the Sam Jackson College Experience

The biggest thing to happen to the college search scene in years just went public, and it’s called Unigo. It is a tremendous new company which I think will really make big waves: it’s essentially an online, user-generated college guide book, though that description sells it short. This weekend’s New York Times Magazine does a good job telling readers all about Unigo, but I’d like to take a moment to share my story about this very exciting enterprise as well.  Unigo is a must-visit site for:

1. anyone applying to college (how I wish I had such a resource!),
2. anyone at college (to tell the true story of your institution), and
3. anyone working at the college (to get an easily accessible angle on what students are thinking and saying).

What makes Unigo so clever and interesting? So slashdot-worthy? Unigo launched last week with tens of thousands of reviews, photos, and videos for a pre-launch list of 225 colleges–30,000 reviews at launch, and that number grows daily. I expect to see a big explosion after this press bump, since these first few ten thousands were just done with the organizational skills of a few interns and the great Unigo team. I know they’re great because I got a chance to visit their NYC office and meet them : )

Unigo’s founder, Jordan Goldman, contacted me out of the blue last spring asking me if I would be interested in a secret project of his. I knew little about Jordan except what I remembered from reading The Gatekeepers, where his college quest was profiled, and from what Google told me. Still, I figured that anyone who insisted I come to New York to learn about their secret internet project must really have had something interesting for me to see, so I hopped on a commuter train as fast as I could to meet with him. And how glad I am that I did! I learned all about Unigo (then going by the stealth name ‘ByStudents’ to collect its reviews) and really just fell in love with the project.

I gladly took a spot on the advisory board and have been really excited over the last few months as I’ve seen the web site transition from wireframes to code and finally to launch. (I even helped contribute some content myself, working with some Unigo staffers to film a series of exceptionally boring videos about Yale.)

So, a little more about Unigo - pulling here from the press release. Unigo features…

Original articles from students and recent grads on every aspect of college admissions and college life;

An Intelligent Calendar to guide students through the search/application process;

“Unigo Match” to help students find the colleges that are right for them, and current students at those colleges with whom they can interact

For 225 top colleges, editorially-written overviews, accompanied by tens of thousands of current student reviews, photos, videos and documents

Ability to search through reviews of every college by each reviewers’ gender, ethnicity, major, political leaning, hometown and more, so you can see every college from a variety of perspectives

All content can be rated, commented on and flagged by other users to ensure truthfulness and accuracy.

Jordan is going a long way towards enabling some of the changes that I have been working towards with my blog. As Chuck Hughes, a former Senior Admissions Officer at Harvard says,

“It’s frankly incredible that this hasn’t been done before. Unigo gives high school students and parents an unprecedented volume of the content they need, centered around one of life’s most stressful decisions.  And it gives college students all the reviewing, video-sharing, photo-sharing, document-sharing and networking capabilities now familiar to web users everywhere – but all in one place, and with a purpose.”

Jordan tested out this approach with some dead-trees guidebooks (Students’ Guide to Colleges) in 2005 and 2006 while at Wesleyan. One visitor to my site was impressed but wrote me to say that they stole my vision — on the contrary, Jordan was already making it happen long before I was even blogging, connecting current students with prospective applicants in an authentic and honest communications channel.

So what makes Unigo different? I went on at length about this with a few reporters this summer, though to my chagrin it looks like none of my interviews were catchy enough to merit printing ; ). In short, Unigo succeeds where many other websites have failed because it goes above and beyond flawed quantitative approaches to college admissions searches. Too many sites ask readers just to crudely rate different aspects of schools and then write a few scant sentences about their entire experience. The brilliance and genius of Unigo is that the questionaires students work from really inspires thoughtful and lengthy responses which are meaningful to readers. It’s not a problem that was easy to solve, as anyone who has administered a survey can attest.

It’s true that Unigo will not be a perfect source of information, and it’s not a replacement for all college admissions rituals. But I think that time spent on Unigo (free!) is much better than time spent supporting distorting publications ($$$ for a yearly update of US News & World Report’s joke of a report). I don’t think that someone should make their entire admissions decision on the basis of what they can see on their screen–how do you average together a few hundred subjective opinions of someplace to make your own judgment?–but I think Unigo will be a great complement. Especially for people who are less able to just up and travel around the country to visit schools, the addition of more photos and videos, and especially more raw footage, is a fantastic boon. Or, in this global world, imagine the international student faced with a one-dimensional college website–where else were they to turn before now?

The fact that Unigo will also have editorial reviews will helpfully add a nice layer of polish to the volumes of user-generated reviews, but just reading through them there is a real amazing quality to the collection. At some schools, more than 10% of the student body contributed! This is a really amazing figure. Can you imagine, even if you went to visit a school, talking to 10% of its student body and asking them how they felt about their experience?

I could write more about Unigo, and would like to continue this conversation with any readers who would like to have it – please comment and tell me what you think, and let Unigo know at their company blog, too. I won’t keep your attention any longer – go ahead and check out Unigo for yourself, maybe look at your own school / alma mater / dream school, then come back here and tell me what you think!

More background about Unigo:

Jordan Goldman, Unigo’s founder/CEO, is now 26 years old.  As a 17 year-old Goldman was featured in a New York Times article on the college admissions process.  Times education reporter Jacques Steinberg began following Goldman, and the specifics of Goldman’s own college search later became the subject of Steinberg’s New York Times bestselling book The Gatekeepers.The next year, as a college freshman, Goldman set out to improve the college search process by creating a series of more accurate, honest and 100% student-written college guidebooks.  Goldman’s Students’ Guide to Colleges went on to be published by Penguin Books in 2005, was updated for publication in 2006, and was featured in Forbes, US News and Time Magazine.

Goldman created Unigo.com and formed a board headed by Frank V. Sica (a private equity investor and board member of JetBlue), and an advisory board that counts Tom Rogers (CEO of Tivo), Bob Chase (former president, National Education Association), Chuck Hughes (former Senior Admissions Officer, Harvard University), Don Ross (Chief Revenue Officer, Bankrate.com) and education blogger Sam Jackson as members.  Goldman’s partners in Unigo include design firm Deepend New York, build firm GotCoders and entertainment firm Autonomy.

Contact:
Sharon Fuchs
Sharon@unigo.com
(O) 646-861-7845
(C) 917-364-6194

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is spearheading an internet security task force, working with companies like MySpace, Google, Microsoft, and fifty attorney generals to help identify effective online safety tools and technologies. danah boyd, social media researcher and general awesome person extraordinaire, is soliciting people for a research intern position working with her on the task force.

I have been interning since the fall with Berkman danah boyd helping her to do research, and can attest to her being an amazing person to work with. What’s more, the Berkman Center is a great and vibrant community where you can really have a lot of fun getting engaged about exciting issues.

Snippet about the Task Force:

“The safety concerns posed by the Internet are part and parcel of the safety concerns that arise in human interactions in the physical world. These concerns are not unique to any one service or technology platform; they are shared by the companies that provide Internet services and the individuals who use these services. We should work together – private firms, technologists, experts from the non-profit world, and leaders in government – to solve online safety issues as a joint effort,” said John Palfrey, Executive Director of The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. “We are honored to assume the leadership of this Task Force and excited to convene the broad array of interests represented by the group.”

Anyhow, danah posted to her blog, and John Palfrey posted to the digital natives discussion list, a call for research intern applications. This is a really great opportunity to get involved in a great project, so check it out or send it to people you know who might be interested. Excerpted from danah’s blog below:

Connected to my role in the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, I’m seeking a research intern. The intern would be responsible for:

1. Creating an annotated bibliography of all scholarly research related to the issues taken up by the Task Force (e.g., Internet sexual predators, bullying, identity theft, COPPA, etc.)
2. Creating an annotated list of scholars and institutes working in the field and reaching out to them to see if new research is about to be published
3. Writing the first draft of a literature review of the relevant research
4. Other things that might come up…

The ideal intern will have strong research skills, strong writing skills, and an interest in the topic. Timeliness is also crucial – much is needed to be done by mid-June. The ability to self-motivate/self-direct is also critical; I will be doing virtually no micromanagement and the deadline is not movable.

The intern would officially be an intern at the Harvard Berkman Center and will receive the standard Harvard intern wage; living in Cambridge is not a requirement – most interactions with me will take place through email/AIM. The intern must be a student at a university (either undergrad or graduate level) and have full library access. Preference will be given to those in social science fields who are familiar with and can evaluate quantitative methods. The most ideal candidate would probably be a pre-quals graduate student who is working in this area and would love to be paid to do the literature review they have to do anyhow, but I’m not sure that this person exists.

This position will start the moment I find the right person. It will definitely last through June and can last much longer depending on the person’s interest (there’s plenty of related work through December). Hours are flexible; all that matters is getting the job done.

To apply, send me an email to zephoria at zephoria dot org. Include your CV, the names and emails of 2 professors who can attest to your research skills, a sample piece of writing (class assignments are fine) and a cover letter that includes: why you are interested in this internship, some background on your research skills, and whatever else you think that I might want to know.

Feel free to forward this announcement to anyone you think might be interested.

Definitely check it out! This is a great opportunity to do interesting work with brilliant and interesting people.

I was recently having a little debate with Diana over at the Digital Natives blog about how best to manage online identities as a teenager, inspired by Lifehacker’s recent post about managing digital reputations. My main point of agreement was about ‘becoming the source’ for information about yourself, and how important it is to maintain a high-profile place for positive information control. I do that very well with this website–google ’sam jackson’ and you’ll see I’m the fourth result–but right before I saw Diana’s post, I had decided I wanted to cover some other bases.

It’s midterms time here at Yale, and while some people like to go out and shop or buy things to de-stress some, I opted for another route: buying a few domain names. I went to gratuitous lengths to try to acquire a few I’ve been negotiating over for ages, with continued failure. But I did go ahead and buy www.SamuelAJackson.com and www.SamuelABJackson.com. I remain bitter that I don’t have the funds to acquire samjackson.com, or samueljackson.com, etc.

I wish I had been a little older–or a lot wiser–when I was younger, because I would be a lot richer now for my domain purchases if that had been the case. But, in case anyone is ever searching for my full name, I now have some good insurance. These wouldn’t really rank, of course, and I will just have them redirect back here for now. Still–pays to try to cover as many angles as possible, and it’s really pretty cheap. Certainly a much lower down payment now than there will be later, if you have to try to buy a domain off someone or do damage control from high-ranking bad PR.

For a good place to start investigating how to control your public identity online, check out both that lifehacker post and danah boyd’s musings on the subject last fall.

One of the most popular posts ever written for this blog was the one in which I wrote about the finer details within the 2006 Senior SAT College Board data. In a way, I am very much a beneficiary of the same standardized-testing and college admissions stresses which I rail against. However, that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try to provide clear and accessible information about the 2007 Senior SAT data–information which will help de-stress applicants, hopefully, and also raise awareness of some of the ways in which the SAT is biased and why we should think twice before judging people on their SAT scores.

I’m going to break it up into a few posts, starting with this one about some general data for the SAT I: Reasoning, with another on percentiles and more detailed demographics, and one more about the SAT II subject tests.

There’s a lot of information in the total national report to cover, so I’ll start with the big picture and hit the most important tables. If you’re interested in the whole report, it’s worth checking out. I aim to give a narrative overview of what is going on in all the most important tables of that 18 page document, so if you don’t want to stare at numbers but want to know what’s going on… keep reading. Numbers given are in Critical Reading / Mathematics / Writing , or complete SAT I reasoning composite score out of 2400 maximum.

The College Board says this data can be used to

• interpret scores of individual students within the broader context of data aggregated across groups of collegebound seniors;
• study changes over time in the characteristics of students taking SAT tests; and
• look at year-to-year educational and demographic changes in this population, along with changes in test performance.

So let’s do the last two, and individual readers can do the first with their own scores or whoever’s scores they happen to have handy, if they want.

First things first–scores dropped for the second year in a row. These scores are “within the expected range” over the long term, but this continues the trend seen with the introduction of the “new” SAT last year. What does it mean? Nothing that should matter on an individual level–the test, in its new longer and more expensive format, is unlikely to change again any time too soon.

Of the 1,494,531 people who took the SAT, with an average composite score of 1511 (502 Critical Reading, 515 Mathematics, and 494 Writing), 53% were female and 46% were male; this mirrors results from last year. The score comparison is, for CR / M / W, Male v. Female, 1526 (504 / 533 / 489) v. 1501 (502 / 499 / 500): a total score difference of just 25 points, in favor of guys. Last year, the difference was… 26 points. You see where this trend is going? Females were helped, once again, by the 11 point writing section advantage in the new SAT, which held steady from last year.

Here’s some correlational information which I find especially interesting: breakdowns of who took the test when. The College Board tracks people over their high school years and indicates if they most recently took the test in Senior, Junior, Sophomore, or Freshman year. Of the graduating class of 2007, 1,001,667 took the test their senior year (either only, or most recently, as an additional sitting). 485,401 took it their junior year, and from there it trickles down with 6339 / 1124 for 10th and 9th grade, respectively. Now, the scores from these sittings? Freshman fare worst overall, and they don’t have writing scores to compare since it wasn’t around for them, but still manage a 1 pt increase over seniors in mathematics. People who only take the test their senior year are the next worse, with 493 / 505 / 486 for a composite score of 1484. Followed by, shocker here, juniors! Who go 522 / 534 / 511 for a total composite of 1567. The best scoring group are those who take the test only in their sophomore year, and their mean score is 1603 (526 / 549 / 528).

Lastly for today, a few Fun Facts, a preview of the percentiles and demographics data to come in the next post in this series:

• Of the 9% of test takers for whom English is not their first language learned (reporting), there was a 7 point mean increase on the math section, while there was a 32 point decline in the critical reading and 24 point decline on average in the writing section.
• 22% of test-takers say they don’t plan to apply for financial aid. (Why not? Lot’s of reasons, but a lot of those numbers probably should be applying, I bet!)
• Those students with coursework or experience in Italian did worst on the math section of all languages polled, with a mean score of 509–lower even than the dismal performances of “other languages.”

Look forward to more to come! Just didn’t want to overload people with too many numbers and too much text all in one place. Enjoy!

Teachers, educators, and librarians sometimes ponder the possible uses of Facebook as an education tool; students and teachers alike talk about the awkwardness and occasional utility that arises from online social networking interactions between-groups. The Education Committee of Missouri has weighed in with a proposal which paints its picture using a giant “sex offenders are everywhere, trying to sneak into our schools” brush. The Columbia Missourian reports:

Teachers would be restricted from connecting with students on Web sites such as Facebook under a proposal by the House Education Committee chairwoman.

The Education Committee added a section to a bill Wednesday regarding teacher-student interaction on social networking Web sites that parents cannot access.

The umbrella bill, aimed at keeping sexual offenders from teaching in Missouri schools, would prohibit teachers from using a “non-work-related Internet site” to communicate with students where third parties have no access. In other words, parents need to see profiles.

“Rep. Jane Cunningham, R-St. Louis, committee chairwoman and sponsor of the bill, said its purpose is to protect children from offenders that school administration cannot catch.” Thus, to protect children from the very small fraction of would-be teachers who might possibly be sex offenders or otherwise have villainous intentions for the youth of Missouri, a whole potential range of social interactions are set to be neutered. Why not ban e-mail, telegraphs, or carrier pigeons, too?

There’s a joke in here somewhere about Missouri being the “Show Me State” but I’m not even going to search for it, because this is just so poorly calculated in my mind–the goal and the means to achieving that goal seem very disconnected and its reminiscent of the deeply misinformed national debate on so many “protect the children from the scary internet” stories in Washington. Thoughts? Christian, other teachers and educators, your opinions especially wanted. Faculty + facebook — always no go?