"Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants. All told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor's degree."

"Assessing student learning outcomes relative to a valid and reliable standard that is academically-sound and employer-relevant presents a challenge to the scholarship of teaching and learning. In this paper, readers are guided through a method for collaboratively developing and validating a rubric that integrates baseline data collected from academics and professionals. The method addresses two additional goals: (1) to formulate and test a rubric as a teaching and learning protocol for a multi-section course taught by various instructors; and (2) to assure that students' learning outcomes are consistently assessed against the rubric regardless of teacher or section. Steps in the process include formulating the rubric, collecting data, and sequentially analyzing the techniques used to validate the rubric and to insure precision in grading papers in multiple sections of a course."

"One purpose of this article is to provide clear definitions of the terms "validity" and "reliability" and illustrate these definitions through examples. A second purpose is to clarify how these issues may be addressed in the development of scoring rubrics."

"The three general categories for computing interrater reliability introduced and described in this paper are: 1) consensus estimates, 2) consistency estimates, and 3) measurement estimates. The assumptions, interpretation, advantages, and disadvantages of estimates from each of these three categories are discussed, along with several popular methods of computing interrater reliability coefficients that fall under the umbrella of consensus, consistency, and measurement estimates. Researchers and practitioners should be aware that different approaches to estimating interrater reliability carry with them different implications for how ratings across multiple judges should be summarized, which may impact the validity of subsequent study results."

Even though twitter is on the headline once again, the important message from the article is not about twitter... but rather, the way in which feedback is being solicited, or collected. Feedback is best when provided as close to the moment of performance as possible, as shown in studies involving everyone from medical students to athletes. But lengthy feedback forms discourage frequent and immediate responses. Enabling employees to solicit feedback in short, immediate bursts may actually be more effective than performance reviews or lengthy feedback systems, since excessive feedback can be overwhelming and hinder performance.

"In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we've built the Google Dashboard. Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings. "

But when it came to defining sets of common learning outcomes for specific degree programs -- Transparency by Design's most distinguishing characteristic -- commonality was hard to come by. Questions to apply to any institution could be: 1) For any given program, what specific student learning outcomes are graduates expected to demonstrate? 2) By what standards and measurements are students being evaluated? 3) How well have graduating students done relative to these expectations? Comparability of results (the 3rd question) depends on transparency of goals and expectations (the 1st question) and transparency of measures (the 2nd question).

Officials at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit in San Francisco that governs Wikipedia, say that within weeks, the English-language Wikipedia will begin imposing a layer of editorial review on articles about living people. The change is part of a growing realization on the part of Wikipedia's leaders that as the site grows more influential, they must transform its embrace-the-chaos culture into something more mature and dependable.

"People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them." "We no longer search for the news, the news finds us... "

This is a very easy way to create a screencast and have it hosted, or twitted.

The first 12 minutes of the webcast is worth watching. He opened up with a story of the investigation of cholera outbreak during Victorian era in London, and brought that into how it related to student success. He then summarized what the key methods of measurement were, and some lessons Learned: An "interdisciplinary" led to unconventional, yet innovative methods of investigation. The researchers relied on multiple forms of measurement to come to their conclusion. The visualization of their data was important to proving their case to others.

I believe it's a case of the students wanting to challenge the whole notion of "We want to stop you from doing something wrong, and so we're going to (do something wrong ourselves, and ...) steal your work and the work of others to build a hugely profitable business acting as the plagiarism police."

PEIR, the Personal Environmental Impact Report, is a new kind of online tool that allows you to use your mobile phone to explore and share how you impact the environment and how the environment impacts you.

A graph of Amazon's acquisitions and investments since 1998.

Learn more about how Google Books works and the recent settlement agreement between Google and a broad class of authors and publishers.