Brandon Muramatsu

muraPOI: September 4, 2012

Star Ratings

  • California State University partners with Pearson for system-wide online program: Tony Bates writes about the Cal State/Pearson partnership.

    “You don’t outsource your future core competencies.”

    Word.

    This sort of partnership with courses, some of the e-book experiments going on, and LMS vendors selling themselves as analytics platforms are prime examples of vendors attempting to dominate the core competencies of universities. In the last year we’ve seen what I believe will be perceived as a major shift in higher education, these sorts of practices are the slippery slope, from which it may be impossible to return. Though to be fair, universitiess probably don’t understand these are their core competencies.

    (Via EdSurge, August 29, 2012)

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    Star Ratings

    Source: XKCD, cc-by-nc

    Star Ratings

    How online reviews are crucial to a restaurant’s takings: Interesting analysis on the impact of rounding 3.76->4 stars and 3.74->3.5 stars in Yelp reviews. The Guardian article is better than the TechCrunch summary (big surprise there), but unfortunately I didn’t read the whole research study published by UC Berkeley researchers.

    (Via Techcrunch, September 2, 2012)

  • Doctor Who Goes Back in Time to Beat TV Pirates and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’ response to HBO Nordic: It’s on!: Near real-time release of TV shows to the internet and online-only access to premium cable. What’s the world coming to? Content the way people want it, when they want it, from the original provider? Well the world isn’t completely crazy, you have to be in Scandinavia for HBO and Australia for Doctor Who. Nothing so forward looking in the United States.

    (Via GigaOm August 29, 2012 and August 30, 2012)

  • mura.org QRCodeHow Apple And Google Could Make QR Codes Mainstream: I’ll confess I still can’t figure out the value in QR codes, if you want to find something just type it out. Instead I have to find a QR app on my phone and hope it works. I can do the search much more reliably than that (and I do, although I’m probably not the target audience as a capable technology user). Brenden Mulligan argues that if Apple and Google built QR recognition into their photo apps (instead of one of a bajillion separate QR apps), this might dramatically improve the uptake and usefulness of QR codes. He might be on to something. (QR code generated by Kaywa.)

    (Via Techcrunch, September 1, 2012)

  • FindTheData Compares Tons of Data Side-By-Side, Is a Research Gold Mine: An interesting site. I have to agree with the commenters, the ability to export the data would make this a really useful site.

    (Via Lifehacker, August 30, 2012)

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