Attention on Tennessee (as a basketball state) and an educational hub

If you follow Men's College Basketball, you know this:

The University of Memphis was #1. Their team lost to the University of Tennessee, which claimed the #1 spot.

Then Tennessee lost to Vanderbilt, (also in the state of Tennessee).

So the story lines for sportswriters ("Hey, you're not even tops in your own State?") also brings attention to the state as an educational hub.

For instance...

The UT system has a couple other campuses of note. UT-Knoxville is the main hub, but there's also Chattanooga and Martin.

We happen to really like another Memphis school called Crichton.

And in Nashville, check out Watkins College of Art & Design.

An Unbelievably Cool Diversion

The magic of technology brings us something called GrandCentral. While I'm not sure what the use is for U Sphere, it sure is cool to post voice mail messages. Like this one.



This service was acquired by Google recently -- and one neato thing for protecting your privacy is that you can say "Call Me," put a link up to a number that goes to your phone -- but never have to give out your phone number. Cool? I think so...

We don't want you here anyway, silly...

That's the comment, received anonymously this morning, to our posting from the Fall about Northern Arizona University's recruitment ad campaign.

Fair comment from the peanut gallery...

It also tells us a little (or maybe a lot) about the sense of community that exists at some schools and, frankly, doesn't at others. The fact that there's someone out there who actually cares to comment...well, speaks volumes about NAU's community.

Have We Mentioned the Cloud Lately?

This U Sphere cloud we've come up with is pretty cool, if we do say so ourselves. Take a look:

Cloud.

No, it's not 100% scientific, and thousands of logins tomorrow could change the way it looks if they all decide to put the same school in their profile. But it's still pretty cool...

Student Loan Questions Raised -- A Link to a Great Posting from Christopher Penn

Few know the ins and outs of financial aid better than our friend Christopher Penn, from the Financial Aid Podcast.

He's told this story better than we could, so we've decided to just link to it.

See here.

The Tragedy at Northern Illinois University

The U Sphere team sends out its thoughts and prayers to all of those in the Northern Illinois University family touched by the tragedy yesterday.

While we can't even begin to comprehend why something like this would happen, we do know this -- from having visited the NIU campus and known dozens of students there: it's a community, and a strong one at that.

BTW, the link above goes straight to the front of the NIU web page, where you can offer your own sympathies to the families of the victims.