American workforce getting grayer

Pew Research Center study shows American workforce getting grayer.

"Why Craigslist is Such a Mess"

Excellent analysis from Wired Magazine about Craigslist, which remains one of the world's most visited websites. Only part of the article discusses Craigslist as a jobs site, but well worth reading.

Employment Index Contradicts Government Data

From Consumer Reports: Employment Index Contradicts Govt. Data

Although unemployment data released last Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics paints a pessimistic picture of the state of jobs in the U.S., the Employment Index indicates more jobs were lost than gained in the last 30 days. The Employment Index examines the change in employment of those that reported starting a new job, compared to those that have lost their job or were laid off in the past 30 days. An index below 50 indicates more jobs were lost than gained, while a score more than 50 indicates more jobs were gained than lost in the past 30 days.

In September, the Employment Index improved from 48 to 50.3, resulting from the decline in reported job losses in the past 30 days, reflecting August 2009, and an increase of those reporting starting a new job in this period.

However, the August unemployment rate jumped from 9.4% to 9.7%, and the total number of unemployed persons rose from about 14.43 million to 14.9 million. In addition, the civilian labor force participation rate, which is the proportion of the non-institutionalized civilian population age 16 and older serving in the labor force, remained flat at 65.5%. Meanwhile, the employment-population ratio, which measures the ratio of employed persons to the total non-institutionalized civilian population age 16 and older, dropped from 59.4% to 59.2%.

The Consumer Reports Index, conducted by the Consumer Reports National Research Center, is a monthly telephone poll of a nationally representative probability sample of telephone households. Interviewing of 1,009 adults aged 18-plus was completed between August 27-30, 2009. The margin of error is +/- 3.2 percentage points at a 95% confidence level.

Extensive & growing use of social media

Forrester Research, a leading media research firm, has released an extensive study on U.S. usage of social media. At this point, four out of five U.S. online adults report using social media at least once per month. Half participate in sites like Facebook and LinkedIn.
Forrester classifies users into categories:

• Joiners — those who simply visit blogs and social media sites;
• Creators — the 25% who create content in one way or another for blogs, social sites, etc;
• Collectors — the 20% who use tags, RSS feeds, voting sites (like Digg and Reddit) to assemble or categorize web content.
• The most rapid growth in social net usage is occurring among those age 35 and older, prompting Forrester to recommend that every marketer needs to be in the social media biz today.

Twitter Message Design

Wisdom from Web Guru Jakob Nielsen re optimal Twitter message design

1. Don't start with word "Announcing" -- "Of course it's an announcement — otherwise I wouldn't be posting it..."
2. "Remember that users tend to read only the first few characters as they scan down a list. Make them count."
3. "Frontload attractive keywords to make the message more scannable."
4. "Users have become somewhat hardened against event promotions" ... make users "feel like they're getting concrete and useful info."
5. Twitter time passes 10 times faster than email time. "One of the big downsides of stream-based communication compared to email newsletters is the highly ephemeral nature of the postings: Once they scroll off the first screen, they're essentially 6 feet under. A look at clickthrough statistics for links posted to Twitter vs. those circulated in email newsletters shows ... lots of clicks the first few minutes, and then almost none. In contrast, email continues to generate clicks for days as people work their way through their inboxes.
   

Grad school fair demographics

This is a very good one-page set of charts from Idealist.org, analyzing the demographics of people who attend their graduate school fairs in DC. By far the largest category among "fields of interest" is "International Affairs/Relations," followed by "Public Policy." Next such grad school fair is Sept 21st, 5pm-8pm at the Washington Convention Center.

free online technology skills training

Only a small percentage of students will want to tackle this, but here's a website -- w3schools.com that offers free online technology skills training for a variety of software; e.g. -- Flash, HTML, Java scripting, etc.

American U. Goes Test-Optional for Early Applicants

From the Aug. 18 online version of the Chronicle

Students applying to American University this year won't have to submit an SAT or ACT score—if they apply under its early-decision plan. If the university ultimately adopts the "test optional" policy for all of its 15,000 applicants, it would be one of the largest, more-selective colleges in the country to do so.

Full article here.

Forbes Newest Top Colleges not the best news for AU

However you slice and dice it, AU is not in the top 100 or even 200 or even 300 of the Forbes' list of public and private colleges and universities. Out of 600 schools listed, we're #433rd. All our competitors in the area did better. George Washington, with the highest tuition, was 429th, 4 slots ahead of us. University of Maryland at College Park was 387th, George Mason at 338th, and Georgetown is 106th.

We also aren't in the list of the 100 top value colleges. University of Mary Washington is (and they're on Tuition Exchange!), at 58. Virginia Tech is 53, College of William and Mary is 33, VMI is 21, UVA is 19, and "Canoe U" (as my West Point father calls it) in Annapolis is 6.

The methodology was pretty interesting in how they balanced different factors. 25% is based on student satisfaction with courses, 25% on post-graduation employment success (based on listings of alumni in the 2008 edition of Who's Who in America and salaries of alumni from PayScale.com) and 20% to debt after four years. The remaining 30% was from the four year graduation rate (16.67%) and student and faculty nationally competitive awards (students at 8.33% and faculty at 5%). Their comment on awards was interesting, but I wonder how quantifiable it really is.

We have modestly demoted nationally competitive academic
awards as a feature in this year's index (from an overall weight of 16.67% to
13.33%). We have kept the portion of this variable related to student receipt of
nationally competitive awards like the Rhodes and Marshall scholarships the same
as in 2008 (8.33% in the total ranking). We have reduced the component relating
to faculty scholarly recognition (e.g., Nobel prizes) from 8.33% to 5%. We
believe having eminent faculty add to a campus's luster, but in some respects
this component has aspects of being an input into the process rather than an
outcome (e.g., a university can buy Nobel laureates), something we are trying to
avoid.

Also, frankly in discussions with students and parents, often the other
factors cited above (quality of instruction, postgraduate success, graduation
rates, etc.) are mentioned, but rarely do they talk about the competitive award
factor as a determinant of college decisions. For the typical student, it is
vastly more important that they feel rewarded by the classes that they actually
take than that there are eminent scholars in their midst who are generally
inaccessible to undergraduates.

Let's see what our own PR folks make of this. At least we're still a top Career Center!

World of an Intern (Music Video) and eBay auction

"Just a video us interns put together in the last couple of weeks here at Crispin Porter + Bogusky. " I think it's great. Wish our interns would come up with something like this. It's a tad cutting but basically positive without being obviously "rah rah."


They also had an eBay auction which raised over $17,000 FOR their 38 interns. That's an interesting way to budget for them!

Rob SanGeorge quotes in Baltimore Sun on Pesticides in Chesapeake

Career Advisor by day, Rob SanGeorge dons a super hero costume off hours and as director of the Pesticides and the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Project, was the go to person for the media when it came to a new report on pesticide pollution causing things like intersexed fish. In the article, which came out Friday, reports,

"There's no smoking gun," SanGeorge says, acknowledging the lack of conclusive research showing that toxic chemicals in the bay and its tributaries are harming fish and wildlife and bay grasses. But he points to studies suggesting problems and "enormous data gaps" that need to be filled.

http://www.thinkswiss.org/index.php

Study in Switzerland! For the third year in a row, ThinkSwiss has selected 17 talented undergraduate and graduate students from the United States as winners of ThinkSwiss Research Scholarships. These students will receive a stipend for up to three months to conduct research at a Swiss university or research lab. The scholarship is open to students of all fields who have an outstanding academic record and a keen interest in Switzerland. This year’s winners come from a range of top U.S. universities, including Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Columbia, and will study at Swiss institutions such as ETH-Zurich, the University of Basel, the University of Lausanne and others. Now in its third year, these research scholarships are an important part of the ThinkSwiss mission to build dialogue between the two nations. You can read about the work and experiences of ThinkSwiss research scholars on the ThinkSwiss Research Blog.

Social Entrepreneurship

Good article on social entrepreneurship in Stanford Social Innovation Review. Potentially useful reading for students interested in the field.

Rank & File Non-Profit Staff Members Earn Average $45,615

From Non-Profit Times, July 2, 2009

http://www.nptimes.com/09Jun/bnews-bluewater.html

From Time Magazine: Postcard from Bismarck

Very interesting article from this week's Time Magazine. Apparently, Bismarck, North Dakota, of all places, has not been adversely affected by the economy, with an unemployment rate half the national average and many "Now Hiring" signs. Could some of our alumni be happy living in the hinterlands?
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1907145,00.html

69% of Non-Profits Report Funding Cuts

From Non-Profit Times, 06/29/2009: "Non-Profits Employ Tougher Measures as Downturn Deepens"

Revenue & Donors Continue Free Fall

Fundraising still taking big hit, from Non-Profit Times, 06.25.2009.

CUNY Social Networks in the Leadership Program

Why should we be interested in CUNY's Leadership Program? Like our interns, they don't see each other. Unlike our interns, they do gather at the very beginning, and at the end to present projects. They use Ning to create their own social network and keep everything professional. Faculty approve each photo to help students understand parameters and purpose. Keeping it professional means students can eventually show this to their potential employers. CUNY also has them develop a LinkedIn profile, turning graduates students into mentors, and keeping track of alumni after graduation.

Old students recruit new students into the program through Ning (but everyone's approved by administrators before being granted access). They also have a Facebook page.

LinkedIn becomes the students' portfolio. They have a poster of their life with links to academic work through the Keep Toolkit, they have their LinkedIn profile, and they link to their blogs that were in their Ning profile. Employers have been very impressed.

You can watch the presentation yourself through Slideshare!

Supporting Students Cross-Campus Collaboration Through Educational Social Networking [Sloan-C, San Francisco: June 18, 2009]

View more OpenOffice presentations from Christoph Winkler.

Twitterpated? and more possibilities

Alexandra M. Pickett is getting us to experiment and teach outside the box. Just consider . . .

Check her top ten list.

• Twitter is used for course announcements and she used the widget to embed it in her course for lots of flexibility and immediacy.
• Meebo widget lets students IM her online for synchronous interaction.
• Quick capture in YouTube lets her do an intro video.
• Voicethread lets you comment via video, audio, text, on the phone on documents, etc . . .
• All her students created blogs as a structured reflective activity and she has one, too.
  
• Diigo is like deli.cio.us on steroids and it can feed deli.cio.us and she created a group based on the class number and the students tag things with that course number, and you can highlight and leave stickies on public web pages, too!
• Jing for screen captures
• Breeze, which she thinks became Adobe Connect
• Audacity
• PollDaddy for getting feedback on the course

Will someone get Geoff an aspirin?

Screen shot is Map of the World 2.0.

How about Advising via Web Conferencing?

Go, Parkland College! This community college has seen online classes take off in the last ten years, and student services didn't want to leave those students out of what they had to offer. They use Adobe Connect because faculty and students liked it, it was less intimidating, customizable, flash-based with nothing to install, and affordable! You can pop in and out with ease, too.

For advising, they schedule their appointment online from the tutorial, click the time, get an automatic tutorial, and have a link that takes them right into the meeting. Both have access to shared screens so the advisor can demonstrate things. It has received rave reviews.

True, advisors resisted. Online?! Ugh. They felt overworked already. And it was unknown. So, they got an early adapter, and she then trained the others. Some students don't have cameras, but it's fine. It's also used by their writing center for tutoring, and they do it as a drop in. Students go to a "waiting room" after ringing a doorbell (they have fun with this). It gets a little awkward when the faculty has audio and can be heard, but the students just chat back, but it's not that bad. They go off line for the summer, and come back in the fall. Students can't always figure out screen share, so faculty just have them upload documents for review. Faculty can be washing dishes at home, hear the "doorbell," and go to their computer to help the students.

Help was needed because people forgot passwords, etc., but most issues were dealt with a phone call or email. Otherwise, they've staffed a helpdesk that deals with Adobe Connect issues. The student experience has been very positive and most would highly recommend it. Then the tech genius tells us how he integrates it into the student system and I'm completely humbled and lost. He created the doorbell so faculty didn't have to stair at their blank screens waiting for students. He gives us the code.

So, maybe it's even simpler to use Skype or Google chat and share with Google docs . . . They'd rather pay the fee because they need to know that the person they see is their student. That's why they log in. They found no need to market it for academic advising other than being on their web page. For the writing, they did need to put an ad on their equivalent of Blackboard.

Photo by kuljuls.