Academic journals are almost extortionist in nature:
The returns are astronomical: in the past financial year, for example, Elsevier's operating profit margin was 36% (£724m on revenues of £2bn). They result from a stranglehold on the market. Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, who have bought up many of their competitors, now publish 42% of journal articles.

Story of Mike Powell, US high school wrestling coach. Immensely strong and a father figure to marginalized kids and forced to reevaluate what manliness was after he got a muscle-wasting disease called polymyositis at the age of 33. Inspiring.

Harvard economist empirically studying children and education.
- paying kids to get good grades has no effect on grades
- Five common elements to higher test scores: increased instructional time, data-driven instruction, feedback for teachers, tutoring (especially so), culture of high expectations
- emphasizes quick testing to keep results relevant

Beginning in February of 2012 Stanford economist Matt Jackson and computer scientist Yoav Shoham will be offering an online course in game theory.  2 hours of video lectures will be posted each week online and there will be a forum to ask questions of the instructors.  Here is their introductory video.

The website where you can sign up for the course is here. Northwestern/Kellogg should do stuff like this.

USA Today: Lanya Olmstead was born in Florida to a mother who immigrated from Taiwan and an American father of Norwegian ancestry. Ethnically, she considers herself half Taiwanese and half Norwegian. But when applying to Harvard, Olmstead checked only one box for her race: white.

“I didn’t want to put ‘Asian’ down,” Olmstead says, “because my mom told me there’s discrimination against Asians in the application process.”

Her Mom is correct:

Asian students have higher average SAT scores than any other group, including whites. A study by Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade examined applicants to top colleges from 1997, when the maximum SAT score was 1600 (today it’s 2400). Espenshade found that Asian-Americans needed a 1550 SAT to have an equal chance of getting into an elite college as white students with a 1410 or black students with an 1100.

Note that this is true even though there is a history of discrimination against Asians in the U.S., Asian children also do well on extra-curricular activities and many have poor, immigrant backgrounds.

Comparing schools which can and cannot legally discriminate suggests a lot of discrimination. At Yale the class of 2013 is 15.5 percent Asian-American, at Dartmouth 16.1 percent, at Harvard 19.1 percent, and at Princeton 17.6 percent. These figures are above the Asian share of the population but compare:

The California Institute of Technology, a private school that chooses not to consider race, is about one-third Asian. (Thirteen percent of California residents have Asian heritage.) The University of California-Berkeley, which is forbidden by state law to consider race in admissions, is more than 40 percent Asian — up from about 20 percent before the law was passed.

Interestingly, the Obama administration has recently reversed Bush era rules and interpretations in order to promote race-based admissions:

Bush guidelines: “Before using race, there must be a serious good faith consideration of workable race-neutral alternatives.”

Obama guidelines: “Institutions are not required to implement race-neutral approaches if, in their judgment, the approaches would be unworkable.”

Governor Jerry Brown would also like to repeal or limit CA’s ban on race-based admissions.

As a turbulent snowstorm whips across the vast, desolate Mongolian grasslands, a group of schoolchildren huddle over laptops, their eyes transfixed as the sagacious Sal Khan works through Newtonian physics.

But Khan is only reaching these kids because of a bold initiative from another creative edupreneur: Neil Dsouza, age 27, cofounder of TeachAClass.org, a San Francisco-based nonprofit dedicated to enabling access to education in developing countries. Dsouza was previously an engineer at Cisco, where he helped develop the first 4G core routers for AT&T and eventually Verizon’s mobile network.

Technology is starting to become a waste in developing countries.

Plenty of people have tried to tackle education in remote areas. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, for instance, has shipped millions of laptops to impoverished corners of the world. The impact has been faint, however, leading OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte to recently propose a more radical approach: dropping tablets from helicopters to remote villages, “then go[ing] back a year later to see if the kids can read,” he has declared.

But to those already on the ground, the idea of indiscriminately flinging equipment from the air and hoping for a positive educational outcome seems like a recipe for waste. OLPC has already donated over 7,000 laptops to Mongolia. When Dsouza arrived, he found many collecting dust on shelves. Some have not even seen the light of day, still unopened in shrink-wrapped boxes.

Photo: One Laptop Per Child

“Technology is starting to become a waste in developing countries,” notes Dsouza. He points to startling findings from the World Bank’s very own Independent Evaluation Group that “only 30 percent [of its projects worldwide] have achieved their objectives of implementing universal assess policies or increasing ICT [information and communications technologies] access for the poor or underserved areas.”

It’s not just due to misguided strategies like airlifting hardware, either, Dsouza says. Too many Western-driven programs have neglected to take into account geographical limitations and cultural differences—whether it’s failing to realize the lack of basic IT infrastructure in developing countries, or assuming that everyone naturally understands the potential and use of computing devices.

Haunted by memories of piles of unused laptops, Dsouza devised an ingenious plan: Bring a chunk of the Internet’s offerings to Mongolia. He packages content from Khan Academy, MIT open courseware, and other resources into portable, self-contained servers that can be wirelessly accessed by laptops and computers. These servers, which cost roughly $350 apiece, are small enough to fit in a backpack and need only a power outlet to boot up. Other laptops need only wireless capability and a browser that supports Flash to log on. What this creates, in essence, is a local intranet network—what Dsouza has dubbed an “Education Hotspot”—that allows users to access materials hosted on the server, even in areas so remote that Internet is either outrageously expensive or non-existent.

Here’s how Dsouza is distributing his technology: TeachAClass.org has a tiny team of three in San Francisco that collects free content from the web, then taps volunteers around the world to translate the material into local languages. These materials are then copied onto the backpack servers, which get delivered to local coordinators in developing countries. These coordinators—so far 12 Peace Corps volunteers in remote regions—work with teachers in schools and orphanages to set up the “Hotspots.” Content on the servers can be regularly updated via CDs or USB sticks.

Too many Western-driven programs have neglected to take into account geographical limitations and cultural differences

The project is still very much in its infancy. So far Dsouza has deployed three Hotspots in Ulaanbaatar, two in the Uvurkhangai province of Mongolia, and one in Takengon, Indonesia—all together serving orphanages that house around 300 children. He plans to set up six more in schools in Mongolia’s Hovd province in the next few months. Next year, Dsouza also hopes to get pilot programs established elsewhere, too, including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Egypt. In India, Dsouza also has plans underway to see how well the Hotspots work with the much-publicized $35 Aakash tablets, which the government has promised to provide to rural schools.

Considerable obstacles exist. Getting buy-in from local officials and educators is not always easy; some can be outright hostile to outsider advisers. But Dsouza has made sure to involve local teachers at every step of his project, providing them with the training required to effectively harness the potential of the Hotspots. It’s opened their eyes and given them a stake, he says, to the point where local teachers are taking ownership of the projects.

And then there’s the matter of funding. So far, Dsouza been bootstrapping this venture largely on his own, something he admits is unsustainable. He has considered returning to a day job to resuscitate his finances or reaching out to investors and VCs to turn the Hotspots into a viable business, despite his initial intentions to make this a nonprofit project.

But buzz around these Hotspots is—excuse the pun—starting to heat up. Dsouza has given talks at TEDxUlaanbaatar and the Global Education Conference. Earlier this year, he was awarded runner-up at the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Global Education Challenge. Even the World Bank sees potential, having allocated a small sum ($3,200) to pilot this project—not for orphans and students, but nomads and herders, who will use the Hotspots to access information relevant to their day-to-day activities and improve their knowledge on production and supply.

Dsouza remains humble about his work, framing it in terms of making the best use of existing technologies rather than creating something radically new. “We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel, but rather focus on finding ways to recycle technology and resources—the hardware, content, and networks—that are already in place.”

By Tony Wan, Associate Editor, EdSurge

http://b.rw/pNPmVC




Today's antidote to gloom. Lovely tribute to teachers by Silberman introduces series of short reminiscences by science writers. Contributions by Rebecca Skloot, Deborah Blum, David Dobbs and more


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Sorry for the bad link from yesterday, find them here.  I thank Yana for the pointer.

Mandarin could become a compulsory part of the school curriculum in the Karachi, Pakistan’s commercial capital, and the surrounding province of Sindh, in a move that is further evidence of the warming relations between Islamabad and Beijing. The authorities want Mandarin to be taught by 2013 to all secondary school children in the region,...

From this longer list (funny throughout), presented by Bill Gross and (possibly) derived from student writings, Jason Kottke provides his favorites:

Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.

John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

His comment:

That first one…I can’t decide if it’s bad or the best analogy ever.

I liked this one:

He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a
real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or
something.

mikejuk writes with a bit from I Programmer on what sounds like an intriguing new game: "If you're bored with games where you run around shooting soldiers or monsters, how about a game where you shoot enemies to win computer code snippets that you can then use to shape the reality around you? It's good to play and good enough to win both the Editor's Choice and Kid's Choice at this year's Bay Area Maker Faire." The linked story has a video demo, too.


Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The internet has made plagiarism much easier and by most accounts plagiarism is increasing rapidly. As a result, over a million instructors now use services like Turnitin, a plagiarism detector that compares submitted manuscripts against a large database of material, including previously submitted manuscripts.  What is less well appreciated is that Turnitin also sells its services to students. In fact, students whose professors use Turnitin are encouraged to pre-submit their work to Writecheck which will analyze and “verify” for the students that their paper has “properly quoted, summarized or paraphrased” previous work and it will also relieve students from “worrying that their paper will be recycled without their knowledge.” Uh huh.

In other words, WriteCheck will tell students if their essays will pass Turnitin! David Harrington summarizes nicely:

Turnitin is playing both sides of the fence, helping instructors identify plagiarists while helping plagiarists avoid detection.  It is akin to selling security systems to stores while allowing shoplifters to test whether putting tagged goods into bags lined with aluminum thwart the detectors.

From Metafilter:

Stanford’s ‘Introduction to Artificial Intelligence’ course will be offered free to anyone online this fall. The course will be taught by SebastianThrun (Stanford) and PeterNorvig (Google, Director of Research), who expect to deal with the historically large course size using tools like Google Moderator.

There will two 75 min lectures per week, weekly graded homework assignments and quizzes, and the course is expected to require roughly 10 hours per week. Over 10,000 students have already signed up.

In 2003, I argued that professors were becoming obsolete, giving a 10 to 20 year time for a big move to online education. Later, I pointed out that the market was moving towards superstar teachers, who teach hundreds at a time or even thousands online. Today, we have the Khan Academy, a huge increase in online education, electronic textbooks and peer grading systems and highly successful superstar teachers with Michael Sandel and his popular course Justice, serving as example number one.

One of the last remaining items holding back online education is a credible system to credential and compare student achievement across universities. Arnold Kling has that covered with a new business model.

For superstars and strong researchers, life in the ivory tower remains good. But for most teachers the cushy life is gone; tenure is just a dream for a majority of university teachers, salaries are low and teaching requirements have risen.

As in other fields what we are seeing is an increase in teaching inequality, at the top are high-salary superstars surrounded by apprentices who work long hours at low pay for a lottery ticket that for most will not payoff and at the bottom are lots of mid-skill adjuncts who do the drudge work of teaching remedial English and math.

Addendum: Tim Worstall points to the UK’s University of London as a model for the future.

There are strident disagreements these days over every aspect of American educational policy, except for one. Everyone thinks it would be great if we could better teach students how to innovate.

So shouldn't we be paying a great deal of attention to the educational method that produced, among others, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, Jeff Bezos, Jimmy Wales, Peter Drucker, Julia Child, David Blaine, and Sean "P. Diddy" Combs? They were all students in Montessori schools. According to a Wall Street Journal article by Peter Sims, there's a "Montessori Mafia" among the creative elite. So maybe there's something to the method Italian physician Maria Montessori came up with around the turn of the 20th century.

The cornerstones of this method, according to Wales's brainchild Wikipedia, are:
• mixed-age classrooms, with classrooms for children aged 2½-or-3 to 6 by far the most common,
• student choice of activity from within a prescribed range of options,
• uninterrupted blocks of work time,
• a Constructivist or "discovery" model, in which students learn concepts from working with materials, rather than by direct instruction, and
• specialized educational materials developed by Montessori and her collaborators.

That list rings true to me. I was a Montessori student in northwestern Indiana from a very early age through third grade, which was as high as the school went at that time. The teachers were an earnest group of the biggest hippies that could be found in small-town Hoosierland in the 1970s, and they gave us a lot of room to explore stuff that we found interesting.

For me this included the beads Maria and her colleagues came up with to teach us about numbers. No matter how young you are, after you see five beads on a wire next to 25 arranged in a square and 125 in a cube, you have a grasp of 5^2 and 5^3 that doesn't leave you. And after you hold the five-cube in one hand and the ten-cube in another, the power of taking something to the third power becomes very real. One is eight times as heavy as the other!

The parents of Larry, Sergei, Jimmy, Jeff, and all the others gave their kids good genes and nurtured them in many other ways beyond sending them to Montessori (I know that's true in my case). But research indicates that Montessori methods work even for disadvantaged kids who are randomly selected to attend (although this might not be the best idea for dental school). And as far as I can tell from my quick glance at the studies, Montessori kids don't do worse than their more classically educated peers on standardized tests. So why do we spend so much time on rote learning and teaching to the test?

When I got too old for my Montessori school and went to public school in fourth grade, I felt like I'd been sent to the Gulag. I have to sit in this desk? All day? We're going to divide the day into hour-long chunks and do only one thing during each chunk? Am I on Candid Camera? Am I Job?

I'm really glad to learn that Montessori methods are entering public schools. And I look forward to more research on the benefits and drawbacks of this educational approach. Until it convinces me otherwise, I'm going to continue to believe in Montessori and recommend it to parents.

The main thing I learned there is that the world is a really interesting place, and one that should be explored. Can there be any better foundation for an innovator in training?

nk497 writes "Amazon has unveiled a new digital textbook rental service, allowing students to choose how long they'd like access to an eBook-version of a textbook via their Kindle or app — with the retailer claiming savings as high as 80%. Kindle Textbook Rental will let students use a text for between 30 and 360 days, adding extra days as they need to. Any notes or highlighted text will be saved via the Amazon Cloud for students to reference after the book is 'returned.' Amazon said tens of thousands of books would be available to rent for the next school year."


Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Is it possible to finance higher education the way we finance start-up companies?

The tech investor Peter Thiel announced the first group of Thiel Fellows, teenagers who agree to drop out of school to start tech companies.

Via Catherine Rampell, research from Andrew Sum on job placement by college major can be found over on the right. Ezra Klein deems this “fairly depressing” as “[a]bout a quarter of college graduates don’t have jobs, and an additional 22 percent don’t have jobs that use their degree.”

I always find the idea of jobs that require a college degree to be kind of a weird one. Do you need a college degree to be a policy-focused political blogger? Well, it’s not like teaching. To teach second grade you literally must have a college degree. Teaching children to multiply without a college degree is illegal. By contrast, anyone in the world is allowed to start a policy-focused political blog. But in practice, as best I know all of us in this particular game do in fact have college degrees. Indeed, not only do we have college degrees but on average policy-focused political bloggers went to substantially more selective colleges than did second grade teachers. But, again, I’m pretty sure that if Dylan Matthews wanted to drop out of college and become a professional blogger that he could pull that off. But if you’re not Dylan, your resume will probably attract some raised eyebrows here at ThinkProgress if you apply for an entry level gig before finishing school. By the same token, my strung suspicion is that Microsoft overwhelming hires people with college degrees for professional work but Bill Gates himself doesn’t have one.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying that I think looking at this kind of data in terms of what’s “required” for what winds up mixing and matching a bunch of different things. I think it’s instead instructive to look at this data from Richard Arum, Josipa Roksa, and Esther Cho about learning:

>

What this chart attempts to do is show gains in Collegiate Learning Assessment scores by major-type when controlling for the characteristics of the people who go into different fields. What it shows is that not only do education and business majors generally start college with worse test scores than people in the traditional math/science/social science/humanities sphere they generally seem to learn less while in college as well. So even though education majors do much better than humanities majors at getting jobs that require a college degree, that looks to me like it’s plausibly an artifact of regulatory policy or BLS categorization. There may be lots of jobs that don’t require a college degree but for which the kind of general skills (“including critical
thinking, analytical reasoning, and writing”) would be useful. Indeed, I think this is especially important when you try to think about career ladders. There are lots of jobs a person might have such that the job itself neither requires a college degree nor a great deal in terms of “general skills” but where such skills would be very helpful in rising to become a manager or quitting to start your own business.

http://b.rw/ksrtUK




MIT is an unusual centre of learning. Winning a Nobel prize for research is apparently considered only "fine", "but if you take that idea and apply it and make something transformative happen, then in MIT that is greatly admired"


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Save your money, United Nations -- the developing world doesn't need broadband Internet to get ahead.

David Brooks (don’t forget his new book) writes:

…in 1954, about 96 percent of American men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked. Today that number is around 80 percent. One-fifth of all men in their prime working ages are not getting up and going to work. According to figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States has a smaller share of prime age men in the work force than any other G-7 nation. The number of Americans on the permanent disability rolls, meanwhile, has steadily increased. Ten years ago, 5 million Americans collected a federal disability benefit. Now 8.2 million do. That costs taxpayers $115 billion a year, or about $1,500 per household.

…There are probably more idle men now than at any time since the Great Depression, and this time the problem is mostly structural, not cyclical. These men will find it hard to attract spouses. Many will pick up habits that have a corrosive cultural influence on those around them.

The rise in disability comes across a time horizon when jobs are becoming much safer and health care is improving.

I am struck by the difference between how some economists talk about “the job market,” and how they talk about the job market in academia, which of course is the job market they know the most about.

When it comes to the job market in academia, most economists have few hesitations about blaming many of the jobless for their fate and applying extreme meritocratic views.  “He spent seven years finishing.”  “Her specification was not robust.”  “He self-destructed in the interview.”  Or, believe it or not, “We don’t even look at people from that school.”

(And as Robin Hanson noted, there is little talk of redistributing grades, Ph.d.s, enforcing mandatory co-authorship for job market papers, or redistributing other measures of academic accomplishment.)

Nonetheless there is clearly a significant cyclical component to academic unemployment, based largely on state government budgets for higher education; as of a few years ago, seventy-eight percent of students were in the state sector.  If your department doesn’t have a slot, you probably can’t hire anybody, although a willingness to work for (much) less can lead to an adjunct job, even if many people won’t take one.

That cyclical component accounts for a lot of the short-run variation in hiring, but if you’re estimating the response to a demand shock, longer-term supply trends matter too and often they matter a great deal.  If Ph.d. programs were stricter about enforcing standards of quality and relevance, rather than stringing along students to maintain the flow of revenue to the graduate program, the short run negative demand shocks would lead to a much less severe queuing problem.  That’s simple microeconomics, and it should be macroeconomics too.

Furthermore short run negative demand shocks can reveal an unsustainable long-run trend in a new and sudden way, just as they do in financial crises.

When it comes to the jobless it is incorrect — and often hypocritical — to dismiss the common sense talk of traditional meritocratic factors, including structural problems on the supply side.

Addendum: Matt responds to Brooks, but his numbers don’t support his case.  As I’ve argued before, it’s a lot “harder” to get a shift from ten to twenty percent unemployment than it is to get a shift from one to two percent.  The cross-sectional distribution in unemployment, and its recent changes, are fully consistent with and indeed support the notion of major structural problems in the most vulnerable sectors, threshold-triggered by negative demand shocks.  Again, it’s two blades of the scissors, not one.

Wesley Yang |
New York Magazine |
May 2011
What becomes of Asian-American overachievers after the test-taking ends?

[full story]

The NY Times has a story about a group of students who took a 2007 course in app development at Stanford that turned out far better than any of them expected. Quoting:
"... by teaching students to build no-frills apps, distribute them quickly and worry about perfecting them later, the Facebook Class stumbled upon what has become standard operating procedure for a new generation of entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley and beyond. ... Early on, the Facebook Class became a microcosm of Silicon Valley. Working in teams of three, the 75 students created apps that collectively had 16 million users in just 10 weeks. Many of those apps were sort of silly: Mr. De Lombaert’s, for example, allowed users to send “hotness” points to Facebook friends. Yet during the term, the apps, free for users, generated roughly $1 million in advertising revenue."


Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "AFP News reports that chess will become a required subject in primary schools in Armenia, where children from the age of six will learn chess as a separate subject on the curriculum for two hours a week. The lessons, which start later this year, will 'foster schoolchildren's intellectual development' and teach them to 'think flexibly and wisely', says Arman Aivazian, an official at the Ministry of Education. President Serzh Sarkisian, an enthusiastic supporter of the game, has committed around $1.5 million to the scheme in a move to turn the country of 3.2 million people into a global force in the games, says Aivazian. 'Teaching chess in schools will create a solid basis for the country to become a chess superpower.' Armenia's national team won gold at the biennial International Chess Olympiad in both 2006 and 2008, and the country's top player, Levon Aronian, is currently ranked number three in the world."


Read more of this story at Slashdot.