By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Various authors: Exploding SQL, Yahoo Site Explorer and PubSub rankings
September 30, 2005
So anyhow, I spent the day yesterday, first, learning the limits of left joins in SQL, and second, trying to get my site back up and running. So there was no OLDaily yesterday, and I'm running behind on links today. I will be catching up over the week-end. And repairing my search function - which may be redundant if Yahoo adds search functionality to this interesting site explorer program. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. LinkedIn University Rankings
Various authors, LinkedIn, 2014/10/03
This has to be better than the made-up rankings provided by entities like U.S. News & World Report, or Macleans in Canada, but even so the purpose remains the same: the rankings reflect the values held by the ranker, and are intended to push the rankees into pursuing those metrics (hence, the U.S. News rankings, for example, push universities away from opening access to lower income students). Just so, the LinkedIn rankings are "based on career outcomes". The LinkedIn blog defines outcomes based on "desirable jobs," for examples, where "we define a desirable job to be a job at a desirable company for the relevant profession. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Shrinking Numbers, Changing Values
Ry Rivard, Inside Higher Ed, 2014/09/24
In this [post it becomes clear that the values represented by university ranking initiatives count against universities reaching out to recruit the poor and disenfranchised. Which (in my view) was exactly the purpose of these rankings in the first place: not to measure the quality of universities, but to skew them toward the values espoused by the rankers. More...