Blurts

The New York Times has an interesting piece on storytelling in Africa and the prediction that stories out of Africa will be the next new thing. This is an interesting read.

This is a complaint of sorts. How companies go about promoting their products matters to me. My initial exposure to Imagine Easy Scholar has generated personal interest. I know the company does Easy Bib which I find to be a useful resource so I am interested in a related tool for the online research process.The product seems similar to Scrivener which is a professional level product I use and I can see how learners could benefit from a similar product at a reasonable price.

Here is what annoys me. I cannot find the price for the product. I cannot find the price on the company site and I cannot find the price in the reviews of other education bloggers. I know that I can sign up for a free trial, but I want to know what schools will have to pay because I know the cost of things is such an important issue. I do not expect free, but taking the time to promote a product/service without understanding the cost to the user is pointless.

NPR provided an interesting recent post (and program) on spending for public education.

A topic within the presentation concerned the use of property tax revenue expressed as per pupil expenditure above. I certainly understand why public schools focus on property taxes. Schools need predictable revenue sources and the value of property is slower to react to economic ups and downs. However, it produces some interesting and uneven experiences for learners. In the past few years, I have lived in Grand Forks, ND (working at the university), a suburb of Minneapolis (our retirement home), and on a lake in the north woods of Wisconsin (a home we purchased with inherited money). The map above (check the article for a better view) provides per pupil expenditures for these areas. Grand Forks and MSP are relatively wealthy areas with active business, health care, universities, etc. Our lake place is located in one of the poorest counties in Wisconsin.

What I find interesting from looking at the specific revenue going to schools in the regions I am familiar is the weird funding disparity. Despite the relative poverty of lake country, the revenue for education is the best. This results from a low population density and the inflated property values for lake homes many of which are second properties so any students using these properties attend school elsewhere. Minneapolis and Grand Forks spend less per pupil despite having far better economic circumstances.

I am not anti-tax. My father, a farmer, always told me to be satisfied with making the kind of money that required me to pay the taxes I do. I try to remember that even in retirement.

As a life-long educator, I have always been interested in the way education is funded. Public colleges are not tax supported in the way public K-12 education is tax supported. As a retired professor, it always puzzled me that the % of university costs funded through taxes declined drastically over the years and yet elected politicians can both determine the money institutions receive from taxes and also control tuition increases. I understand this is what is meant by “public institution”, but I don’t think the “public” really understands how it works. State-controlled and state subsidized is a more accurate description than state funded. The level of control is out of balance with the level of funding.

UND was always a regional university and we were lucky to attract as many students as we had from Minnesota. I suppose some locals feel the “tax supported” institution was be exploited by those who did not pay taxes. Well, ND students could attend MN schools via the same agreement. We were lucky that so many MN students came our way. Higher ed also requires a certain scale to provide quality experiences and the untaxed students from elsewhere were necessary to achieve the scale necessary for a true university.

Enough ab0ut funding. I no longer have to worry about such issues, but it obviously irks me that so many are unwilling to take the time to understand how this actually works.

Son Todd just learned that the VR video project he directed for Target received a People’s Choice Webby award (Webbys). Cindy had to tell him. I assume Webby People’s Choice awards are those projects receiving the most votes from the public and are separate from the Webbys selected by the committee. The project made use of cool technology I described as a Gaggle of GoPros in a previous post. The tech is new and experimental, but the team and the budget it took to generate this product was impressive. Todd has moved on from Target (creatives have this tendency). We have a good time talking tech.

DropBox has big ideas for the amount of space it can provide users (PCWorld). The new model would allow more external storage while limiting the amount of space that must be dedicated on the local computer.