Blurts

This piece from the Wall Street Journal using Univ of Colorado as an examples summarizes issues in the rising cost of public higher education.

I am passing on the link to a post regarding teacher salaries from Louis Caruso.

His comment regarding “gender shifts” is interesting:

More women are entering the fields of education and healthcare than men while male graduates are outnumbering their counterparts in the fields of business and engineering. Wages in occupations that have a higher percentage of female workers have been found to drop relative to wages in similarly skills jobs that hold high male employment.

I have read similar analyses before. It has nothing to do with gender bias, but is interpreted as a negative sign of decline in financial. recognition. As I understand the analysis, the shift is also regarded as a consequence of economic factors and not a cause.

This is really cool. A Canadian company (Teaching Kids News)  has created a site populated with current news stories written at grade levels (you can use the tags to find stories for second grade, 8th grade, etc.). Take a look at the tech stories (under science).

The site is looking for donations (this is not one of those ad supported sites). Clearly there is a cost to writing the stories at age-appropriate levels. I remember when schools used to pay for The Weekly Reader. Perhaps schools should invest in this resource to keep it going.

Here are some suggestions from LifeHacker for creating web sites with analysis. Interesting options if you have not bothered to look around (I am interested in SquareSpace, the one suggestion I have not tried,  because of the publicity it receives on TWIT and because it promises to expand with traffic). The suggestions also include hosting costs – several of the suggestions are really combinations of software and hosting.