Group items tagged

"the liberal rhetoric of individualism and personal choice is casually affirmed without sufficient attention to the ways in which one's choices and much else are influenced by tradition and community. Many interfaith couples have "chosen the romanticism and the individualistic ethos of America over the demands of the communities that they have come from" only to find, later on, that those demands still exert a force. "

"Power centers are elsewhere - in financial systems, corporations, technology, networks - that long since dispensed with borders. That being the case, loudmouthed, isolationist trumpery may just be a sideshow, an American exercise in après-moi-le-déluge escapism."

"If we follow a path of leveraging technology to create new forms of networked learning, I think they are much more likely to end up as Friedman-inspired marketplaces than Dewey-inspired learning webs."

an example of the importance of considering alternative hypotheses (and of connecting with people who raise them)

"[H]ow can race simultaneously be an irrelevance and an obsession? Unsurprisingly, [colorblindness is] rapidly cured in neighborhood selection, school choice and intimate relations..."

A study (pdf) done for the Innocenti Research Center, a research arm of Unicef, found that cutting had only 3 percent support in 2008 - down from 97 percent in 1999. This is a remarkable achievement. There is nothing more difficult than persuading people to give up long-held cultural practices, especially those bound up in taboo subjects like sex. The change happened because of an organization that Gebre and her sister Fikrte started called Kembatti Mentti Gezzima-Toppe, which means "women of Kembata working together." It is now known simply as KMG-Ethiopia.

"...we're probably measuring the wrong things and the right things are not amenable to measurement. If this is true and it is also true that the culture of measurement is in the ascendancy, we might expect that things that resist measurement - quality, poetry, insight - would be dismissed and set aside, on the reasoning that if it can't be measured, what good is it? A new technology typically turns its limitations into a mechanism of evaluation and consigns phenomena outside its capacities to the margins, not merely to its margins but to the margins of what is generally significant and worth worrying about. "

What does this say about online learning platforms and courses? (Do they ever come with red, yellow and green lights that administrators see when they sign contracts for $$millions without knowing the educational effects of the online systems?) Note other skeptical views expressed in the comments section.