Archive for January, 2007
Build your campus in 3D competition
“Today the Build Your Campus in 3D Competition begins. This spring, you and your (presumably equally artistic) friends can honor your campus turf as you hone your 3D design skills just by modeling your school’s campus buildings in Google SketchUp, geo-reference them in Google Earth, and submit them through the competition website to earn lasting online glory. And the winners get a visit to Google, all expenses paid.
You’re eligible if you’re a higher education student in the U. S. or Canada. You can team up with other students, or take the project on yourself. (To do the best work possible, we suggest you have a faculty advisor.) The deadline for entries is June 1, and the winning entries will be posted to the 3D Warehouse by July 10.”
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...
Reduce your credit card debt
Every semester credit card companies arrive on campus to entice students with new credit cards and t-shirts, frisbees, stress balls and such. But that t-shirt ain’t free. High interest rates and fees are enough to pay for all that chachka and then some. If you are juggling multiple credit cards, this debt calculator helps you to reduce your debt load by showing you in what specific order to pay off your debt. Here is a similar PC software download called CreditCardMath that purports to do the same and more. Debtinator , Burn and Spendthrift are MAC applications with a similar function. Online lender, Prosper, may help to secure you a loan at a lower interest rate. Debt to Income calculates your debt/income ratio, Fundable can help you describe a project and collect funds online, and Snowball Calculator helps you to calculate the true cost of a loan. Click NYT prosper article for the New York Times opinion. Also, why not try one of these free personal finance management software from the Consumerist or iCompta for the MAC. Click debt advise to get more advise on how to avoid debt. Watch “Maxed Out” full documentary on how credit cards impose modern slavery on people.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...
Tutortrac Review
As you might guess, Tutortrac has many advantages over manually collecting student data. These benefits can be encapsulated into the fact that collecting and analyzing information is now less onerous. Tutortrac even collects more specific information than did the in-house program that we commissioned specifically for us. I haven’t done an extensive comparison but it seems that Tutortrac even has a better scheduling interface than does Accutrack. If you’re running a tutoring center, these two programs are the only viable options other than to build your own. This is an unfortunate situation as such a tiny market does not drive innovation nor punish mediocrity.
We use Tutortrac to create individual and group tutoring sessions. The individual appointment function works fine. The group appointment function requires compromises that goes against sound pedagogy and commonsense. I’ll explain by first describing our course code, XX-XXX-XXX-XX. The first two numbers is the school. The second three numbers is the subject. The next three numbers is the course and the last two numbers is the section. If we use this course code and a wildcard symbol “@” specific to Tutortrac, we can assign a subject to an individual or group session, thereby allowing certain students to sign up to a session while disallowing others from doing so.
For example, we can assign 21@ to a group session which means that students from school 21 taking any course can sign up for a session with a tutor who has been assigned that specialty. Of course, this would not be a workable assignment as we’ve cast our net too wide, so let’s continue. We can add a subject to the assignment 21_640@ meaning that students from school 21 taking a math course can sign up for a session. This also is unworkable as our net is still too wide. To continue, we can assign 21_640_119@ to a session, effectively excluding all students excepting those from school 21 taking Basic Calculus. We could continue by adding the section number, effectively limiting the session to students taking a specific course. This process of assigning subjects to groups seems to work well in principle but quickly breaks down in practice.
The problem arises when we realized that before we began using Tutortrac we would assign students in ways that the above procedure doesn’t allow. Several of our courses don’t command enough traffic to justify hiring a tutor for just that course, so to compensate we create groups of similar enough courses. Moreover, we also combine like courses because we believe students benefit from engaging with their peers who are studying similar material, for instance, Basic Calculus and Calculus I. But because Tutortrac allows sign-ups based upon only one course code per session, assigning groups in this way is no longer possible.
Effectively, courses that are essentially the same except for some differences in course code cannot be assigned to a single group. For instance, two students taking Basic Calculus one from our undergraduate college and the other from our adult college cannot be assigned to the same group session because their courses have a different school codes. To compensate, Tutortrac allows for two special classes of subjects designated by “@” and “*” that aren’t very feasible themselves. The best available solution for us is to assign “@” to most group tutoring sessions, which limits the session to only and all subjects in which the tutor specializes. If a tutor specializes in wildly disparate subjects then we either have to accommodate ourselves to strange combinations of subjects or remove some of a tutor’s specialties, a decision which has important drawbacks.
Our inability to assign courses in the manner that we decide affects us in important ways. We cannot assign tutors as efficiently as we have done in the past and students cannot be grouped based on sound educational principles and practices. Students notice these things. Here’s an example of a comment that we collected last semester, “It is better if all Basic Calc was together, all Calc I is together and Calc II, because that way students can help one another as well as tutor and you will get help the whole session.” Not only does this make sense, it makes commonsense. Our tutors also feel that this assignment issue makes their jobs more difficult.
To be fair, RedRock Software has made several requested modifications to the program. This one seems to require more effort than they are willing to commit so they have determined that this is not on the shortlist of things they wish to do at this time.
This decision is a shame as assigning students to groups is so fundamental to the work of a learning center that this ability should have been among the essential features of version 1.0 rather than a possible add-on to be completed some time in the future…maybe.
This interview with Craigslist founder Craig Newmark describes the relationship between the Craigslist site and its users. I’ll leave you to determine its relevance to this post. Via Mark Evans Blog.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...
Ramen Noodles inventer dies
Those ubiquitous noodle packets in dorm rooms everywhere have an illustrious history. They were developed to stem hunger in Japan in the wake of World War II deprivation. Click noodles to read more about the inventor.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...
