An infographic about grade inflation, a pretty universal reality in Western universities as insititutions — despite an ambiguous rhetoric of ‘excellence’ — create pressures for higher grades.

Short of putting direct pressure on professors (as it happens in the countries where class averages are taken into account in performance evaluations), sometimes the curricula are designed in a way that encourages low standards; and the system is designed to make it hard to fail students (giving the students lots of second opportunities not to, having the professor go through a bureaucracy to fail a student, etc). That said, while not being fanatical about it, I know the bell curve tends to be a fact of life, so I’m almost always going to give out a lot more ‘B’s and ‘C’s. ‘A’s should really be exceptional.

I like Stellar. As Jason Kottke put it, it tracks your (and others’) favourite things online, by reading your ‘favourites’/’likes’/etc. from YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter and Flickr, and crossreferencing it with other users. It’s a cool way to discover neatness.

On the other hand Stellar makes Tumblr, which I described as “blogging for the lazy” upon discovering it, feel like a bureaucracy — even a ‘reblog’ requires at least two clicks and considering whether to add some comment. By contrast, your Stellar blog/stream/wall (there called the ‘flow’) is a product of your one-click ‘liking’ and favouriting around. ‘Creating’ is actually consuming and, at best, Stellar may cement the reputation of some users as good curators. Nowhere there’s that tiny Tumblr pretense of being a place where people do create original posts or at least original captions to other people’s stuff (95% of posts are probably n-th level ‘reblogs’, but still). Stellar is cleaner — only stuff you somehow declared to like, with no comments and no ‘via’ paths. I like it.

But considering the Web is shaped by the tools it offers, does Stellar’s architecture represent the level of engagement we desire? And should we even care?