Really, actually, I just don’t care. The level at which I don’t is below the ultimate level of rest of whale feces.

Why don’t I care?

I was never any more happy with the notion of “favoriting” something with a star than I was with liking something with a thumbs-up. The forced dichotomy of simplification developed within the use of “free” social media platforms is never going to be satisfactory for everyone. There will always be implications for every action (and non-action) in such a system that are both real and assumed. @tressiemcphd has written about this, and a number of other really smart people have also said smart things about how people use and react to these things.

Somewhere in the house I have duffle bag that was issued to me in 1982 at Ft. Jackson, NC on my way to Ft. Benning, GA. On the bottom of it is painted in grey a club (as in that found in within a deck of cards) and dash at the twelve o’clock position. This was so dozens or hundreds of duffle bags stacked together could be readily identified to the units where they belonged. This goes back to World War II and, if you pay attention, you can see it in various Hollywood movies where the 101st Infantry is depicted, such as those about the Battle of the Bulge.

I mention this because it because most of life there have been symbols associated with my life that were not of my choosing. “Tod” is a good example of this. After all, a name is just a symbol constructed with predetermined components. Any icon, simple or complex, is really no different. Whatever values, images, understanding of Tod that exists is based on the collections of my actions not the symbols used to describe those actions. I know that any symbols used have broader contextual meanings and people will apply their own meanings and such, but that will always happen, regardless of symbology, more importantly it will happen regardless of what I think those symbols mean.

In other words, haters gonna hate, hearters gonna heart.

If you are concerned that using the heart is going to cause someone to think that you love someone’s tweet or action, rest assured that anyone who does think that probably thinks they can love a refrigerator and is thus of no consequence.

The heart as an icon has never meant much to me. It has been so overused to the point of “I kind of have a pretense of affection for this thing/person.” Twitter’s use of the heart just drives it into more meaningless to the point that Common Core exams will simply use the heart as a bubble to fill.

Of course, what’s really going on is Twitter wants to make Twitter less hateful. They think by forcing people to use hearts there will be less hate spewed. One really can’t love a hateful tweet…well, unless of course you don’t actually think it is hateful.  And so Twitter is getting hate tweets from users about the heart. I think there is a word for that.

So, I am writing an app. It doesn’t do much that’s useful. It simply allows everyone you interact with to give you a five-star rating. The ratings will get published to the cloud and I have been assured everyone will be given a record, so no one will escape the rating.

All of this is quite simple. The hard part is determining how many categories are needed to meaningfully define human interaction. It seems to me we really only need a few – Work, play, payment, courtesy, empathy, civic engagement, service, attractiveness, and utility. I think this captures everything that matters. Unfortunately, the advisory group hired by the foundation that is funding this effort all seems to think we need much greater nuance and detail. For example, some argue for health & well-being measures while others want a measure dedicated to voting. (For some reason these people seem to think that state boards of election will willingly update the ratings of their citizens.)

All that aside, I think this is app is a game-changer. The individual ratings will simplify things dramatically for employers, lenders, and even dating sites. Just imagine, simplified five-star ratings for everyone. No need to worry about whether a potential mate is good enough, their rating will tell you that.

“Folsom Prison Blues” is one of those near-perfect songs. More folk/Americana than country.

I hear the train a comin’
It’s rolling round the bend
And I ain’t seen the sunshine since I don’t know when,
I’m stuck in Folsom prison, and time keeps draggin’ on
But that train keeps a rollin’ on down to San Antone..
When I was just a baby, my mama told me. Son,
Always be a good boy, don’t ever play with guns.
But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die
When I hear that whistle blowing, I hang my head and cry..

The bass line is easily identifiable. It starts and right away you know the song. You know also the “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die” is one of most cold-blooded lyrics ever in popular music.

Today I heard the Surreal McCoys (“The top cowpunk band to ever come out of Notre Dame Law School”) and their mashup of Folsom Prison Blues and Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Lovin’.” It is a song I didn’t know I needed to hear.

And it is coooool.

Sometimes things just work. While I enjoy Jason and Scorchers covers of Lost Highways, Country Roads and Absolutely Sweet Marie, I like the blending the Zeppelin and Cash an awful lot.

But I also like the many versions of Stairway to Heaven, particularly The Geezinslaws cover which includes an inspired use of a kazoo. It is surpassed only by the Yayhoos and Dancing Queen which turns crap into something worth hearing.

Why did we never have a movie featuring Robert Preston as hucksterish university president?

We’ve got an article about the [outgoing] president of Duquesne University calling students libertine for living off-campus. You know, when the student newspaper publishes,

Dougherty made these comments as part of his address to campus faculty about the university’s financial situation. According to Dougherty and Vice President for Management and Business David Beaupre, there are 304 empty beds in campus dorms this semester. This means that only 92 percent of campus beds are occupied, compared to 98 percent in the spring.

It’s clear that you’ve got trouble. Trouble that begins with T, which rhymes with D which stands for Duquesne.

Libertine men and Scarlet women!
And Rag-time, shameless music
That’ll grab your son, your daughter
With the arms of a jungle animal instinct!
Mass-steria!
Friends, the idle brain is the devil’s playground!

I keep wondering about the campus housing scam when I look at the numbers. For example, DU reports $11,084 annual cost for room & board. This reader comment on the student paper editorial highlights cost issues:

Half of a Brottier room: Approximately $800/month.
Private room in a house within walking distance from Brottier: $320/month.
This is the only argument necessary.

To be fair, DU has to collect money to cover things like security, maintenance, acquisition cost of the facility, all that stuff. Further, walking away from on-campus housing is probably not a viable choice, and a certain amount of research on traditional populations of students suggests living on-campus is a good thing. On the other hand, if I were to think like a bureaucrat, I might think, “Geez, what has he stepped in now. Has he just claimed that students living on campus do not drink or have sex or whatever? That somehow DU controls that? Does DU now have an assumption of liability for student behavior it previoualy did not?'”

With an average Net Price for DU’s poorest students of over $17,000, the president might want to re-think his accusations and accept the cost arguments at face value. Especially when the average student is now borrowing $10,000/year, with median graduate debt of $27,000 a couple years ago, excluding PLUS and private loans.

But…

..you know they showed you statue, told you to pray
Built you a temple and locked you away
Aw, but they never told you the price that you pay
Only the good die young

Humans are funny creatures. Their funniest aspect is ego. Too often they seem to think that their awareness of a thing defines its very newness. Just as Columbus “discovered” North America, despite the fact not only it was never lost or undiscovered as it was already peopled, modern Hus act as if the length of their professional career represents all the known work of a field.

Just because you have not seen the work doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an extensive history.

Just because you and others did not develop a need for something until recently, doesn’t mean it hasn’t been done.

I understand that is a lot of work and effort to actually do research beyond the first three pages of Google results. I get that. Even a profession as young as the one I am in, a mere 50-plus years, has a fairly rich history of work and development. And much of that work has not been published in the journals. Why? Because very few people thought it necessary at the time. They might have thought a new thing was cool or interesting, but it wasn’t relevant to their concerns at the time.

It often becomes relevant later.

When this happens, almost no one checks to see if this thing has been done before, if it has a history.

Often it does.

I once teased a senior colleague shortly after he received the top award in the profession, “So, does this mean you are going to write something new instead recycling the same old things?”

“Why should I? Until they read what I have written the last 40 years, why write something new?”

Yep. I get it.

And in 2015 it means to be read it has to be in the first couple of pages of a half-assed Google search.

So, get the hell of my lawn. Come back when you have done your homework.

Thoughts in response to John Warner (@Biblioracle) and some of the commenters on this piece at InsideHigherEd about Uber for higher ed.

Perhaps if the original essay had not been bracketed by these two unfortunate paragraphs:

For more than 100 years, taxicabs were the kings of the road. They set prices and buddied up with lawmakers who promised to help them keep the meters running. Then, in 2009, an app changed everything. Uber created an interface that finally put the passenger in charge of the ride, and the taxicab establishment has been in chaos ever since.

…

It sounds farfetched, but so did hailing a car from the comfort of one’s own bed just three years ago. I believe there is someone out there who is on the verge of creating a sort of UberEd, and it is almost certainly not a university president or federal lawmaker. Instead, it’s an entrepreneur who grasps the importance of putting students first who stands to start making waves in higher education.

First, I am not quite sure how Uber actually puts the passenger in charge of the ride. The passenger is still just a passenger, a rider. And, Uber’s website makes it pretty clear that it is all about the driver, not the passenger. I mean seriously, this is a top-linked page of Uber.com and it looks to me like an apex predator recruiting secondary predators to fleece the sheep. Or perhaps Barlow in ‘Salem’s Lot, the primary vampire creating lots of dependent vampires. Or your typical MLM.

The closing paragraph ignores that for most of the 100 years of taxi cabs referenced in the first paragraph, one could call (using a phone, albeit a simpler phone than a smart phone) to arrange cab service as Warner points out in his call for Uber for Lobbyists.

Given Uber’s recruiting page, I am pretty confident that I don’t want (another) entity that makes such claims to “put students first.”

Warner is “concerned that our lobbying and consulting class has run out of ideas” which may or not be true. The bigger problem, as I see it, is for whom they lobby, and why. I am not aware of any lobbyists for higher ed writ large. I am aware of some that claim to be, but in reality they lobby for member organizations who look to protect their pieces of the pie. There are also thousands of lobbyists for individual institutions that do make the occasional stand for the good of higher ed, but are generally more focused on the needs of their particular institutions, as they should be. The assembled groupies in the building at One Dupont Circle have very clearly degraded into territorial fighters (my apologies to any friends painted with this broad brush, but I forgive you) for their own interests.

I am not clear who is really lobbying and fighting for higher ed in general. (I may just be generally ignorant though.) I do have really strong ideas about who is not.

However, these are the minor problems. The truly big problem is that the Uberization (and other -ations) of education is a return to the 1970s and the “Me Generation” of the Boomers. (And if you recall, the best proposed solution to this was the “Al Franken Generation.” Sigh.) Uberization is all about me, my needs, my money, my costs, and the continued efforts of disruption to ensure that no one ever pays for anything they don’t wish to pay for. Of  course, this is myth since most folks never see how revenues and profits are spent. It continues down a path that forsakes education as a public good.

Maybe I am wrong to hold onto a belief in the public good. Perhaps we will all be better off when nearly everyone is contingent. Nobody will have to worry about stuff happening because whatever they do will only be of the moment. Pick up one passenger, drop them off, pick up another if you want. Ratings will matter for some users, but for others there will always be someone who simply needs a ride. After all, payday lenders are not the most affordable nor most pleasant experiences, but they get heavy use. We’ll always be moving on to the next thing, and everything will always be contingent because we will be the boss of everything.

We’ll be the boss when we drive.

We’ll be the boss when we ride.

We’ll be independent contractors in charge of our future.

In education, we’ll be the teachers.

We’ll be the student.

We’ll be the funders.

We’ll be the aggregator.

We’ll self-certify our competencies.

We’ll be the experts about what we need.

We’ll.., well, Me, uber alles.

The opening of the song is nearly two minutes of piano and guitar. No lyric until just about the two minute mark, at a time when pop songs on American FM were expected to be no longer than three minutes and following a simple structure of verse, chorus, bridge, hook, and refrain. At  eight minutes and 10 seconds, the song “Bat out of Hell” follows none of these conventions.

It is one of the greatest rock songs of all time.

It’s greatness lies in its power and complexity. It has nuance and depth. It can be sung with anger and triumph or it can be screamed down the highway with an unshakable sense of loss.

Cutting it down to fit FM airplay rules is a hack job.

The same is true for “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” Any trimming simply reduces the narrative, and the basic conflict. It would turn it in to pablum. Ten minutes is just about the perfect length for this song.

These songs are great and the album on which they appear “Bat out of Hell” is currently the fifth best-selling of all time, according to the Wiki-god.

Reducing them would be absurd.

At the other end of the spectrum, “Escape” aka “Escape (the pina colada song)” is much shorter. Kind of cute and maudlin and you really only the need the chorus to feel happy. The narrative exists only to justify the chorus. On the other hand, the chorus is unnecessary without the narrative.

So, let’s also look at “Hooked on a Feeling” which is just under three minutes and just as close as one can get to lyrically-based musical wallpaper. It’s a nice little song, but it is not one that washes away or recalls teenage angst.

Let’s just think about how this is like data or policy information.

“Just give me what I need to make a decision.”

“That’s what I am trying to do. You need to know these things to both make your decision, understand the risks, and more importantly, understand why you are making this decision.”

“No. I don’t have that kind of time. Neither does our audience.”

“Right, you want “Hooked on a Feeling” and I am trying to give you “Bat out of Hell.”

One of these will stand the test of time.

We are in a time when nuance and complexity seem to be rarely appreciated. Consultants shout, “Spare change! Spare Change!” and all the executives hear “Change! Change!” (credit to Scott Adams for this.) Consultants tell us fewer measures are better, simpler measures are better. We end up with a college scorecard that demands understanding, demands nuance, but little is provided.

I believe understanding comes with effort, with work. Good decision-making comes from understanding, otherwise it is luck or privilege. I am a violently cynical idealist that keeps hoping for the tide to turn, but expecting to wait a long damn time.

“And when you say Dylan, he thinks you are talking about Dylan Thomas, whoever he was.”

And he was:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

–Dylan Thomas

So, I am kind of moody about the latest BSO (Bright Shiny Object) to hit the ether this week. While I think the new report from EdTrust about Pell Graduation Rates is a good piece of work, I am again frustrated that the attention is on having a national database to play with…especially since it merely documents what some of us knew already.

Pell students tend to have lower graduation rates than the institution average and lower than non-Pell recipients.

We’ve been publishing such data since 2008, here in THE Commonwealth. Further, we have it by gender, race/ethnicity, part-time students, transfer students, and those taking remedial courses in the first year. Oh, we also do the same for all other Title IV programs and Virginia aid programs.

Of course, I am getting kind of oldish and dated. It is rare that I get excited by, let alone chase, each new BSO, even if it is a data BSO. I have more data than people are able to use. I also spend a lot of time thinking about reshaping published data, and doing so. So any new data must add value beyond what I have already. And that is a pretty high bar.

My relationship with data goes back a long ways. Long enough to explain the why my database is still relational. Data, she’s harsh mistress, but she doesn’t have to worry about me leaving her for the newest data. In fact, the older she gets, the more I care about her.

But I do get jealous that she doesn’t get the attention she deserves. Too often there is a bias for two things: national data and easy-pezy comparisons. I keep wanting the story to be along the lines of, “Very nice, you caught up with Virginia. Now what are you going to do with it? What’s your goal?”

You can read about our goals here.

I also want the occasionally story to be, “Oh, look at Virginia has done. Nice. Now what are you going to do with it?” “Well, let me tell you…..”

Dude, it is tabular. The data are tabular. Abide.

It ain’t no use in callin’ out my name, Gal
Like you never did before
And It ain’t no use in callin’ out my name, Gal
I can’t hear you anymore
I’m a-thinkin’ and a-wond’rin’ walkin’ all the way down the road
I once loved a woman,a child I’m told
I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul
Don’t think twice,it’s all right

Clarity.

A colleague sent me a link to a local blog post that took data from the College Scorecard and plotted wages against estimated median SAT. He wanted to know if we could do this.

“Can we do crap analysis, inattentive to definition and datasource, and blog about it? We could, but we won’t.”

Apart from the fact that the author of the blog post in question is kind of clueless about this type of analysis in the first place, the Scorecard has admirable lack of clarity to it. Admirable, that is, if you are trying to create confusion and noise. I know I take some heat for trying to publish too much data and text, but I need people to know what they are looking at. Understanding will eventually come with such knowledge, but almost never in its absence. The Scorecard does not do that.

If a user is like myself and understands where the data are drawn from and what that means for their scope, then the scorecard is fine. But few enough people in higher education are actually well-informed about Title IV, and fewer still have a clue about the National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS). So confusion is not a surprise. But it is irritating as it creates local brushfires to extinguish. Lord knows what our board is going to have say about it the next two days.

The College Scorecard needs next. Much more text than is currently there. Explication about what things are and are not. Recognition that some words are commonly misused and misunderstood. Such as “alumni.”

There needs to be a guide for the casual, oh-so casual user (and abuser) of data that lays out the limits in simple English. You know, “‘executive-speak.”