'Furthermore this seems to me to play once again into the view that ‘economics’ is technical and has right answers, while ‘politics’ is emotive and contested, so students of the EU don’t have to talk about it.'

"If you adopt economical driving habits, you’ll end up putting less gasoline in your tank.  But if you skip past the economical driving habits and just put less gas in your tank, you’ll end up muttering grim imprecations as you trudge down the highway with a gas can."

"The book was enormously popular, and Mr. Reed and Mr. Brainerd’s diagramming swept through American schools like a refreshing breeze. By the latter half of the 19th century, chalkboards had become increasingly common in classrooms; for students, the impact of watching a sentence take shape on that large surface as a comprehensible, often elegant, and sometimes downright ingenious drawing must have been significant. It’s hard to believe anyone but the most dedicated pedant could have actually enjoyed parsing, but plenty of students — including me — loved diagramming.

A century and a half later, diagramming sentences is even more out of date than writing lessons on a piece of slate. When the book I wrote about it was published in 2006, a couple of hundred people sent me e-mails. One writer accused me of succumbing to Stockholm syndrome because I wrote so benignly about the nun who brainwashed me into thinking diagramming was fun. Another asked me for a date. Two objected to my political attitudes, as they deduced them between the lines. A dozen or so either faulted some of the diagrams or challenged me with a particularly tricky sentence."

'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."'

"One thing that struck me during the meeting, though, was that if you created a really rich body of materials that looked somewhat like an “online course”, what you really might be doing was crafting a completely novel form of publication. Imagine a work of historical scholarship that included video of the author giving an explanatory lecture at the beginning of a section of the reading; that had direct links to a huge body of archival pictures, audio recordings, maps, and other supporting materials; that extensively linked to relevant (or competing) analyses available in digital collections like JSTOR; and where the author would appear live once every week to take questions from students reading the book in a class."

"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."

"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…"

"Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems.

The motivation for starting Project Euler, and its continuation, is to provide a platform for the inquiring mind to delve into unfamiliar areas and learn new concepts in a fun and recreational context."

"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."

"Mathematics illuminates the patterns and structures all around us. Our dynamic exhibits and programs will stimulate inquiry, spark curiosity, and reveal the wonders of mathematics."

"I am confident that the Scrum Alliance sees the need for developer improvement, and that they are working toward making their members aware of the need. I am confident that they are working to provide resources that Scrum teams can use to begin to build the skills that they need. And I’m dedicated to influencing them in the right direction, and to bringing as many people into the situation to help accomplish that.

In the end, what I care about is software development, as narrow and geeky as that might be. I care about other people finding the joy in the craft that I’ve found, and that means they have to discover the joy of life-long learning. I think this Scrum Alliance effort can help with that, and I think that “certification” has little or nothing to do with it. What counts will be what we tell the people who show up."

"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."

"If you spent hundreds of hours playing Dungeons & Dragons in your youth, it turns out that time wasn't wasted. Three successful authors tell Suvudu that D&D gave them the experience points to write decent novels and stories."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"That insight led Mr. Martin to begin advocating what was then a radical idea in business education: that students needed to learn how to think critically and creatively every bit as much as they needed to learn finance or accounting. More specifically, they needed to learn how to approach problems from many perspectives and to combine various approaches to find innovative solutions."

"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?’”"

"The core of this wonderful museum is the Reuleaux collection of mechanisms and machines, a set of 19th century models built to demonstrate the elements of machine motion (more collections here). Also of interest are the tutorials and this extensive list of online references."

"...A colleague once suggested that if our aim is to create more entrepreneurs or at least better prepare potential entrepreneurs, we should replace all entrepreneurship education programs with basic sales courses. After all, and to Fox's point, entrepreneurs are engaged at every step of the way in selling something: an idea, themselves, a product, a vision."

"I guess that's what's kind of disappointing to me about Fama's post. I'm thrilled that he's read my book, and is saying halfway nice things about it in public. In general, I'm a big Fama fan—his willingness to keep testing his theories against the evidence, and to support the work of students and younger professors whose research undermined those theories, is hugely admirable. But he and a lot of other people in academic finance just don't seem interested in directly engaging in many of the most interesting questions raised by the financial crisis. Such as: Can the financial sector get too big, and if so how can we tell? Can derivatives markets concentrate risk as well as spread it? Is financial innovation fundamentally different and more dangerous than innovation in other fields, and if so what should we do about it? Should central banks and financial regulators try to snuff out asset-price bubbles, and if so how should they go about determining when we're in bubble territory?…"

"If we dealt with the pincer movement of lower state aid and higher enrollments by imposing admissions standards -- say, by refusing to do remediation anymore -- the economics (and prestige) of the operation would take off. Blocking developmental students would, all by itself, result in a wealthier student body. We would have much higher retention, graduation, and transfer rates. We would have much less call for special services for students with severe learning disabilities. Our financial aid spending would drop dramatically, as would our spending on tutoring. We'd run proportionally more sophomore-level classes, to the understandable delight of the faculty. As our graduation and transfer rates went up, our standing as a college of first choice would go with it. And we could both impress our politicians and insulate ourselves from them, just like the University of Michigan has. "

"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."

"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."

"Today’s class in ENG 198, Introduction to the Missing Basics of Engineering (syllabus here), is covering engineering modeling in the lecture Engineering and Models: Hint – Real Engineers Use More than Just Equations."

"By the time we tell you the right answer, it'll be too late."

"One would be hard-pressed to disapprove of autodidacticism. Consider a list of notable alumni from the academy of the self-taught: René Descartes, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, William Blake. Michael Faraday apprenticed himself to a bookseller and read everything he could before going on to figure out electromagnetism. August Wilson schooled himself at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh after dropping out of the ninth grade. Arnold Schoenberg claimed to be an autodidact, and who are we to dispute it? Frank Zappa advised, “Forget about the senior prom and go to the library and educate yourself, if you’ve got any guts.” Hear, hear. (Though if the prom band is playing Frank Zappa songs, we’re donning a powder-blue brocade tux and we’re going.)"

"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."

"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."

"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. "

'"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."'

"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."

'"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."'

"This curriculum is designed to give teachers a comprehensive set of tools to educate students about copyright while incorporating activities that exercise a variety of learning skills. Lesson topics include: the history of copyright law; the relationship between copyright and innovation; fair use and its relationship to remix culture; peer-to-peer file sharing; and the interests of the stakeholders that ultimately affect how copyright is interpreted by copyright owners, consumers, courts, lawmakers, and technology innovators."

"And I worry that the idea that learning in relation to history can easily be kept within some type of bounds implies, to a degree, that the importance of history is its factual content. Generations of captive history students, face-down and drooling on their desks, indicate that approaches of this nature are not only unfortunately limited, but also a fatal blow to any intrinsic interest in examining historical/cultural change."

"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."

"Essentially, we moved from a world where banks were run by businessmen, to a world where businesses were run by financiers. Let's hope that the pendulum will now swing back (only with more women in charge this time around), and that business schools will start de-emphasizing finance in their curricula. But that might be too much to hope for. Even in 1972 students were being taught CAPM. And the vast majority of them failed to ignore it."

"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."

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?"

"When I first started writing, one of the pieces of advice that I heard was that you should always imagine that you are writing to a particular person. It gets your juices going – you’re automatically in an explanatory state of mind and you know what you can expect from your audience. I was doing that, but I noticed that I was drifting. I was losing my sense of audience. I started to explain one thing, and then I realized that I would have to explain something else to help it make sense. I couldn’t imagine that person any more. How could I know what they know and what they don’t?"

"It’s difficult when confronting a student who admits he doesn’t like the feedback he gets from papers but refuses to admit there might be anything wrong with his writing not to scream, as Ramsay does, “You ungrateful piece of dogshit! I’m trying to help you!” Anyone who is friends with a teacher will know that we bitterly complain about student arrogance in exact proportion with how much we care about helping them. If you’re putting in countless office hours and even more writing emails and comments on papers, and a student keeps coming back to say, “How can I get an A?” without even trying to take any of the advice you give, you know how Ramsay feels. Sometimes, baffled, Ramsay will shout, “You bloody asked me to fucking come here!” If my feedback and advice is worthless to you, why ask for it? You clearly enjoy getting C’s."

"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."

Predator-Prey dynamics, anybody?

True for nearly every discipline beside "painting" as well. Including the ones where one may be "more successful". I know a lot of useless computer scientists, for example.

Also may be useful in biology and biochemistry, amazingly enough.

"If America is to maintain its scientific and technological edge, it needs to inspire and support its most talented scientists and engineers through the early stages of their careers..."

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

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

READ THIS. All of you.

via: boingboing

"This experience, I fear, maps the domain of belief onto the social domains of authority, of command, of law."

Good summary

Copyright fear has chilling effect on educators

"Mine may be the last generation that defines itself by books, rather than digital data."

I don't think it's that simple.

Important

"Give a damn. Your students are not fungible data-production units..."

read the comments for advice on life-changing decisions, young folks