May 4th, 2009, No Comments »
Last year we did a bunch of work with DreamBank, a collaborative giving platform aimed at reducing waste and giving people gifts that they really want. Last week I wrote about Kickstarter, a way for creators to collecting funding for projects–a kind of collaborative investment in future art.
Today’s collaborative funding project (courtesy of Springwise) is GradeFund. From the article:
GradeFund lets students recruit sponsors—usually friends and family—who donate money for each good grade. Participating students upload their transcripts at the end of each term and GradeFund verifies them and then collects funds from the sponsors, who can set their own criteria such as sponsoring students from their alma mater or choosing specific grade levels to sponsor. They can determine donation amounts for each grade, from as low as USD 5.
It’s a nifty, if slightly warped, idea. Though I believe I benefited from such a scheme when I was in high school, I’m not a big fan of incentivizing childrens’ scholastic performance with cash.
The other factor that’s interesting in GradeFund’s case is that surely 100% of ’sponsors’ will be personally known to the student. That is, there’s no ‘fans’ or benevolent strangers funding the kid’s education. In this sense, the site is less essential than other collaborative funding projects I’ve seen. Surely the child’s family could just put a gradated score card up on the fridge and some money in a jar?
No Comments »
January 27th, 2009, 9 Comments »
In the next couple of months, I’m giving three talks to different groups associated with post-secondary education. In preparing these speeches, I was doing research into Facebook’s market penetration among BC’s teens.
As you may know, Facebook’s advertising program lets you thin-slice your target audience in all sorts of interesting ways–gender, age, location even specific interests or workplaces. I created a query that indicated that I could reach 344,860 British Columbians between the age of 15 to 19. I take this to mean that there are 344,860 profiles matching that criteria on Facebook.
Curious to see what percentage of all BC teens this was, I checked the BC government’s stats for the current population of teens aged 15 to 19 in the province. They reported 287,444. I took screenshots of the two sources:
That means that there are 1.2 profiles on Facebook for every BC teen. Is that possible? Probably. After all, I recently read that 99% of the 2012 class at Amherst College had a Facebook profile. I suppose that if 20% of teens created two profiles, they’d generate these results.
And I remember reading some of danah boyd’s (lower case capitalization hers) research that indicates that teens discard unwanted profiles frequently, and often create several on a given social network.
In any case, isn’t this kind of false advertising from Facebook? The most teens an advertiser could possibly reach in BC is all of them: 287,444 in 2008, a few more in 2009.
9 Comments »
March 26th, 2008, 16 Comments »
I recently learned this fact, and had it confirmed by two other people in the world of post-secondary education. I tried to do some googling, but couldn’t find any reliable-looking data.
Is this a surprise to anybody else? Apparently college profs have it better because they’re unionized. As such, they’re paid more and enjoy better benefits than their peers at university. Plus, college instructors apparently aren’t under the same pressure to publish academic work.
As far as I could figure out, the main advantages of being a university professor are the accompanying prestige, and the, er, more cerebral and academic environment.
Did you know that this was the case? Any profs out there who might care to comment?
16 Comments »
