March 2010 – Page 2 – Andrew Careaga

Academic bracketology

March Madness is upon us, and college sports fans everywhere are busy filling out their brackets for the NCAA Division I men’s and women’s basketball tournaments, trying to predict which teams will make it to the Final Four. Serious bracketologists study each team’s overall win-loss record, strength of schedule, tournament match-up, the predictions of experts/media personalities like Dick Vitale and other data in an attempt to divine the ultimate winners.

If the teams in the Big Dance were judged solely on academic performance, it would be much easier to pick a Final Four. That’s what Ben Miller has done in a recent post over at The Quick and the Ed. Miller is a policy analyst for the think tank Education Sector and writes frequently for ES’s The Quick and the Ed blog.

According to Miller’s analysis, the academic Final Four, based on a rolling calculation of players’ graduation rates, would be Kansas, Butler, Villanova and Wofford. “The championship game would then feature Butler vs. Wofford, with the former prevailing thanks to a graduation rate of 89 percent vs. the latter’s 83 percent mark.”

With the assistance of Education Sector’s Abdul Kargbo, Miller filled out his bracket based on the federal graduation rates of each team.

Miller’s post has some other interesting insights into the state of college athletics in terms of graduation rates by race and overall. It is not a pretty picture. “Some schools are failing their athletes regardless of race. Maryland and Houston’s first round matchup has the distinction of being the worst academic pairing in the tournament, as the two have basketball graduation rates of 9 percent and 13 percent, respectively.”

SXSW: tomorrow is happening there, but I’m still stuck in today

Nope, I’m not at SXSW either. I’ve never been. Probably never will go. It happens to fall right around the time of the busiest event on our campus, the annual St. Pat’s Celebration, and I pretty much need to stick around campus for the duration of the event.

But just because we can’t attend doesn’t mean we can’t experience it vicariously. Here are a few resources to help you out:

The obvious portal for all things SXSW is the official website. But that’s kind of routine, no?
The #SXSW hashtag on Twitter will clue you in to all the cool things happening there, and all the cool things the cool kids are doing in Austin. But you’ll soon tire of all the chatter about the cool hangouts you’ll never go to and the cool people you’ll never meet.
Click through relevant Slideshare presentations, like this one on Universities in the “free” era (h/t to Delicious power user Mark Greenfield for sharing this).
If it’s the music you’re missing out on, download a couple of free SXSW samplers from Amazon and NPR.
Tune out the real SXSW altogether and focus your attention on the fake SXSW — “the virtual get together where you don’t have to leave your home in order to attend. You can host a panel. post your handle or smoke your sandal.”
Finally, follow along on the fakest of SXSW adventures: Todd Sanders‘ SXSW imagication. Start with Day 1 and work your way along with Todd.

Friday Five: Cluetrain leaving the station edition

Five signs that some institutions have yet to get their ticket for a ride on the Cluetrain:

1. From FastCompany.com: OK Go Ditches Label Over YouTube Embedding Rights. You’ve probably heard of the band OK Go because of their insanely popular (and clever) music videos that have spread like wildfire on YouTube. The latest example is the amazing video for OK Go’s song “This Too Shall Pass.” But as Fast Company’s Dan Nosowitz reports, OK Go’s label, EMI, “in a misguided attempt to wring every penny out of the band’s success, decided to block embedding on the YouTube videos — meaning the videos were unable to disseminate out through music and pop culture blogs, news sites, and personal blogs the way they did before the restriction. And that’s not a minor detail: the band saw a 90% drop in views when that restriction went into effect. As in, 100,000 views one day, 10,000 views the next. … [W]hen the label makes their videos less popular, it means, in no uncertain terms, that less people out there know about OK Go.” And that translates into fewer album and ticket sales.

2. Worst social media “strategy” ever. A news and media company is trying to get into the social media consulting business by offering a cookie-cutter program. For a fee, the company will set up Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook accounts, promise one blog post a week, five to eight custom tweets a day, etc. The author of this post on Businessgrow.com calls it a “copy and paste social media marketing strategy” that also flies in the face of journalistic ethics. If this isn’t the worst social media strategy ever, it’s got to be close. (Via @NewsSocialMedia.)

3. How to screw up the higher education system in Ontario. See? Not even higher ed is safe from missing the Cluetrain. Best part of this blog post for me was discovering a new word: “mediocracy.” (Via @tsand.)

4. The truth about Twitter users. Yikes. Could even Twitter, which was all the rage in 2009, be standing at the station when the Cluetrain pulls away? As the above-linked Mashable story points out, most Twitter users are not active. According to Brad J. Ward, these stats further signify Twitter’s “growing irrelevancy”. Of course, he said that on Twitter, so take it for what it’s worth.

5. For kicks, here’s one from the days of steam-engine cluetrains: An essay by Clifford Stoll (remember him?) from 1995 on why “no online database will replace your daily newspaper.”

The best thing about Facebook

The best thing about Facebook, from my perspective, is opening up the inbox to find a message like this from a long-lost friend:

rember when we went down town under the bridge and got drunk with that bum he went and got it rosevelts beer an MD 20 20 and we went to your house in the basment an listen to TOMMY. it was on tv last week. or we would go to the back lot behind mad dogs house . when i think of that sh*t i cant beleve we made this far, but that sh*t is f#cken funny

This is also the worst thing about Facebook.