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Beyond the Textbook

'Even if you have the most up-to-date edition of the very latest textbook, I think it's recognize that the textbook -- as an object, as instructional practice -- is still a relic. It is a relic of a time when information was scarce. It's a relic of the way in which we manufactured and scaled the industrial model of education -- a teacher at the front of the classroom, assigning the lessons and readings from an authoritative text. One that was bound by print. One that was distributed state and even nation-wide. One that was uniform. Somewhere along the way, "textbook" became "curriculum" -- and under today's testing regime, that all became wrapped up in "assessment."'

academia academic-culture publishing textbooks pedagogy collaboration adhocism pragmatism
9 weeks ago by Vaguery

copy to mine

The Conversation, the startup Australian news site, wants to bring academic expertise to breaking news » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism

"First, “every author has to fill out a profile, so the reader knows who the person is and their education. And there is the additional requirement of a disclosure of any potential conflicts which might color their judgment.” Second, in response to the political question — after noting that my academics-are-liberal assertion might be a bit loaded — Jaspan replied that what The Conversation is ultimately doing is putting people in touch with “academics who are usually better informed than the general public because of their depth of knowledge and their sense of the complexity of the issue.”

Third, and most important, Jaspan sees The Conversation, true to its name, as leading to public debate. “One of the key things we want to do with a public-facing media channel is to make sure we have a range of views on something like the execution of Osama Bin Ladin, and that we have different interpretations of what happened and whether or not the means in which it was done were judicial.” The main goal, though: “We want to surprise our readers. We don’t want to give them the usual explanations, alternative insights, and viewpoints — and that will lead to lively conversation.”

Jaspan’s backers come from both the nonprofit and for-profit realms. The Conversation is backed by Ernst & Young, among other corporate supporters. And from academia, he has drawn on some of the top Australian research universities, in addition to Australia’s Department of Education. To find the academics, Jaspan and his staff did a “census” of academics based on their areas of expertise. Then, by word of mouth, they asked participating academics to recommend colleagues who would make good contributors to the site."

journalism academia commentary deepening-the-news experiment conversation
may 2011 by Vaguery

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Introducing Randomness « Bionic Teaching

I was lucky enough to be able to present as a plenary speaker1 as well. After being repeatedly told to “bring my A game” I had completely psyched myself out. In direct retaliation I decided to introduce as many elements of “randomness” as I could into this presentation.2 I’m not necessarily arguing that all three made the presentation better but it did make it more interesting to me and I think they did add some interesting elements for the audience.

in-praise-of-randomness conference academia teaching public-speaking still-watching-the-video-but-I-approve-so-far
may 2011 by Vaguery

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Why you may not like your job, even though everyone envies you

"To summarize: trading practical work for high-level positions is prestigious, but it may make you dumber, alienated and unhappy. Back when I was a graduate student, we used to joke about the accident. The accident is what happens to successful professors: they suddenly become uninteresting, pompous, and… frankly… a tad stupid."

via:iamsidd2k7 for-all-my-academic-friends-and-correspondents worklife not-an-employee life-o'-the-mind academia academic-culture
november 2010 by Vaguery

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Learning Curves: Pick Your Battles: End of the Semester Edition

"Some feel powerless because they have no control over their lives and are doing poorly at their own classes and need to demonstrate power (and their self-belief of their superior mathematical skillz) in the only venue they have, their class. Some of the rest were picked on by business majors when they were undergrads. Some of the rest really don't believe that it's possible for an educated person to be as bad at algebra as the students who attend this university."

academia academic-culture cultural-assumptions graduate-school grading mathematics pedagogy learning-by-failing
april 2010 by Vaguery

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News: Who Really Failed? - Inside Higher Ed

"Ellwood, the campus AAUP chapter president, said that his group had verified that no one informed Homberger of concerns before removing her from the course, and that no one had questioned the integrity of her tests. He also said that the scores on the second test were notably better than on the first one, suggesting that students were responding to the need to do more work. "She's very rigorous. There's no doubt about that," he said."

academia academic-culture grading expectations-as-stylized-behavior faculty value-divergence whuffie-culture
april 2010 by Vaguery

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High Throughput Humanities

"The High Throughput Humanities satellite event at ECCS'10 establishes a forum for high throughput approaches in the humanities and social sciences, within the framework of complex systems science. The symposium aims to go beyond massive data aquisition and to present results beyond what can be manually achieved by a single person or a small group. Bringing together scientists, researchers, and practitioners from relevant fields, the event will stimulate and facilitate discussion, spark collaboration, as well as connect approaches, methods, and ideas.

The main goal of the event is to present novel results based on analyses of Big Data (see NATURE special issue 2009), focusing on emergent complex properties and dynamics, which allow for new insights, applications, and services."

Morettism humanities academia conferences complex-systems misprision-about-data
march 2010 by Vaguery

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Building a Better Teacher - Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

"Another problem I've often had (as recently as last semester!) is that my goals for students--what they're expected to be able to do when the semester is over--are often not well defined. When we don't have a sense of where we're going, our 15-week courses often fall apart somewhere around week 7 or so. But this should not be such an issue in high school."

pedagogy teaching academia learning-by-doing advice citation-etiquette
march 2010 by Vaguery

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Humanities And Inhumanities | The New Republic

"Menand focuses on the elite institutions that still concentrate on providing an education in the arts and sciences, and argues that they have failed to respond to these and other painfully obvious problems because they remain stuck in patterns that were set a century and more ago. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he explains, scholars set out to create a limited free space in which they could set standards for the fields they practiced and for undergraduate and graduate training--a professional space dedicated, like the legal and medical professional spaces that took shape at the same time, to pursuing the general good rather than personal gain."

academic-culture disintermediation-in-action life-o'-the-mind cultural-assumptions academia education future humanities universities
march 2010 by Vaguery

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Viewpoint: Time for computer science to grow up | August 2009 | Communications of the ACM

"Our conference system forces researchers to focus too heavily on quick, technical, and safe papers instead of considering broader and newer ideas. Meanwhile, we have devoted much of our time and money to conferences where we can present our research that we can rarely attend conferences and workshops to work and socialize with our colleagues.

Computer science has grown to become a mature field where no major university can survive without a strong CS department. It is time for computer science to grow up and publish in a way that represents the major discipline it has become."

computer-science academia academic-culture publishing peer-review conferences credentialing
march 2010 by Vaguery

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Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education: Vampires and Zombies: Transnational Transformations

"Contributors are invited to submit papers on aspects of zombies and vampires as they relate to texts and media across cultural boundaries."

conferences academia horror criticism sociology media-studies popular-culture
february 2010 by Vaguery

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Parsons launches new MFA program in Transdisciplinary Design - Core77

"Parsons The New School for Design announced a new MFA in Transdisciplinary Design set to launch in Fall 2010. The program is based in the School of Design Strategies at Parsons, which encompasses innovative programs that apply design thinking to study the intersection of cities, services and ecosystems."

generalism academia pedagogy startups disintermediation-in-action new-thinking
february 2010 by Vaguery

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Pseudonymity, Blogging, and Journalism Versus Marketing : Mike the Mad Biologist

"Hell, if someone wants me to write a professional science-only blog where I talk solely about science in my capacity as a known scientist, then they'll have to pay me like a professional (just like those whiny Nature bloggers get paid)--and I already have a full-time job, thank you. Like I said, that's not what we do here. Nor will we: it cheapens the blogging.

An aside: Something that people seem to forget is that one of the strengths of ScienceBlogs, in my opinion, is that many bloggers here are professional research and educators, not full-time professional writers."

academia academic-culture blogging professionalism writing what-do-you-do-for-a-living?
february 2010 by Vaguery

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J-Schools Get an F in Finance | Newspaper Death Watch

"The students were aware that they’re stepping into an uncertain world but they didn’t seem to grasp the finer points of the media business. Looking at the journalism department’s website later, I could see why. The curriculum lists 29 courses in the journalism program, and not a single one is about the economics of publishing or how to sustain a career as a journalist.

This university is failing it students. I suspect that so are a lot of others."

academia academia-doesn't-guarantee-acuity economics worklife pedagogy universities jobs
february 2010 by Vaguery

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Confessions of a Community College Dean: The Times Whiffs Again

"Several alert readers sent me links to this article from the New York Times. It's a weirdly chipper "pick up some money in your spare time by adjuncting!" piece, written for (and apparently by) people who aren't terribly conversant in higher ed.

Depending on your angle to the universe, it could be read as refreshing, bizarre, or deeply offensive. (I fall into the 'bizarre' camp, with sympathies for the 'deeply offensive.')"

education academia adjunct worklife assumptions
february 2010 by Vaguery

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Confessions of a Community College Dean: Friday Fragments

QOTW: "There's a reason so many super-villains have graduate degrees."

academic-culture academia yeah
december 2009 by Vaguery

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No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons (Re-reloaded) » Because As We All Know, The Green Party Runs the World.

"Science doesn’t work despite scientists being asses. Science works, to at least some extent, because scientists are asses. Bickering and backstabbing are essential elements of the process. Haven’t any of these guys ever heard of “peer review”?
There’s this myth in wide circulation: rational, emotionless Vulcans in white coats, plumbing the secrets of the universe, their Scientific Methods unsullied by bias or emotionalism. Most people know it’s a myth, of course; they subscribe to a more nuanced view in which scientists are as petty and vain and human as anyone (and as egotistical as any therapist or financier), people who use scientific methodology to tamp down their human imperfections and manage some approximation of objectivity."

science academic-culture cultural-norms cultural-assumptions mythology logic academia
november 2009 by Vaguery

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Conference Proceedings

"The current global financial crisis, visibly catalyzed by the rapid drop in securitized mortgage valuations in the summer 2007, has entailed a dramatic decrease in the availability of credit, wealth destruction linked to stock market valuations, the failure of banks and insurance companies, numerous other bankruptcies, the growth of governmental intervention, a deep and protracted recession, and a general rise in the uncertainty of Capitalistic institutions. It is in unsettled times such as these that hegemonic and taken-for-granted ideas and institutions may be challenged, and new alternatives cultivated. In the context of the early 21st century, it is the hegemonic ideals of markets, market-based solutions, and the ideology of neoliberalism that is on trial."

economics financial-crisis philosophy academia social-sciences essays
november 2009 by Vaguery

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Lowess is great : Applied Statistics

"One of the discussants in Brain and Behavioral Sciences of Seth Roberts's article on self-experimentation was by Martin Voracek and Maryanne Fisher. They had a bunch of negative things to say about self-experimentation, but as a statistician, I was struck by their concern about "the overuse of the loess procedure." I think lowess (or loess) is just wonderful, and I don't know that I've ever seen it overused."

regression models statistics received-wisdom cultural-norms academia communities-of-practice
november 2009 by Vaguery

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Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines: GPEM 10(4) now available online

"The fourth issue of volume 10 of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines is now available online. This is the first part of the two-part Special Issue on Parallel and Distributed Evolutionary Algorithms, and it contains the following articles:..." [which I unfortunately cannot read; dammit, Springer]

genetic-programming academia papers journal distributed-processing somebody-toss-me-a-bone-please
november 2009 by Vaguery

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Open Source Science? Or Distributed Science? : Common Knowledge

"Open source, if we view it through a different lens, is really more about a distributed methodology for software development. The burden of creation is widely distributed across a massive community with more-or-less equal access to tools and systems. In this context, the role of the legal tool is more akin to an enzyme. It was an essential piece of a puzzle, but it was not the only piece. In fact, without the rest of the infrastructure (connectivity, tools, and people) the legal tool on its own would not have led us to GNU/Linux."

openness distributed crowdsourcing science science2.0 community collaboration infrastructure academia academic-culture
november 2009 by Vaguery

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The Valve - A Literary Organ | The Audacity of Audacity

"Take the example of higher-education teaching, where deprofessionalization has meant that persons who need a reasonable return on education (ie, they work to live) increasingly leave faculty work to those who have another source of income. This means that campus employers sort for persons who can subsidize themselves, or find a corporate sponsor.

Even from a straight-up liberal perspective, this has major harms, advantaging corporate-driven curiousity--see Washburn.

Similarly, turning college teaching (back) into philanthropy functions as a significant economic discrimination that, in the U.S. also works to segment campus labor by gender, ethnicity, and age. In turn, this affects student learning, and the nature and quality of research."

academia academic-culture public-policy economics labor-v-capital
november 2009 by Vaguery

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Seb's Open Research: The Fate of the Incompetent Teacher in the YouTube Era

"How fast is this going to happen? Well, Khan is already becoming famous. Last year CNN gave him airtime to explain the financial crisis. Why him, and not an economics Ph.D. type, you ask? Because he is understandable, and because some genius at CNN figured out that at least some of their viewers were able and willing to learn a little bit in order to understand what is going on."

pedagogy web2.0 disintermediation education academia YouTube learning teaching distance science2.0
november 2009 by Vaguery

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Tran|script, by Mike Caulfield » Blog Archive » Abstinence-only Web Education

"Shockingly crazy worldview, I hereby name you “Abstinence-only Web Education”.
Adding this: there is always this resentment of people in the Academy toward the term “real world” — as in what we teach them “in here” has to pertain to the real world “out there”. I sympathize with that resentment, and even commiserated about the inappropriateness of the term with a coworker a couple nights ago.
But it’s things like abstinence-only web education that make that term relevant and, yes, often a legitimate critique. It’s not everybody, true, but the belief of even a percentage in higher education that what we really need to do is get back to printed books to solve the information filter problem is evidence enough that we are insulated from the world outside the campus, and to a stunning degree."

cultural-norms academia education pedagogy web2.0 disintermediation-targets
november 2009 by Vaguery

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Critical Mass - Bad day at the office

"ACTA has argued--quite convincingly and interestingly--that our accreditation system is badly broken, and has laid out a plan for repairing it. Among the recommendations: break the link between accreditation and federal financial aid. See ACTA's 2007 report, Why Accreditation Doesn't Work and What Policymakers Can Do About it."

universities academia academic-culture financial-crisis public-policy funding colleges sea-changes
october 2009 by Vaguery

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iFoundry

"Made possible by an $8 million gift from the entrepreneurs for whom the program is named, the Rajendra and Neera Singh Program in Market and Social Systems Engineering, MKSE, will be the first course of study to fully integrate the disciplines needed in this emerging science. The intellectual core of the program will encompass network science, algorithmic game theory and other disciplines relevant to engineers and scientists as they consider human incentives and behavior in developing modern technological systems."

social-networks social-engineering academia pedagogy interesting
october 2009 by Vaguery

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Communiqué from an Absent Future « we want everything

"If the university teaches us primarily how to be in debt, how to waste our labor power, how to fall prey to petty anxieties, it thereby teaches us how to be consumers. Education is a commodity like everything else that we want without caring for. It is a thing, and it makes its purchasers into things. One’s future position in the system, one’s relation to others, is purchased first with money and then with the demonstration of obedience."

academia academic-culture cultural-norms politics education future activism ashes-make-glass
september 2009 by Vaguery

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Confessions of a Community College Dean: Just Say No?

"The tenure system is based on the sole breadwinner with a stay-at-home wife. Tinkering around the edges -- "post-tenure review," stopping the clock, mentoring -- falls fatally short of addressing a fundamentally flawed structure. If we want the workload spread evenly, in the name of fairness, we need to be able to hold everybody accountable for their work. Until then, the good sports will suffer, and the narcissistic jerks will just keep on prospering."

academia academic-culture professors professionalism tenure free-riders disintermediation-targets
september 2009 by Vaguery

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Edge: ECONOMICS IS NOT NATURAL SCIENCE By Douglas Rushkoff

"We must stop perpetuating the fiction that existence itself is dictated by the immutable laws of economics. These so-called laws are, in actuality, the economic mechanisms of 13th Century monarchs. Some of us analyzing digital culture and its impact on business must reveal economics as the artificial construction it really is. Although it may be subjected to the scientific method and mathematical scrutiny, it is not a natural science; it is game theory, with a set of underlying assumptions that have little to do with anything resembling genetics, neurology, evolution, or natural systems."

economics economicS-reform received-wisdom history cultural-assumptions science psychology social-psychology academia capitalism money models
september 2009 by Vaguery

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College for $99 a Month by Kevin Carey | Washington Monthly

"StraighterLine is the brainchild of a man named Burck Smith, an Internet entrepreneur bent on altering the DNA of higher education as we have known it for the better part of 500 years. Rather than students being tethered to ivy-covered quads or an anonymous commuter campus, Smith envisions a world where they can seamlessly assemble credits and degrees from multiple online providers, each specializing in certain subjects and—most importantly—fiercely competing on price. Smith himself may be the person who revolutionizes the university, or he may not be. But someone with the means and vision to fundamentally reorder the way students experience and pay for higher education is bound to emerge."

academia academic-culture business-model disintermediation disintermediation-in-action education industry credentials
september 2009 by Vaguery

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Fistful of Talent: What the Future of HR is not Learning... But Should Be...

"The second driver is a consistent ignorance, apathy and a serious underestimation of the impact of new technology on the businesses that HR supports (particularly social technologies). Technology moves so quickly and for HR leaders and professionals it can seem so easy (and sometimes necessary) to remain in their comfort zone of policy creation and enforcement, employee relations, or compliance reporting."

via:rlanhman540 human-resources corporatism pedagogy academia learning-by-doing cultural-norms business-culture
september 2009 by Vaguery

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PHD Comics: Post hoc vs. Post-doc

"right?"

academia graduate-school Ponzi comix
august 2009 by Vaguery

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Edge: THE IMPENDING DEMISE OF THE UNIVERSITY By Don Tapscott

"In the industrial model of student mass production, the teacher is the broadcaster. A broadcast is by definition the transmission of information from transmitter to receiver in a one-way, linear fashion. The teacher is the transmitter and student is a receptor in the learning process. The formula goes like this: "I'm a professor and I have knowledge. You're a student, you're an empty vessel and you don't. Get ready, here it comes. Your goal is to take this data into your short-term memory and through practice and repetition build deeper cognitive structures so you can recall it to me when I test you."... The definition of a lecture has become the process in which the notes of the teacher go to the notes of the student without going through the brains of either."

academia academic-culture universities disintermediation-targets cultural-norms cultural-engineering business-model futurism intellectual-property credentials
august 2009 by Vaguery

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Computational Complexity: Time for Computer Science to Grow Up

"Our conference systems forces researchers to focus too heavily on quick, technical
and safe papers instead of considering broader and newer ideas. Meanwhile we
have focused much of our time and money on conferences where we can present
our research that we can rarely attend conferences and workshops to work and
socialize with our colleagues."

computer-science academia publishing academic-culture
july 2009 by Vaguery

copy to mine

The Valve - A Literary Organ | Colorado Judge Mugs Churchill

"Look for this stinker to be reversed on appeal. And if it isn’t--whoa, nelly. Strap on for a wild ride. Increasingly the Law says administrations have academic freedom--and you don’t.

Here’s your homework assignment for the day. Ask yourself what “academic freedom for administrators” means."

academic-culture law academia academic-freedom universities disintermediation-targets have-the-cook-set-aside-some-Schadenfreude-now-please
july 2009 by Vaguery

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Academic Evolution: Scholarly Inquiry Optimization (SIO) - Overview

"We need more than the passive ideal of easy access to published knowledge; we need the active ideal of improved methodologies for advancing knowledge. In the Enlightenment Francis Bacon had the boldness to call for a Novum Organum, a "new instrument" of knowledge (in contrast to Aristotle's old Organum); similarly, we must devise new instruments of knowledge to match our cyber environment. Ours is a knowledge revolution on par with the introduction of empirical research itself or even the codification of the scientific method. But are we conceptualizing and establishing the new methodologies to the same degree that we are fighting for the free circulation of traditional materials? We are not. That's why we need Scholarly Inquiry Optimization."

publishing academic-culture findability open-access scholarship academia
june 2009 by Vaguery

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Edge 288

'"Graduate education," he began, "is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans)." The key problem, he noted, began with Kant in his 1798 work, "The Conflict of the Faculties." Kant argued that universities should "handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee."'

academia pedagogy disintermediation-targets interview univers future knowledge trends
june 2009 by Vaguery

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Colleges Consider Using Human Skin Instead of Blackboard at Bionic Teaching

"Unfortunately, this tendency to overvalue life outside of academia is typical of the demented and deranged. Luckily police were on hand to place Ms. Sheehan-Saldaña in protective custody before she could do further harm to her career."

pedagogy academia academic-culture technology universities Conservation-of-Higher-Education
june 2009 by Vaguery

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Symposium on Engineering and Liberal Education

'"What is it that identifies humans? The use of tools. For that reason, perhaps engineering is the most human of studies. ... Maybe we should teach engineering as a liberal art, and maybe a piece of every literate person's experience should be to create a useful artifact that improves life, including something as important as communication."'

engineering conference education pedagogy academia generalism worklife engineering-philosophy pragmatism
june 2009 by Vaguery

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"Rethinking Critically Reflective Research Practice"

"Ironically, Popper’s original critique of empirical foundationalism thus paved the way for a new theoretical foundationalism. Either you are grounded in theory, or you have no grounds at all for claiming to be a competent participant. The new foundationalism here reveals its elitist and technocratic face as well as its impractical nature at once. It burdens researchers and professionals with the impossible role of having to “explain,” by virtue of their advantage of theoretical and methodological expertise, to all others what in a concrete situation would be a correct understanding of “the problem” and what might be done about it. At the same time, it largely immunizes these “explanations” against the critical efforts of concerned citizens. If they do not agree with the experts’ monologically presented findings and conclusions, it is their problem, as it were; for the reason can only be that they are insufficiently informed or […] unable to understand the reasoning of the experts."

research philosophy-of-science philosophy academia theory-and-practice-sitting-in-a-tree
may 2009 by Vaguery

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thoughtbox

"I think you're logic is backwards. You make it public so that people can refractor the umich-specific parts if that's useful to them. Every OSS project starts out only meeting the specific needs of its creators. You make it public so it can become generally applicable, not make it generally applicable so it can become public."

cultural-norms academia academic-culture open-source collaboration value-divergence FAIL
may 2009 by Vaguery

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The Valve - A Literary Organ | No Problem With Student Debt?

"Among the many inconvenient facts that Wilson leaves out is that present trends suggest that 40 to 50 percent of all persons with bachelor’s degrees in 2009 will eventually go on to graduate or professional school. Those debts can be enormous, and when one acknowledges the real chances that any individual with a B.A. will go on to grad school the “lifetime of debt” is indeed more “likely.”"

students financial-crisis debt academia disintermediation-targets Chronicle-of-We-Got-Tenure-an-You-Don't
may 2009 by Vaguery

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PHD Comics: Science News Cycle
science media academia communication it's-more-complicated-than-you-think
may 2009 by Vaguery

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Ernie's 3D Pancakes: Yet another reason to hate Elsevier

"Now tell me again: Why do we submit papers to, referee papers for, and buy journals from these people? Some sort of misplaced sense of loyalty? Or some sad combination of apathy and inertia? What will it take for the research community to cut Elsevier loose?"

publishing Elsevier academia academic-culture journals bad-decision bad-faith bad-business disintermediation-targets
may 2009 by Vaguery

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Urban Oasis » Should You Get a PhD?

"I’ve heard a variation on Benton’s phrase “good people get good jobs” in a number of venues, some from clueless, privileged wankers who said it in earnest, sometimes from professors who said that the phrase was the extent of the advice they got from their grad school advisors shortly before being turned out to the wolves of the mid-70s job market. Don’t believe it. Sometimes good people get bad jobs or no jobs at all; sometimes terrible people get great jobs. Not only is there a shortage of jobs, the search process is totally capricious and inscrutable."

academia academic-culture cultural-norms pedagogy PhD graduate-school
april 2009 by Vaguery

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Luis von Blog: Academic Publications 2.0

"Can a combination of a wiki, karma, and a voting method like reddit or digg substitute the current system of academic publication?"

[A: yes]

academia academic-culture credentials citation publishing collaboration science research writing web2.0
april 2009 by Vaguery

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Brad DeLong's Egregious Moderation: Kevin Carey: What Colleges Should Learn From Newspapers' Decline

[Compare with aforementioned Bob Martin's Craftsmanship post...]

"As of today, there's no Craigslist busily destroying the financial foundations of the modern university. Teaching is a lot more complicated than advertising, and universities have the advantage of sitting behind government-backed barriers to competition, in the form of accreditation. Anyone can use the Internet to sell classified ads or publish opinion columns or analyze the local news. Not anyone can sell credit-bearing courses or widely recognized degrees."

economics disintermediation-targets education academia business future universities
april 2009 by Vaguery

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Master Craftsman Teams.

"Why should a young aspiring software professional spend four years and $200K+ to attend an institution that will teach them less about their chosen profession than 3 months of working on a real project with talented mentors? Indeed, why should employers pay $50K for undertrained programmers who are sure to make horrific messes for the next three years of their career?

Consider instead a team of craftspeople. At the center of this team is a master programmer. This is someone who has been programming for two decades or more. This person understand systems at a gut level, and can quickly make technical judgements without agonizing over them. Such a person can direct a team with the kind of calm confidence that only comes with years of experience and seasoning."

academia training pedagogy guild computer-science-is-not-software-development programming development engineering learning craftsmanship
april 2009 by Vaguery

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3TU.Centre for Ethics and Technology

publications

ethics philosophy-of-science philosophy-of-engineering academia public-policy technology engineering-design
march 2009 by Vaguery

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Technische Universiteit Eindhoven: Simon Stevin Series

A number of very nice theses and whitepapers.

philosophy-of-science philosophy philosophy-of-engineering artifacts making engineering engineering-design ethics design academia
march 2009 by Vaguery

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High Speed Computer Conference 1957 Program, Page 1 on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

A technical conference schedule from my Dad's papers.

computing computer-science conference history nanohistory ephemera academia futurism pastism
march 2009 by Vaguery

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ghetto of our mind: Why it's ok to feel stupid - especially in Science

"I was amazed that the Journal of Cell Science has the wherewithal to publish an essay like this. Kudos to the author of the essay and the editors of the journal. "

science self-image learning-by-doing academia cultural-norms article stupidity why-we-are-not-cowboys
march 2009 by Vaguery

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dense outliers

"After a bit of work we believe we have solved most of the practical problems that have to be taken care of before starting a free journal. This is probably the easy part. Now we have to decide if it is a good idea or not.

The aim is to have a high quality journal for the CG community that is run by the CG community and free to everyone (really free, no cost to publish and no cost to access). Obviously such a journal needs the support of the CG community to be successful. The work should be shared among the community, i.e., the editorial board and editorial manager(s) should be replaced regularly. "

mathematics academia journals publishing open-access disintermediation discrete-mathematics
march 2009 by Vaguery

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PHD Comics: Beware the Profzi Scheme

So funny you will cry

academia PhD graduate-school economics
march 2009 by Vaguery

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Object-oriented sheep, running around in Ruby Shoes [Restafari.org]

Why, ultimately, I quit graduate school:

"But programming is not about the syntax. Programming is not about „writing code“. The essence of programming is in understanding the world and being able to transform such understanding into a set of descriptions, rules and procedures. When you're facing a task such as „write a customer relationship management (CRM) system“, your problems aren't „which sort of sorting algorithm is faster“ or „how to query a database“. Your problem isn't „how to structure the database“ either, actually. Your problems are questions like „What is an invoice in real word?“ and „How this particular customer understands the ‚invoice‘ concept?“. Programming is about mapping the relationships of dirty and complicated real world into artificial, frictionless world of computer code."

academia pedagogy programming software-development education why-I-will-never-hire-a-computer-science-student-to-do-software-development
march 2009 by Vaguery

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Earning My Turns: Scaling up intellectual authority

"What Dave Winer says here about the news applies as well to scientific publishing. The arguments about open access and about review quality are but a sideline to a much more fundamental one: how to create sustainable mechanisms that will increasingly open up the process of writing up new ideas, reviewing them, and publicly building a consensus for or against their scientific soundness and importance."

openness open-access publishing academia academic-culture credentials
march 2009 by Vaguery

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"The trade associations argue instead that “alternative means for achieving the desired use should first be pursued including seeking permission from the rights holder.” This is wrong — a non-infringing use is one where prior authorization from the rights holder is not necessary. Reminder: fair use is an unauthorized use. If you are asking permission, then you are not exercising your lawful exception."

fair-use copyright rights-grabbing academia libraries intellectual-property DMCA
march 2009 by Vaguery

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Gene Expression: Will information criteria replace p-values in common use? Some trends

"It's promising that both are increasing over the past 30-odd years, since that means more people are bothering to be quantitative. Still, less than 5% of articles mention p-values or information criteria -- some of that is due to the presence of arts and humanities journals, but there's still a big slice of the hard and soft sciences that needs to be converted. Also encouraging is the steady decline in the dominance of p-values to the AIC: they're still about 4.5 times as commonly used in academia at large, but that's down from about 15.5 times as common in the mid-1970s, a 71% decline. Graduate students and young professors -- the writing is on the wall. Aside from being intellectually superior, information criteria will give you a competitive edge in the job market, at least in the near future. After that, they will be required."

AIC statistics p-values habits cultural-norms academia publishing credentials trends
march 2009 by Vaguery

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FT.com | Willem Buiter's Maverecon | The unfortunate uselessness of most ’state of the art’ academic monetary economics

"Most mainstream macroeconomic theoretical innovations since the 1970s (the New Classical rational expectations revolution associated with such names as Robert E. Lucas Jr., Edward Prescott, Thomas Sargent, Robert Barro etc, and the New Keynesian theorizing of Michael Woodford and many others) have turned out to be self-referential, inward-looking distractions at best. Research tended to be motivated by the internal logic, intellectual sunk capital and esthetic puzzles of established research programmes rather than by a powerful desire to understand how the economy works - let alone how the economy works during times of stress and financial instability. So the economics profession was caught unprepared when the crisis struck."

via:cshalizi economics models academia expertise modeling psychology optimization failure financial-crisis financial-engineering public-policy mister-occam-tear-down-this-wall
march 2009 by Vaguery

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Confessions of a Community College Dean: Poster Children

"The particular dilemma, at this point, boils down to which part of 'unsustainable contract' trumps the other. UF is claiming, correctly, that the current fiscal shortfall demands some level of sacrifice. Babb and the union are claiming, correctly, that a contract is a contract.

Both sides are right, but if they've retreated to such intractable positions they've both already lost. If the University 'wins,' I'd expect 'stars' to start decamping for greener pastures as soon as the market improves, since they'd be afraid that promises are written in sand. If Babb 'wins,' the University will have to take out its cuts instead on those least able to fight back – it's not like the fiscal crisis will just go away -- and the anti-public-education conservatives will have their latest Ward Churchill to use as a battering ram. Either result is ugly."

academia management-failure social-norms labor financial-crisis faculty union negotiation public-opinion adjunct
february 2009 by Vaguery

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Caveat Lector » Blog Archive » Humanists and the digital

"Another common thread in the grad students’ stories was dissuasion, both passive and active, from engagement with the digital. From bureaucratic hassles to tepid advising to being actually barred from computing facilities built for faculty (think about that for a moment; it’s appalling on so very many levels), the message goes out loud and clear: technology is a toy, it’s a diversion, it’s fine for the classroom, but it’s not how you do your work."

academia pecking-order academic-culture humanities worklife project-management disintermediation-targets
february 2009 by Vaguery

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academhack » Blog Archive » Tenure-Round 1: The Issues

"But alas, it does not. In fact and here is the crucial point, tenure doesn’t enable academic freedom, there is no such thing as academic freedom, what tenure does is farm the decision of academic freedom out to other bodies. A majority of institutions make tenure decisions based on publishing record, in other words forces outside the institution which are making market decisions based on what can be profitably sold as an intellectual commodity (usually in book form) are deciding what academics can and cannot say."

academia tenure institutional-design sacred-cows reform faculty worklife save-the-brightest-before-they-wither
february 2009 by Vaguery

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Machine Learning (Theory) » Decision by Vetocracy

"This experience has also altered my view of blogging and research. On one hand, I’m very enthusiastic about research in general, and my research in particular, where we are regularly cracking conventionally impossible problems. On the other hand, it seems that some small number of people viewing a discussion silently decide they don’t like it, and veto it given the opportunity. It only takes one to turn strong paper into a years-long odyssey, so public discussion of research directions and topics in a vetocracy is akin to voluntarily wearing a “kick me” sign. While this a problem for me, I expect it to be even worse for the members of a vetocracy in the long term."

academia cultural-norms machine-learning community peer-review peer-production collaboration competition Arrow's-Theorem (and-the-inevitability-of-being-pissed-off)
february 2009 by Vaguery

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Confessions of a Community College Dean: Error and Failure

"Grad school was even worse. At that level, a self-selected bunch of failure avoiders competed for faculty approval in a pretty airless environment for years. By the end, it took an act of will just to put together a declarative sentence. The most damning insult in grad school was “naive,” which was typically applied to anyone who actually made some sort of positive claim. (“Naive realism” was the worst, since it implied the unforgivable sin of claiming to actually know something about something.) Self-doubt can be taught.

In grad school, too, I recall the faculty being perplexed as to why so many doctoral students seemed oddly hesitant and overly deferential during oral exams. At one panel of grad student papers, I recall noticing that every single grad student started her presentation with “this is a work in progress.” Translated, that means “please don't attack me.” These habits are learned...."

academia culture learning self-image ego social-dynamics hierarchy anthropology rebellion
february 2009 by Vaguery

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Confessions of a Community College Dean: Process and Word Problems

"This may all sound sinister and manipulative, but the impulse behind it is getting people past the blinders that inhibit them from helping to shape the solution. The point is to enable a constructive kind of academic citizenship, rather than the usual dichotomy of either apathy or total war. Once they grasp the contours of what we're up against, they're in a position to craft actual solutions, and to defend their own interests more effectively. I want that to happen, since I can't help but think that we're smarter together than separately."

academia management teams mules-or-asses ego self-definition self-esteem mental-models planning
february 2009 by Vaguery

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Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship | Berkman Center

"Call to Action: We therefore urge every U.S. law school to commit to ending print publication of its journals and to making definitive versions of journals and other scholarship produced at the school immediately available upon publication in stable, open, digital formats, rather than in print."

open-access academia law publishing public-good collaboration intellectual-property business-model-failure
february 2009 by Vaguery

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An EdTech Survivalist Interlude: The End is Coming at bavatuesdays

"She said that Mexico and Canada will merge with us and that a new, open source dollar called the Amero is going to replace the dollar. But the most scary thing is what she told me she’s been doing for the past couple of years. She’s been overseeing the construction of Learning Object Repositories being built all throughout America."

disintermediation-jokes library2.0 social-norms academia
february 2009 by Vaguery

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Confessions of a Community College Dean: Ask the Administrator: What the Fish?

"That said, the guy is the Tony Danza of higher ed. For reasons that elude me entirely, he keeps popping up. How he continues to find sweet gigs, like New York Times columnist, is a complete mystery. I suspect that in an attic somewhere, there's a picture of him looking unpublished. But I digress."

education academia cultural-norms faux-nostalgia golden-age
january 2009 by Vaguery

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Creationism Makes Its Mark | Science & Religion | ReligionDispatches

"After Freshwater took his side public, Jenifer said she and her husband were worried Freshwater wouldn’t face disciplinary action. In June, they filed a lawsuit against Freshwater and the district for violating the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause by permitting religion to be taught in class, and for failing to protect their son. Federal law allows such civil liberties cases to be filed anonymously. Freshwater has filed a countersuit, citing defamation of character."

religion creationism conservatism academia pedagogy social-anthropology the-American-disease
january 2009 by Vaguery

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naked capitalism: "The myth of the riskometer"

"The myth of the riskometer is alive and kicking. In spite of a large body of empirical evidence identifying the difficulties in measuring financial risk, policymakers and financial institutions alike continue to promote risk sensitivity.
The reasons may have to do with the fact that risk sensitivity is intuitively attractive, and the counter arguments complex. The crisis, however, shows us the folly of the riskometer. Let us hope that decision makers will rely on other methods."

finance financial-engineering metrics risk investment prediction statistics academia training
january 2009 by Vaguery

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Confessions of a Community College Dean: The Uses of Students

"She said that while cc grads who transfer to her university do just as well academically as native students, they don't donate as much back to the university as alums. They only spent two years there, instead of four, so they don't feel the same level of attachment. The university knows that, so it puts a pretty tight lid on transfer admissions. It admits a few students to fill out the numbers in some upper-level courses, but that's it. It doesn't want to jeopardize the future funding stream from donations."

academia social-norms business-models education class income demographics marketing
january 2009 by Vaguery

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PMLA Alternative Source Citing

"When citing Magic 8-Balls:..."

citation bibliography humor academia academic-culture language geek
december 2008 by Vaguery

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Machine Learning (Theory) » Adversarial Academia

"The adversarial viewpoint makes you stupid. When viewed adversarially, any idea has crippling disadvantages and no advantages. Contorting your viewpoint enough to make this true damages your ability to conduct research. In short, it promotes poor mental hygiene."

academia academic-culture peer-review collaboration anti-collaboration zero-sum social-norms
december 2008 by Vaguery

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Confessions of a Community College Dean: Some Thoughts on the AFT Report

"The more complicated cause is the relative difficulty of increasing 'productivity' when the 'product' itself is measured in time. Other than increasing tuition, increasing class size, or decreasing pay, how do you improve the economic 'productivity' of someone teaching 45 hours a semester? When most of the rest of the economy realizes productivity gains every single year and we don't realize any for decades, a funding crunch is utterly predictable. Unless we get away from the 'seat time' model, we'll be stuck in a work-speedup/cost-runup cycle until we simply break the market. Which we're perilously close to doing now."

via:cshalizi academia public-policy teaching labor-v-capital management business-culture unions self-image politics
december 2008 by Vaguery

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Why College Is A Waste of Money - The Daily Beast

"Which means that financially speaking, the spectacularly high dropout rate boils down to a spectacularly bad investment. Though there’s no specific data, one can imagine the countless millions that are wasted financing educations that never come to fruition. We could try to predict which students would be part of the 46% who don’t finish, then encourage those students not to go to college. But to do this would mean a lot of students who might graduate never get to give it a shot. That wouldn’t be fair. So what we can do instead is identify the 5% or 10% of students who are the least likely to graduate, and not send them to college."

academia colleges social-norms economics public-policy pyramid-schemes
december 2008 by Vaguery

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Homeschooling Research & Scholarship: Home Page
sociology social-norms education academia demographics research homeschooling teaching culture-clash
december 2008 by Vaguery

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The Best and the Brightest Have Led America Off a Cliff | | AlterNet

"These universities, because of their incessant reliance on standardized tests and the demand for perfect grades, fill their classrooms with large numbers of drones. I have taught gifted and engaged students who used these institutions to expand the life of the mind, who asked the big questions and who cherished what these schools had to offer. But they were always a marginalized and dispirited minority. The bulk of their classmates, most of whom headed off to Wall Street or corporate firms when they graduated, starting at $120,000 a year, did prodigious amounts of work and faithfully regurgitated information. They received perfect grades in both tedious, boring classes and stimulating ones, not that they could tell the difference. ..."

education academia academic-culture criticism essay social-norms cultural-norms economic-crisis via:tsuomela via:vielmetti
december 2008 by Vaguery

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Confessions of a Community College Dean: Yet More Evidence That I Don't Understand the Press

"Of course, certain graduate programs – I'm not naming any names, you know who you are – may respond simply by lowering their standards. All those sections of Freshman Comp aren't going to teach themselves, after all. And certain professors – again, I'm not naming any names – will do whatever they need to do to maintain their status as members of 'graduate' programs, even if there's no demonstrable need for their programs.

Still, the beginnings of a Great Refusal suggests that some basic truths are starting to get through. The optimist in me can't help but smile at that, and hope that it continues."

academia economics demographics cultural-norms supply-and-demand
december 2008 by Vaguery

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Why Giving Money to Your Alma Mater is Immoral - The Daily Beast

"Think of it this way: If you believed that the government should have bailed out the automakers with no strings attached so that they could continue business as usual, then by all means: send money to your old school and pray that they decide to use it smartly. But if Detroit has taught us anything, it’s that large, old, entitled institutions don't restructure until they're hamstrung. Economic turmoil is forcing everyone, from corporations to individuals, to reexamine their finances and reconsider their poor choices. This is a good thing, and a lesson to be learned for colleges too, if their alumni will let them learn it."

academia economics fundraising social-norms financing philanthropy
december 2008 by Vaguery

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Caveat Lector » Blog Archive » John Wilbanks keynote, SPARC Digital Repositories 2008

"Conclusion: don’t wait. Lots of things need to happen before all this becomes real! If we wait until all the problems are solved, the commons won’t have what it needs to explode. But people aren’t watching IR space, which is the best time to create an open, disruptive system! Use existing ontologies. Work around problems rather than tackling them head-on."

open-access repositories libraries academia intellectual-property publishing publishing-war
november 2008 by Vaguery

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