José Silva's Scrapbook

Take 36-year-old Nick Keith, who remains $142,000 in debt eight years after graduating from culinary school.

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This Bright-Eyed Young Man Was Utterly Demolished by Student Loans

I think you mean “dim young man in some financial difficulty due to bad life choices, made against the advice of those who tried to help” there:

Keith’s father only agreed to co-sign a student loan if he stuck with an engineering degree at Iowa State University, but even with decent grades, he knew it wasn’t a right fit.

$142,000 in debt for a one-year degree in cooking school? And not even at the C.I.A.!

Students assigned randomly to statistics courses that relied heavily on “machine-guided learning” software — with reduced face time with instructors — did just as well, in less time, as their counterparts in traditional, instructor-centric versions of the courses.

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Report: Robots stack up to human professors in teaching Intro Stats | Inside Higher Ed.

Extremely unsurprising: statistics, like much technical material, is a practice. You learn it in the lab not in the lecture. As long as there’s motivation (a/k/a testing and grading), access to computers, and a good textbook, instructors are necessary only for clarification.

That experiment should have had “textbook only” as a third condition. But there’s always the lure of technology.

Truth in course definitions.

Professor Anant Agarwal on MITx (by MITNewsOffice)

He is still giving talks, and the titles now all include the word “wonder.” Whatever tool professors can find to conjure that—curiosity and a sense of amazing possibilities—is what they should use, he says. Like any good lecture, his point may be more inspirational than instructive.

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A Tech-Happy Professor Reboots After Hearing His Teaching Advice Isn’t Working - The Chronicle of Higher Education.

I have so many objections to so much of this article, that instead of writing them (at least for now), I’ll quote Robert Talbert’s comment:

We can’t call any kind of teaching, technologically-driven or not, “excellent” without some discussion of student learning — and that is conspicuously absent here.

Yep. There’s too much talk about teaching and not enough about learning.

I think the current university system is a disaster. It’s also a bubble. When are people going to realize that the BA is literally meaningless at this point, if you know nothing else except that a person has a BA?

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Transcript: “Coming Apart” Author Charles Murray Answers Reader Questions on America’s Growing Class Divide - Ideas Market - WSJ

Agreed in general, but there’s a difference between a BA in Self-Discovery Studies with a Self-Esteem minor from PartySchool and a degree in EECS from SeriousInstitution.

So once we add the concentration and the school, the BA can become informative. (There’s a pooling equilibrium outside of the clearly separating degrees in clearly separating institutions: a very smart and hardworking person may get a “easy major” degree from a party school, but a dumb lazy person cannot graduate in EECS from Stanford.)

My thoughts on iTunes U: It will help, but the problem in education is institutions

Making lectures (and supporting materials) widely available is good, but the idea that learning is some sort of procedure done to the student by the educator is flawed; learning is something that the student makes happen, by practicing the materials.

Walter Lewin does make physics fun to watch, but watching Lewin’s lectures won’t make anyone a physicist. Solving Lewin’s problem sets will. (Lewin may motivate people into doing the work necessary to become a physicist — and that’s a great contribution right there —but without slogging through the math no one becomes a physicist.) MIT’s rule of thumb is that learning is 1% lecture, 9% self study, 90% solving the problem sets.

Putting the lectures online — possibly in a mix of text, occasional talking head, interactive content, and links to references — is a good idea; instead of using the class time for them, we can use the class time for problem solving and discussion. This, of course is a major change to how education is practiced, so I expect most classes will continue almost unchanged.

Addendum: Some time ago I saw some new “smart classrooms” which were to be used for exec-ed; these classrooms had hundreds of thousands of dollars of presentation equipment and cheap, uncomfortable chairs. That’s upside-down: students’ discomfort will make a much bigger negative dent on their learning experience (and these are middle-aged students with the ailments that entails) than the minor positive of the high-resolution projectors and other machinery. Hey, I understand that the money might have been earmarked for technology, but chairs are technology too.

MIT’s contribution to producing technocrats was what it did not teach. It did not teach humility. It did not teach that the world is too complex for technocrats to control.

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RTWT: The MIT Connection. Wait… you mean there are no actual demand functions when you work in a company? Or cost functions?

Gee… it’s almost like those business classes, “market research” and “cost accounting,” were useful or something. Luckily they seem to be coming back under the guise of “analytics,” so there’s that.

These days, higher education is a dynamic and increasingly digital environment — and some are questioning the relevance of the traditional educational institution at all.

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11 Tech Factors That Changed Education in 2011

It’s an interesting collection of technologies that may help educate students, but I think I’ll keep my focus on the students rather than the technologies.

Don’t get me wrong, all else equal I want the best technologies possible; but if it comes to a choice between whiz-bang classroom technology and comfortable seats for the students, I choose comfortable seats. Student comfort removes one distractor from the learning process and one depletor of BDNF from students’ brains. I’m always flabbergasted when I see a classroom with millions of dollars of high-tech equipment and seats that are less comfortable than a stone bench.

I’m sure the lecturer was going to write “+1” next, but whoever chose this photo for their landing page should really have paid more attention to the content.

(A tip of the conspiratorial hood to my anonymity requested source.)

What does a circular polarizer do? This.

I rail against the unnecessary proliferation of animations, videos, and other distracting elements in presentations, but when the intended content is dynamic, animations or videos are more illustrative than still shots. Compare with this earlier illustration.

Why I like Participant-Centered Learning

Because it’s the most effective and efficient use of class time I know, of course.

Especially with a mix of discussion and exercises, not just discussion (and certainly not just discussion of Halberd cases). Learning technical material is 1% listening to the instructor, 9% studying on one’s own, and 90% practicing the material; exercises and discussions are that last 90%.

There are a few ancillary advantages, though.

Though it takes a moment for them to warm up to the discussion, the students are a lot more engaged than if I had been lecturing — and I’m told that I’m an above average (great!) presenter; imagine the average DeathByPowerPoint presenter’s students. Observe that I’m not presenting in the above video; I’m moderating the discussion, and writing what the students say on the board. Well, selectively writing.

Students usually don’t study during the semester, preferring to cram for the exam. These are weekend MBA students, who have serious jobs and families competing for their time. Knowing that the class is all about practice creates an incentive to study on their own ahead of class: their pace, their cognitive style, not the instructor’s lecture pace at the instructor’s cognitive style.

Discussion and exercises (on paper) are incredibly robust to technical difficulties. No computers to crash, no mismatch between the projector color and the slide design colors, no missing cables impeding education, no Growl notifications. Note how the only projected materials in this class are: the logo for the company being discussed (Black and Decker); the logo for one of the case options (DeWalt); and a colorful diagram — of which a wire-frame version is on the handout I distributed before the case discussion — during the five-minute lecturette that introduces a class exercise.

A long time ago in a university far away… a faculty meeting included a discussion of cooperation with another university. And some professors raised questions of intellectual property protection: what would stop this other university from just reproducing the courses for their own students (outside of the joint venture) or continue to use the courses after the joint venture ended. Participant-centered learning cannot be copied; it requires training, experience, and — above all — subject matter expertise. And that isn’t on any “deck” that can be lifted from the server.

With participant-centered learning there’s no denying the reality that what makes a great class are great students. And the ones on the video above, the weekend cohort of the TheLisbonMBA class of 2010 were great students, no doubt about that.

But then again, mine usually are.

Many schools already offer an “information technology” degree to avoid diluting their computer science degree.

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—	Why Science and Engineering Majors Change Their Minds « Isegoria. Truly sad, this state of affairs.