"Because what I hadn’t known—this is my first time grading this exam—was that it doesn’t matter how well you write, or what you think. Here we spent the year reading books and emulating great writers, constructing leads that would make everyone want to read our work, developing a voice that would engage our readers, using our imaginations to make our work unique and important, and, most of all, being honest. And none of that matters. All that matters, it turns out, is that you cite two facts from the reading material in every answer. That gives you full credit. You can compose a “Gettysburg Address” for the 21st century on the apportioned lines in your test booklet, but if you’ve provided only one fact from the text you read in preparation, then you will earn only half credit. In your constructed response—no matter how well written, correct, intelligent, noble, beautiful, and meaningful it is—if you’ve not collected any specific facts from the provided readings (even if you happen to know more information about the chosen topic than the readings provide), then you will get a zero."

"My readers ask me that question more than just about any other. So here's my question back: What is school for? (Click the link to get to the free download).

I've just published a 30,000 word manifesto, totally free to read, share, translate, print and, most of all, use to start an essential conversation. It took a lot to get it to you, and I'm encouraging you to take a few minutes to check it out. After you read it, perhaps you'll write one of your own."

"I'm jealous of high school computer science students these days. I had to tap out my GOTO 10 commands on a crappy CRT monitor; they get a cheap, rugged robot to play with. The Finch, as it's called, costs just $99, so every student in a classroom can have their own. And its design was rigorously based on educational research that uncovered the five key attributes to making the perfect educational toy."

"remember: the government giving massive amounts of money to corporations to hire people to do shit is capitalism; the government just hiring people to do shit is socialism"

"…For all its pretensions to public importance (every professor secretly thinks he’s a public intellectual), the professoriate is awfully quiet, essentially nonexistent as a collective voice. If academia is going to once again become a decent place to work, if our best young minds are going to be attracted back to the profession, if higher education is going to be reclaimed as part of the American promise, if teaching and research are going to make the country strong again, then professors need to get off their backsides and organize: department by department, institution to institution, state by state and across the nation as a whole. Tenured professors enjoy the strongest speech protections in society. It’s time they started using them."

"Critical pedagogy, for Freire, meant imagining literacy as not simply the mastering of specific skills, but also as a mode of intervention, a way of learning about and reading the word as a basis for intervening in the world."

"Is it any wonder that the value of a college education is now being questioned more than it used to be? Perhaps a basic education in personal finance would help more people make informed decisions about college and how to handle the financing of that endeavor."

"In the rhizomatic model of learning, curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process. This community acts as the curriculum, spontaneously shaping, constructing, and reconstructing itself and the subject of its learning in the same way that the rhizome responds to changing environmental conditions…"

"It is a mantra of the deficit hawks that they are working to ensure their children and grandchildren will one day have the same opportunities that they have had. But right now, in real time, those same children and grandchildren are having those opportunities taken away. ..."

"The big change appears to be that those in school have become increasingly less attached to the labor market. The percentage of school enrollees aged between 16 and 24 who are also participating in the labor market was relatively stable between 1989 and 1998 at around 51 percent. However, labor market participation by those in school declined between 1999 and 2008 from 50 percent to 42 percent. In contrast, labor force participation by those aged between 16 and 24 not enrolled in school has declined only modestly—from 82 percent to 80 percent between 1989 and 2008."

"They attempt to co-opt nascent OER initiatives by directing them toward commercial enterprise, arguing that resources must allow commercial licensing, and directing production toward enterprises and initiatives that must receive see funding and draw a return on that investment through the conversion of OERs into commodities.

And they foster a sense of incapacity in opinion and the media to suggest to students themselves that they are incapable of independent action without the comforting support of corporations and institutions, that they are simply not capable of learning form themselves. From the first utterance that "OCW is not an MIT education" the suggestion has been that education must need be a high-priced endeavour, available, really, only to those willing to pay the price."

"Bailing out the financial system, but not bailing out schools in financial trouble because of the crisis, is unconscionable…"

"These are basic life skills that everyone should want to master. If we taught them broadly, and if everyone learned them, then this sort of mastery wouldn’t attract the geek label. But we don’t teach these skills broadly, most people don’t learn them, and the language we use isn’t our friend. If systems thinking is geeky then only geeks will be systems thinkers. We can’t afford for that to be true. We need everyone to be a systems thinker."

"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."

"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.')"

"Under the new plan, EWA will immediately shift from a traditional membership organization to an open community, embracing a wider net of people concerned about the quality of education information. The organization will create 21st century mechanisms for supporting traditional writers in real time while adopting creative advocacy on behalf of first-rate sustainable journalism."

"I've used blogs in my classes for five years with university graduate students. I've found them to be extremely helpful in certain circumstances but only when there is clarity for students in their use. Students who object to the inclusion of blogs in a course are usually objecting to what they perceive will be just one more task on top of a myriad of others or simply some busy work that will not benefit their learning. Older students can also reject the notion of "publication" that is inherent with blogging. Each of these objections can be addressed by an effective and innovative instructor by careful planning and skillful management. There are, however, several common mistakes that should be avoided when using blogs in instruction. I have made all of these mistakes and have learned how to address each one proactively."

"Brilliant … but what made Dr. K’s technique most insidiously evil and genius was, during the most technically difficult lecture of the entire quarter, there was no lie. At the end of the lecture in which he was not called on any lie, he offered the same challenge to work through the notes; on the following Monday, he fielded our theories for what the falsehood might be (and shooting them down “no, in fact that is true – look at “) for almost ten minutes before he finally revealed: “Do you remember the first lecture – how I said that ‘every lecture has a lie?’”"

"Columbia University's Computer Vision Labaratory is testing out a product called the BigShot, a digital camera intended to be taken apart and assembled by children, in order to remind them that yeah, someone actually designed and built this thing."

"Such deliberate cluelessness and misrepresentation – it’s unfortunate the U.S. News & World Report will publish nonsense generated by someone who’s clearly only using half a brain."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Fluency, in the fluency game paradigm, means you don’t learn, you teach; either you teach yourself, or you teach others. In doing so, you achieve a major milestone: all your skills and knowledge “come alive”, because they can readily jump from you into others. As living skills, they can spread throughout the people in your family, community, and work life. And your fluency in one skill signifies a fluency in self-teaching. With any new skill, you know just where to start, and where to go after that."

"It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again."

"There’s only one rule at hack day: build something you can demonstrate at the end of the event (Powerpoint slides don’t count). Importantly though, our hack days are not restricted to just our development team: anyone from the technology department can get involved, and we extend the invitation to other parts of the organisation as well. At the Guardian, this includes journalists.

For our first hack day, I put together a list of “tools for non-developers”—sites, services and software that could be used for hacking without programming knowledge as a pre-requisite. I’m now updating that list with recommendations from elsewhere. Here’s the list so far:"

"The conventional rationale for copyright of written works, that copyright is needed to foster their creation, is seemingly of limited applicability to the academic domain. For in a world without copyright of academic writing, academics would still benefit from publishing in the major way that they do now, namely, from gaining scholarly esteem. Yet publishers would presumably have to impose fees on authors, because publishers would not be able to profit from reader charges. If these publication fees would be borne by academics, their incentives to publish would be reduced. But if the publication fees would usually be paid by universities or grantors, the motive of academics to publish would be unlikely to decrease (and could actually increase) – suggesting that ending academic copyright would be socially desirable in view of the broad benefits of a copyright-free world. "

[more raw material for Nudge project]

"For years, students with print disabilities have struggled to have access to instructional materials in the field of Science, Engineering, Mathematics, and Technology. For students who cannot read ordinary print, understanding complex equations and formulas is a daunting challenge, most often addressed with the aid of a human reader. This intervention strategy, however, is fundamentally limited and does not provide true access to the student."

'"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."'

"Universities are going through a tough time financially. People no longer have to attend them to get the credentials they need. People inside universities think they are selling an experience and that people are turning away from that. I think universities were always selling credentials.

They're just not the only place to get them any more."

[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."

"Parallel play is also sometimes observed in older children when playing video games..."

[and coworkers]

"If you're a conservative and you care about this kid, you don't give him a public forum. You give him your card, and you take his e-mails. You give him a list of books that he needs to read. Then when you see him, you quiz him on those books. You tell him that you're glad he showed the initiative to write and publish himself, but his thesis is actually banal. That if he's going to play in the big leagues, he should expect to get hit and prepare himself thusly. You warn him away from sideshows, and teach him to pride hearing over being heard. You teach him that these are his weapons and his shield in the great war of ideas."

If you want to buy me a present, buy me this. The whole set.

"When occupations contract, the average age of workers in those occupations tends to rise, Autor says. "Young people don't want to stake their futures in shrinking fields. Meanwhile, older workers have an incentive to stick around as they have skills and knowledge specific to these jobs.""

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."

"Are you paying attention, Pinky?"

"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."

"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."

"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. ..."

"What this all takes is patience — more patience, sometimes, than I am good at. I am impatient to know things, and impatient for things to make sense more quickly; and the discipline (ah, that apt term) just doesn’t work that way. A colleague of mine told me that he’s been Only Collecting for over ten years, and can now knock out a 3000 word paper in under two days, simply because all his material is already at hand; it exists in the stuff he’s picked up in his intellectual infancy and adolescence, which at the time he didn’t know how to use, and perhaps didn’t even know was important."

"The elephant in the room is the movement from solitary studying to a collective, hivemindish mode of learning, where kids are shifting for questioning to answering, from learning to teaching all the time."

"Student governments should actively press administrators to disclose and dissolve financial ties with credit card companies."

"Seriously, it would help, if you want to complain about the declining quality of the humanities, to not be a historical dunderhead on a fantastic scale..."

"Because that's not the way we do it, that's why."

I expect the scene from Doctorow's _Down and Out_ to become reality before 2010....

The key: "...it needn't be bureaucratically untenable."

READ THIS. All of you.

via: boingboing

One wants to know how set boundaries may be made fluid again. One wants, I think, to let people do what they enjoy. There are enough of us for that.

Good summary

Call or write. This is stupid.

Call or write. This is stupid.

Copyright fear has chilling effect on educators

Funny, but sad. So many people broken.

"Theses must be born-digital (i.e. NOT PDF); Domain ontologies must be used; All data must be included in theses;Data must be validated before submission; Theses must be openly exposed to data and metadata crawlers..."

There is no more delicate matter to take in hand, nor more dangerous to conduct, nor more doubtful of success, than to step up as a leader in the introduction of change. For he who innovates will have for his enemies all those who are well off under the e