By Joshua Kim. This week I changed jobs at my institution. As part of this shift I had to return all of my devices to the team that I was leaving.
One of the devices that I returned was an iPad mini.
The question that I’ve been pondering this week is should I replace the iPad?
I’m typing this post on a new MacBook Air (feels just like the old MacBook Air), and while I wavered a bit between the snazzy 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display there was no doubt that I needed a laptop to do my work. Read more...

By Joshua Kim. Dear colleges and universities of the world. I will soon be sending you money. 
Daughter #1 will land on your campus in 2015. Daughter #2 in 2017. 
Who should I make the check out to?
While I am not clear what influence I will be able to exert on either daughter’s higher education choice, I am clear on what I will be looking for.
On the campus tours to come I hope to gather the following information. Read more...

By Matt Reed. What if student learning counted as a metric in performance funding? 
Okay, that’s wonky. To translate: right now, many states are either using or considering a formula to determine funding levels for public colleges that would tie funding to “performance” along some prescribed set of measures.  I’ve seen relatively simple proposals, such as funding based simply on the number of graduates, and I’ve seen much more sophisticated and complex ones, such as the multivariate formula that Massachusetts applies now to community colleges. (It doesn’t apply performance funding to UMass, though.  You may draw whatever conclusion about that you wish.) Read more...

By Matt Reed. A new report on student loan debt from The Institute for College Access and Success is generating quite a bit of press with its statistics on student loan burdens. The headline claim is that “Seven in 10 college seniors who graduated in 2012 had student loan debt, with an average of $29,400 for those with loans.“
The report goes on to name (and shame) high debt colleges and high debt states, and to contrast them with the presumably more honorable low-debt colleges and states. It ends with a note on for-profit colleges, saying that too few of them report anything close to the amount of data needed for meaningful comparisons. Read more...
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By Matt Reed. Yesterday I gave a brief discussion at the NEASC conference in Boston, thinking it would be about the potential impact of federal performance funding for community colleges.  In passing, I made the point made here earlier this week that right now, we measure ‘performance’ using proxies, such as graduation or degree completion, but that using competencies offered the possibility of getting closer to measuring actual learning.  I considered it peripheral to the main argument, if interesting in itself. Read more...

By Matt Reed. I read once that anything older than you is natural, anything invented in your childhood is technology, and anything invented in your adulthood is magic. There’s a real emotional truth to that; the DVR that my kids think of as normal still strikes me as miraculous. The power of the observation is in pointing out that things that seem like they’ve always been there usually have histories. That doesn’t make them any less real, of course. Buildings are constructions; anyone who doubts that they’re real is invited to jump off a tall one and let me know how it goes. Something can be real, even imposing, and still be both “constructed” and, in some important sense, fleeting. Buildings come and go. Technologies come and go. Read more...