry faculty how to teach better — and the program has taught over a thousand faculty!

A thousand faculty?!?  I’ve blogged about how hard it is to get CS faculty to come to our workshops, either Media Computation or Georgia Computes.  I’ve talked to other folks who offer workshops to CS faculty, and they say that they have to invite high school teachers, too, or they won’t have enough people to run the workshop.  Why do so many Chemistry professors show up, when we struggle to get CS professors to show up at teaching workshops?

Barb had an interesting insight: Maybe it’s because Chemistry is taught to everyone.  When you teach something to everyone, you have to teach…

Computing Education Blog

Sally Jackson

Rather than report to the state university system’s office instead of her own campus provost, the CIO of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has resigned. The issue was concern that the new structure would lead to better technology for administrators but worse service for academics, reports The News-Gazette.

“What’s important here is that the reporting line to the academic leadership has been broken,” Ms. Jackson told the local newspaper. “Once you isolate authority in a vertical silo, eventually academic influence disappears and technical values take over.”

The Illinois system has just announced that Ms. Jackson, as well as the CIO’s on the Chicago and Springfield campuses, would report to a new “executive CIO” in the system office. That is Michael Hites, associate vice president for administrative information-technology services, who in turn reports to the chief financial officer. Ms. Jackson had previously reported to the provost at…

Wired Campus

I’m working with Amy Bruckman and Klara Benda on a paper describing the results of a study that Klara did of students taking on-line CS courses.  Klara points out in her review of the literature that most retention/attrition models focus on psychological factors, e.g., having appropriate background knowledge, motivation, and metacognitive skills like planning.  But the factors that appear in empirical studies of students who drop out, especially in on-line classes, emphasize sociological factors, like changes in job and residence situations, changes in financial status, and family pressures.  That’s certainly what Klara found in her study of on-line CS students, and those same issues are echoed in this MSU study.

Depression, a loss of financial aid, increased tuition, unexpected bad grades and roommate conflicts are among key risk factors that lead college students to drop out, according to a study led by Michigan State University researchers.

Not so influential: a death in the…

Computing Education Blog

In October 2010, Robert Darnton, the historian and university librarian at Harvard, talked to Wired Campus about the possibility of building what was then being described as a National Digital Library. Since then, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, with money from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has stepped into the role of coordinating plans for what’s now being designated a Digital Public Library of America.

The planning has a public component as well: The Berkman Center has set up a wiki to which anyone can contribute. “We very much hope that this wiki will be the embodiment of a consensus-based and peer-produced approach,” the center notes on the welcome page.

The wiki lays out major topics related to the proposed DPLA project: content and scope (which includes a handy roundup of digitizing projects in the United States and abroad), governance and business models, legal and technical issues. It’s early days, but to get a sense of how the conversation’s shaping…

Wired Campus

NSF’s budget request to Congress is now out, and what it tells us about how CISE thinks about CE21 has a somewhat different emphasis than in the call for proposals which is more flexible about evaluation (e.g., “Different methods of research and/or evaluation are appropriate.”)

Evaluation is a vital part of CISE’s STEM education programs such as Computing Education for the 21st Century (CE21) which is a partnership with EHR and OCI. Each CE21 award will provide a rigorous research and/or evaluation plan designed to guide project progress and measure its impact; the plan will also include a description of the instruments/metrics that will be used. The overall CISE education portfolio will be assessed with an appropriately rigorous evaluation process.

Within the CNS Division, there’s a clear focus on BPC:

CNS supports the Computing Education for the 21st Century (CE21) program that seeks to increase computational competencies for all students, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity,…

Computing Education Blog

I’ve been asked to speak at the annual board dinner for the American Craft Council in a few weeks about the DIY movement. Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m not a fan of labels, but I am excited for the opportunity to talk with the ACC board about the needs of the next generation of crafters.

I was able to get a list of questions posed by the ACC board in advance, and I wanted to throw a few of them out to you.  After all, I’m not just speaking for myself here.  So please, share your thoughts in the comments so that I can make sure your voice is heard when I meet with the ACC board.

What can the Council do to inspire more of the DIY crafters to participate in our shows?

How do we bridge the gap between the two “groups” of fine craft and the DIY makers?

What do you think of the term DIY? Do you have an alternative?

What are the biggest artist needs in the DIY craft community?

How can ACC be valuable to the DIY artists?

Do you see yourself as part of the DIY movement or…

Crafting an MBA

Today I’m happy to share a guest post from Meredith of Smaller Box.  Meredith has a new ebook out that’s all about harnessing the power of Google Analytics.  And today, she’s sharing 3 things you must know about your online shop, and why they’re important.  Thanks, Meredith!

Conversion Source
The most important thing you can know about your online business is where your conversions come from. A conversion simply means a customer completed a desired action. The most common type of conversion we care about is making a purchase, but secondary conversions also matter. You may consider joining a mailing list, clicking your Twitter “follow” link, clicking your Facebook “like” button, etc. all conversions. Your goal is to get as many conversions as possible.

Why you should care about source:
If you know where your conversions come from, you can invest more in marketing activities that are driving them. Imagine 30% come from organic search, 40% come from banner ads and another 30% come…

Crafting an MBA

Community colleges cancel deal with online Kaplan University

This headline begins a recent article in the Los Angeles Times.  As described in the article:

The plan was intended in part to offer students at the state’s 112 community colleges a way to take courses that might have been canceled or overcrowded because of state budget cuts.

It is not surprising that this plan gets scuttled in the current charged political debate over for-profit higher education.  Nevertheless, the cancellation brings up a few important issues that should be noted.

According to the article, one of the main reasons given for the cancellation is:

because the University of California and Cal State University systems had not agreed to accept Kaplan courses for transfer credits.  Without the transfer agreements, the plan could have harmed students and the community colleges, the officials said.

It would be interesting to know why the UC and Cal State systems would not agree to accept Kaplan…

Changing Higher Education

An iPhone app designed by a team of students for a contest at the University of Missouri at Columbia has helped lead the institution to rewrite its intellectual-property policies.

Members of the student competition, hosted by the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism, had been informed that the university might assert a partial or complete claim to the products that the students were creating. That led some students to drop out, said Anthony Brown, then an undergraduate in the department of journalism.

Mr. Brown and his team, made up of fellow students Zhenhua Ma, Dan Wang, and Peng Zhuang, decided to stay in, despite their concerns. When they won the competition with an app called NearBuy, the students decided to contact the university to assert their ownership and to ask the university to waive any intent to assert ownership.

They argued that student inventions, even if fostered to some degree by faculty mentors, stood apart from the work done by…

Wired Campus