Tag: Education

The Anti-Dropout

The Anti-Dropout:

It’s true (and exciting) that so much knowledge has moved online in the past decade. I can learn basic programming via Treehouse. I can learn web design in a course on Udemy. But what if I want to learn about the physics that drive hardware performance? The materials science behind the next generation of wearable computing? Or what about how to bring electronics manufacturing back to the United States? There are real, fundamental sets of knowledge that are still locked up in traditional academia.

A Domain of One’s Own. Neat digital identity project from the University of Mary Washington. Looks like a lot of it is based around using WordPress, too.

Why grad schools should require students to blog. Great post about the impact consistent, public writing has upon dissertation work.

Nicholas Carr writes of a study that shows students still prefer printed texts:

What’s most revealing about this study is that, like earlier research, it suggests that students’ preference for printed textbooks reflects the real pedagogical advantages they experience in using the format: fewer distractions, deeper engagement, better comprehension and retention, and greater flexibility to accommodating idiosyncratic study habits.

Or, put another way, it shows that students who were taught to read through printed texts still have a bias toward that medium as they grow older. Humans are highly adaptable creatures and I’d bet the preference these students have is more a result of pedagogy than the inherent values of digital texts.

I think we won’t truly see the effects of digital books until these studies focus on students who learned to read on digital devices. In other words, people who don’t look at an iPad or Kindle as an e-book but, rather, just as how you read.

Your Massively Open Offline College Is Broken:

In the academy, we’re fine with anything that lowers the cost of education. We love those kinds of changes. But when someone threatens to lower the price, well, then we start behaving like Teamsters in tweed.

Fantastic piece from Clay Shirky about why some of the biggest threats to college come from within the system.

A moment of dreaming about higher education:

As university education becomes a more highly valued commodity-as you pay fourteen thousand a year for a UC education, instead of nothing-the university experience has, indeed, become more a pleasurable self-cultivation, since university administrators prefer customers to workers. This is why universities spend more and more money on new dorms, new campus programs, and new ways of making their campus experience an attractive prospect for incoming freshmen: as universities transition towards a customer-payment model, they moving out of education business into the production of education products. They spend less and less money on classrooms and teachers, the spaces where student work happens, because they are, quite literally, not interested in student work. Their financial interest is in student-customers, and it shows.

Really interesting essay.

College was my biggest mistake:

$44,000 might as well have been a million dollars, because in my mind they were equally unfathomable- with only $300 in my checking account, I had to make a decision whether or not to borrow $176,000. Makes sense.

I remember facing a similar decision at 18. I withdrew the $6,000 from my savings account and wrote a $5,000 check to Whitman.

The other grand bought me a MacBook. On that MacBook I taught myself basic HTML, CSS, PHP, and eventually discovered WordPress.

I wouldn’t say my time at college was a mistake. Too much good came out of it to say that. But, I do know what the more productive use of my time and money was.

Professors without borders. Interesting overview of mass, distributed, web-based teaching tools. Things like Coursera and Udacity are neat but they’re really just an alpha. They take the same model of education as traditional colleges and shift it online. The revolution will come when someone sets the goal of building a web-native tool for learning. Then it will get interesting.

A Conversation With Bill Gates About The Future of Higher Education. Great interview with Bill Gates where he discusses some of what his foundation is working on in terms of education and schools. Via Daniel.

The joys of doing so

We so quickly forget that people, especially children, will not willingly do what we teach them unless they are shown the joys of doing so.

Frank Chimero – The Shape of Design.