A review of "Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Scghools in Raleigh", by sociologist Gerald Grant. Raleigh merged its school district with suburban Wake County and integrated its schools not just by race, but by socioeconomic status. Quoting the 1966 Coleman Report: "The norms of a good school are shaped more by the children who come through the door than the dollars spent on books, buildings, laboratories, teacher salaries, or other traditional measures of school quality." Is this why "selective" colleges are more successful? How are the "norms" of WSU shaped?

David Leonhardt reports that "a list of organizations whose failures had done the most damage to the American economy in recent years...should also include ... public universities... in terms of its core mission -- turning teenagers into educated college graduates -- much of the system is simply failing." Leonhardt summarizes a book called "Crossing the Finish Line".

Kevin Carey pulls no punches in this story about an online startup and how its business model threatens to undermine higher education as we know it.

Washington Monthly's College Guide includes an introduction by the editor which frames the issue of assessment in terms of the unsustainability of the current paradigm and its rising costs. He asserts that "the higher education market is missing a measure of value, quality divided by price". "Value measures would allow colleges to do what they can't do now: lower prices without being punished by the market." The introduction points to several other useful articles in the College Guide.

A good overview of how higher ed's core functions are being remixed online. As you might expect from the source, the emphasis is on the positive.

The Easy Tabs Web Part allows you to add a tabbed interface to a SharePoint page.

Twitter for Business, Text as UI: "A few days ago, I posted the announcement of our next usability conferences to Nielsen Norman Group's timeline on Twitter (@NNgroup). I don't have all the guidelines for stream-based postings yet, because we're still conducting usability studies (particularly of B2B users, like my audience). But, based on the user sessions I've observed already, I put this posting through 5 rounds of iterative design."

Yeah you read that right. They told you it couldn't be done - I'm tellin' ya it can be done.

Silent screencast shows creation and customization of a simple Data View Web Part to display an RSS Feed.

A college classroom also has its own particular ecology, involving a host of interlocking factors. Instructors-and the education researchers who study them-ignore that ecology at their peril, he says.

The goal of this guide is to teach you how to make Google gadgets regardless of your skill level, even if you do not know any coding.

the site is called "Capellaresults", but I can't find any results data other than satisfaction surveys.

"College Choices for Adults [website] provides adults with specific information about what students are supposed to learn in the colleges' mostly career-oriented programs and measurements of whether they did." That's the billing in the Chronicle, but when I wen to the site, I found mostly self-reports of engagement and satisfaction.

No learning outcomes here -- just engagement and satisfaction surveys.

ummary: Community features are spreading from "Web 2.0" to "Enterprise 2.0." Research across 14 companies found that many are making productive use of social intranet features. Includes guidelines for implementation of "Enterprise 2.0" based on the experience of surveyed companies.

Social Bookmarking on steroids -- not just links, but clips from pages you can put in a box.

Google is not the only way to mashup.

A summary of types of files, lengths of files, filename lengths, and character codes that are inappropriate or invalid for SharePoint.