When Education Secretary Margaret Spellings made a speech and report outlining her vision for higher education last fall, I went on a little blogging rage rampage. Have a look:

Big Brother Goes to College

Margaret Spellings’ Plan for Higher Ed: Standardizing College, Putting Salary Outcomes on a Pedestal

Margaret Spellings’ Plan is Fraught with Contradictions

Now, with little fanfare, her plan is being quietly executed in a somewhat more benign form. Fortunately, Inside Higher Ed has been keeping an eye on it. However, the plan is still far from friendly and still tantamount to an ‘unfunded mandate’ for privates.

It looks as if these changes are aiming at requiring institutions to participate in ’student learning assessment’ tests and to report their scores publicly (although that is not stated as the immediate goal). What is part of the immediate changes are asking about a bunch of self-assessment documents (like fact books) as part of an institution’s website and then aggregating those web links as part of the Education Department’s ‘College Online Opportunities Locator‘ (COOL). They are also asking questions about Financial Aid data to try and provide a report on the net cost of an institution for different types of students as opposed to the sticker price. This data will also be included on the COOL site.

In the short term, I’ve already started the ‘not me!’ shouting and talking about what a great thing a PDF is as opposed to hand-coded HTML. I sure don’t want to be the one that has to mark-up our fact book and assessment data.

Otherwise I’m too zonked this morning to get all fired up about it. Have a look at Andrew’s response at Higher Ed Marketing. Need some coffee…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 20th, 2007 at 6:58 pm and is filed under Higher Education. It has been viewed 1194 times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

From ‘A Softer World’

There is an argument made against privacy that says someone who isn’t engaged in criminal behavior has nothing to hide. This method of thinking allowed the US government to slowly sap away our civil liberties in the wake of the 9/11 attacks–many have just accepted that trading privacy for security is acceptable and used the “nothing to hide” argument to rationalize what was, essentially, a decision based on fear. However, limiting the government’s ability to intrude in our private lives is easy compared with attempting to control how personal information spreads on the internet via gossip. Rather than spies or wiretaps, gossip is often gathered by those we trust and spread online by people who don’t understand or appreciate the potential for the damage it can do. In reality, privacy is about much more than concealing wrongdoing.

Internet-based abuse (‘cyberbullying’) and privacy / relationship issues are still massively misunderstood. The complexities of online sociality are probably the biggest ‘generational divide’ between modern teens and adults. To help put it in perspective a bit, here are some numbers…

I HAVE A MYSPACE ACCOUNT!!1!