This is a guest post by Jim Farmer.
As you know, the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems program is funding states’ work to improve their data systems. Over the past four years, 41 states and the District of Columbia have received more than half a billion dollars from this program. It has supported states as they link data from preschool, K-12, and postsecondary education. In some states, it supports their work to track students into the workforce. We’re committed to helping all states.
Keynote presentation – Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan

This is a guest post by Jim Farmer. Jim is Chairman of instructional media + magic.
Analysis of data recently released by PayScale Inc. and published in Bloomberg Business Week show starting salaries for graduates of Party Schools begin fifth of seven sectors moving up to third place by mid-career. Party Schools have a rate of salary increase exceeded only by graduates of Ivy League universities:

The data comes from 611,000 surveys completed as profiles on the PayScaleWeb Site.

The University of North Carolina, a current Blackboard customer that is evaluating Sakai, just published a very interesting report of their findings so far. Among other things, it’s a good model for schools that want to do a thorough evaluation of a platform and have the resources (i.e., staff and time) to do it right. Here’s the excerpt of it that UNC chose to publish in their blog post announcing its release:

The Delta Initiative, a consultancy group, just did a terrific webinar in cooperation with the Cal State system on the state of the LMS. This one of those predict-the-demise or predict-the-next-flux-capacitor presentations, though. It’s just an excellent, down-to-earth institutional view of how LMS adoption is going in the real world and what the challenges are, especially for large university consortia. To begin with, you have to love any presentation that includes a graphic like this one:

It is incredibly dense with information yet completely readable. Even better is the narrative that the presenter (Phil Hill, at this point in the presentation) weaves around it:

photo credit: Kongharald
There’s a blog post update from Desire2Learn on the latest back and forth between them and Blackboard over the patents. (Remember, there’s more than one patent now.) Here’s the latest, as near as I can follow it:

I am thrilled to report that my former colleague Ken Udas, most recently the Executive Director of Penn State World Campus and before that a fellow escapee from the SUNY Learning Network, has been selected as the new CEO of UMassOnline. Says University of Massachusetts President Jack M. Wilson,

photo credit: alles-schlumpf

Update: Patently-O blogger Dennis Crouch has posted a legal analysis of the ruling in which he concludes, “Defendant Desire2Learn wins a complete victory (after a few million in attorney fees).”

I have a terrible backblog of posts that I will try to catch up on over the next few days, starting with my obligatory Sakai conference summary. Since last conference represented something of a watershed, I wasn’t sure if I would use the same categories of comment or come up with something new. I think I will stick with the same categories for at least one more year, with more emphasis on the Sakai 3 effort.