Yesterday we linked to an article in The Arizona Republic describing difficulties that the Maricopa County Community Colleges have had installing a new student-information system. The story depicted Maricopa’s project as a financial fiasco, but campus officials say it has been no such thing.
In a letter to Maricopa employees, the colleges’ chancellor, Rufus Glasper, said the information system should be up and running by October. And he argued that Maricopa’s expenditures on the project were in line with what other institutions have spent:Since 1994, the Maricopa Community Colleges have spent a total of $45-million on technology development, with $20-million of that on the current Student Information System project. There is no debate that is a lot of money, yet when you look at the size of our organization (we serve more than 250,000 students per year), and the fact that our systems must accommodate the needs of not one but 10 colleges, Maricopa is well within the range of what has been spent elsewhere.
The full text of Mr. Glasper’s message is available here.—Brock Read
9 Responses to Maricopa Community Colleges Say They Haven’t Overspent
mbelvadi - March 23, 2012 at 7:02 am
Tweets are short enough that the entire “work cited” can be included verbatim in the citation – I think that point says something important, but I’m not sure what.
Steve Muhlberger - March 23, 2012 at 9:49 am
“…but are willing to boast of it in public.”
Oh, well said!
Nick Seaver - March 23, 2012 at 10:44 am
It seems like a bad idea to stick bitly in the middle of your link: what happens if bitly crashes, closes for good, or is shut down by libya?: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/libya_shuts_down_vbly_bitly_owly_next.php
Mark Allen - March 23, 2012 at 11:06 am
The @ symbol is either part of the name or a tool for identification. MLA doesn’t include it before the Twitter handle, but the CMOS answer does. Is it redundant to say Carol Saller tweets at @SubvCopyEd? My thinking: It’s become integral to the name and immediately identifies it as a Twitter handle. Leaving it off causes a moment of confusion. We don’t give e-mail addresses as “markallen at the organizational domain copydesk.”
Carol Saller - March 23, 2012 at 11:24 am
I agree that URLs are a problem, but the problem isn’t limited to Twitter. And not even the expanded versions are necessarily permanent.
Carol Saller - March 23, 2012 at 11:26 am
I agree, Mark. But I don’t like the way @ looks in parentheses. I might argue for a different treatment if I’m around when CMOS 17 is drafted.
dank48 - March 23, 2012 at 12:12 pm
Well, after all, we’re all accustomed to the ultimate informal attribution, namely “Jane Doe (personal communication, March 23, 2012),” so why not accept Twitter? So long as the form provides the proper documentation, what does it matter how one acquired the information? I suppose we should draw the line somewhere this side of “(sudden epiphany)” or “(personal revelation),” but Twitter’s informality and, to some of us, unfamiliarity hardly seems grounds for panic.
On a not totally unrelated matter, if you’re still around, and I hope you are, for CMOS 17, I’d suggest calming down the design from the last two editions. I’m no particular fan of TR, heaven knows, but–especially combined with Baskerville display–it does have the requisite blandness to convey a huge amount of complex information without calling attention to itself. Whatever else book design is, it’s not about self-expression.
The message is the point; the messenger’s role is to deliver the message, not to distract the recipient.
Richard Grayson - March 23, 2012 at 2:08 pm
Thanks for this great piece! I just tweeted this (web)site!
humpty_dumpty - March 23, 2012 at 11:48 pm
“What surprised me was the amount of backlash from commenters who are still shocked at the idea of Twitter as a legitimate source of information for scholars; who cling to the idea that Twitter data consists only of what millions of users ate for breakfast”
Exactly – very surprizing. Even assuming for the argument’s sake that there ain’t nothing but crap in Twitter, how about people doing research in linguistics, media studies, psychology, etc. etc. etc., who may be interested in the very crappiest crap out there, because it proves some point for them. As in studies in film impact by learing if the “American Pie” fans have pies for breakfast oftener than the average person (the first example that crossed my mind). Finally, if one of the backlashers were to prove, scientifically, that there ain’t nothing but useless-for-scholars crap on Twitter, the person would have to offer examples, and that would mean… quoting Twitter!