Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean
yalecollege.yale.edu
Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean
1–10 of 86 posts
Re: Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean
#2so will they allow the app now?
Re: Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean
#3As much as I would love to sit here carrying on about how Information Wants to be Free, I do appreciate where she's coming from. YBB forced to students to actually read course evals and apply critical thinking to their class selection. YBB+ wrongly suggests that the quality of a class can be reduced to a scalar value.
We've complained about this bitterly going the other way. How many app developers are frustrated when they get a one-star review that says, "This app couldn't sync to my online account unless I was connected to the internet. Changing to five stars when that's fixed"? How many Amazon shoppers have seen one-star reviews that say, "The package was damaged during shipping. The return was really easy and I got a replacement in two days, but I wanted it for an event that happened before the replacement came."?
Re: Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean
#4As much as I would love to sit here carrying on about how Information Wants to be Free, I do appreciate where she's coming from. YBB forced to students to actually read course evals and apply critical thinking to their class selection. YBB+ wrongly suggests that the quality of a class can be reduced to a scalar value. We've complained about this bitterly going the other way. How many app developers are frustrated whe…
> YBB forced [] students to actually read course evals and apply critical thinking to their class selection.
This doesn't come close to being true in any sense. Wanting to do something and actually doing it are barely even related concepts.
Re: Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean
#5As much as I would love to sit here carrying on about how Information Wants to be Free, I do appreciate where she's coming from. YBB forced to students to actually read course evals and apply critical thinking to their class selection. YBB+ wrongly suggests that the quality of a class can be reduced to a scalar value. We've complained about this bitterly going the other way. How many app developers are frustrated whe…
As an app developer who has gotten those reviews, the reality is they don't actually matter. Since everyone gets them, the real question is how many happy and 5 star reviews you get from the rest of your customers. You don't have 3 stars because of the guy that put 1 star, you have 3 stars because of the people who gave it 3, or all the people who didn't feel it was worth it to put down 5 stars.
The situation is the same here, at my school when viewing aggregate evaluation data, I find it to be VERY accurate to the actual experience I've had in those classes, and I think that's the issue here. Yale is protecting teachers from being called out for being bad teachers.
Re: Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean
#6I think this is a great example of both compromise and overreaction. In the end, they are clearly trying to give students the tools they want, but this should have been the first response, not the second. I can't find it now but the other yale student that wrote the chrome extension was the main catalyst. He took the complaints of Yale and removed them therefore forcing them to find new logic, which they did. Hats off to him.
Re: Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean
#7Original post for context: http://haufler.org/2014/01/19/i-hope-i-dont-get-kicked-out-o...
Re: Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean
#8so will they allow the app now?
As I read the letter, first they're going to stop providing faculty evaluations, and then they're going to set up a bureaucracy overseeing student-developer use of university resources. After that, they may or may not reallow the app, but as the letter points out:
> Just this weekend, we learned of a tool that replicates YBB+'s efforts without violating Yale’s appropriate use policy, and that leapfrogs over the hardest questions before us.
Not a huge victory for the students here. :/
Re: Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean
#9So that's what you do with an art degree
Re: Open letter to the Yale Community from Dean
#10As much as I would love to sit here carrying on about how Information Wants to be Free, I do appreciate where she's coming from. YBB forced to students to actually read course evals and apply critical thinking to their class selection. YBB+ wrongly suggests that the quality of a class can be reduced to a scalar value. We've complained about this bitterly going the other way. How many app developers are frustrated whe…
There is already some data that Apple doesn't provide in the app store but that third party sites do collect, namely price history. Being able to see if an app often goes on sale is very useful to the user, but not information that Apple or the developers want to make obvious.