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Felix Gryffeth

Arizona State Settles DNA Case With Indian Tribe - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...22dna.html

ethics Indian tribes native American

shared by Felix Gryffeth on 22 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Felix Gryffeth on 22 Apr 10
     
    The Havasupai people, who live in the Grand Canyon, had claimed that university researchers misused their DNA.
Dave Truss

The Tell-All Generation Learns When Not To, at Least Online - NYTimes.com - 10 views

www.nytimes.com/...09privacy.html

facebook socialmedia socialnetworking socialresponsibility presentation parents

shared by Dave Truss on 10 May 10 - Cached
  • Younger teenagers were not included in these studies, and they may not have the same privacy concerns. But anecdotal evidence suggests that many of them have not had enough experience to understand the downside to oversharing.
    • Dave Truss
      Dave Truss on 10 May 10
       
      This is why we need to have social networking sites at school, so that we can help teach about safety/security/privacy!
  • But in many cases, young adults are teaching one another about privacy.
  • Ms. Liu is not just policing her own behavior, but her sister’s, too. Ms. Liu sent a text message to her 17-year-old sibling warning her to take down a photo of a guy sitting on her sister’s lap. Why? Her sister wants to audition for “Glee” and Ms. Liu didn’t want the show’s producers to see it. Besides, what if her sister became a celebrity? “It conjures up an image where if you became famous anyone could pull up a picture and send it to TMZ,” Ms. Liu said. Andrew Klemperer, a 20-year-old at Georgetown University, said it was a classmate who warned him about the implications of the recent Facebook change — through a status update on (where else?) Facebook. Now he is more diligent in monitoring privacy settings and apt to warn others, too.
    • Dave Truss
      Dave Truss on 10 May 10
       
      Great examples of peers leading peers, but not the kind we usually read about when media describes social networking sites.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • He has learned to live out loud mostly by trial and error and has come up with his own theory: concentric layers of sharing.
    • Dave Truss
      Dave Truss on 10 May 10
       
      Like my "Worlds Collide" post: http://pairadimes.davidtruss.com/google-buzz-and-george-costanza-worlds-collide/ but I still think there is too much of a perception that you can have 'private' or 'hidden' digital lives (which you can't) rather than thinking about it as being appropriate to your audience, and always "appropriate" and thoughtful about your image.
  • The conventional wisdom suggests that everyone under 30 is comfortable revealing every facet of their lives online, from their favorite pizza to most frequent sexual partners. But many members of the tell-all generation are rethinking what it means to live out loud.
  • more than half the young adults questioned had become more concerned about privacy than they were five years ago — mirroring the number of people their parent’s age or older with that worry. They are more diligent than older adults, however, in trying to protect themselves.
  • In a new study to be released this month, the Pew Internet Project has found that people in their 20s exert more control over their digital reputations than older adults, more vigorously deleting unwanted posts and limiting information about themselves.
Brendan Murphy

A Culture of School Discipline - Inside the School - 16 views

www.insidetheschool.com/...a-culture-of-school-discipline

shared by Brendan Murphy on 21 May 10 - Cached
  • Kids were disrespectful to teachers, and teachers were impatient with kids
    • Brendan Murphy
      Brendan Murphy on 21 May 10
       
      We can sometimes cause our own discipline problems.
  • how does a school get to the point that my school was at when I first arrived? In this particular case, there had been a series of administrative turnovers, so every couple of years the priorities changed. There was no adopted discipline code, so school discipline was something that was randomly applied to individual students rather than a part of the entire school culture. Teachers felt that they were not supported by administration, and some students realized that there were few in any consequences for poor behavior (the student who hit the opposing player earned the first suspension in years). Some teachers just gave up; others became angry. Still others were intimidated. Teacher absenteeism was high.
    • Brendan Murphy
      Brendan Murphy on 21 May 10
       
      We first create our own problems because we don't have an district/school wide plan or if we do it isn't being followed.
  • The school turnaround didn’t occur overnight, but at the end of two years of consistent application of the discipline plan
    • Brendan Murphy
      Brendan Murphy on 21 May 10
       
      As with all change in education it takes time and consistant application
Suzie Nestico

How test scores are used as a political prop - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post - 7 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ABPCe33_blog.html

shared by Suzie Nestico on 21 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Standardized tests are necessarily narrow, thus rendering their value for informing teaching and learning extremely limited. Their validity for labeling students and evaluation teachers is just as misleading. I learned that assessment that supports teaching and learning trumps assessments that label.
    • Suzie Nestico
      Suzie Nestico on 26 Mar 11
       
      Interesting, too, that while we, as educators, are dealing with so very many new bullying issues in our schools, ultimately our testing system is just another means of labeling and classifying students, "Hey Proficient, I'm Advanced...  nice to meet you. Look at Below Basic sitting over there by himself." In many cases, the testing is merely showing and telling our students how wrng they are or how much they do not know.  What a self-esteem booster!  And, we expect them to be lifelong-learners, independent thinkers, probem-solvers and innovators?
  • High-stakes, authoritarian, and punitive environments are the antitheses of the life conditions we assert public education is essential for supporting (and unlike anything being practiced in Finland).
  • Politicians have long used funding to mandate policy–often with little logic (consider the use of highway funds to force raising the drinking age to 21 under Ronald Reagan). In short, politicians often fail us because the power of the purse strings allows inexpert politicians to drive public policies regardless of the available data or the expertise of those practicing the fields impacted.
  • Brett Campbell on 21 Mar 11
     
    I learned that students needed to be taught how to make choices. I learned that affect matters as much as cognition. I learned that assessment that supports teaching and learning trumps assessments that label.
Vicki Davis

Save Favorite Tweets | Diigo - 31 views

www.diigo.com/save_tweets

education diigo productivity twitter

shared by Vicki Davis on 02 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Vicki Davis on 02 Jun 11
     
    You can save your favorite Tweets to Diigo. This is going to be SO useful!
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Suzie Nestico on 02 Jun 11
     
    Yes! It is incredibly useful. I thought this was common knowledge as I have been doing it for quite sometime... the reason I have so many "favorites" in Twitter. Automatically ships them here and then I can sort and organize by my groups and lists.
  • Ed Webb on 05 Jun 11
     
    I do it, too. Like Suzie, it means I have more favorites than I otherwise would have. I also use the rss feed https://twitter.com/favorites/edwebb.rss to put them into Google Reader in case I want to share further via Buzz or other means, and to have them show up in an RSS widget on some of my course or other wikipages, blogs etc.
  • Ruth Howard on 06 Jun 11
     
    Thanks I've just bothered to apply for an education account!
anonymous

adVancEducation: The Narrows and the Shallows - 3 views

advanceducation.blogspot.com/...narrows-and-shallows.html

professionaldevelopment bestpractices

shared by anonymous on 04 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Most of us can relate to the befuddled lady in the "Age-Activated Attention Deficit Disorder" video http://tinyurl.com/6xcej6g.  With the constant distractions of modern life interrupting completion of any tasks begun, the lady depicted can't keep up with frequent alterations to her memory synapses which are potentially activating a few genes capable of creating protein for memory storage which might find their way into the gene pool in case reproduction was on her agenda (oh, NOW I remember where I was going in the car :-)
Vicki Davis

Emory student charged in New York SAT test cheating case  | ajc.com - 4 views

www.ajc.com/...tudent-charged-in-1189843.html

Education sat

shared by Vicki Davis on 28 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Vicki Davis on 28 Sep 11
     
    How many schools would have the integrity to investigate discrepancies in the sat. An Emory University student flew home several times to take the SAT for six students who paid him more than $1k a piece to take the test, according to charges filed this week.
Jeff Johnson

School Choice Crucible: A Case Study of Boulder Valley - 0 views

www.pdkintl.org/...k0110how.htm

school choice SES FRL reduce inequities controversial public education reform

shared by Jeff Johnson on 09 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Jeff Johnson on 09 Apr 09
     
    SCHOOL CHOICE is a controversial public education reform -- but not as controversial as it should be. Support for choice remains strong in the face of mounting evidence that long-standing controversies are being decided in favor of the critics of choice. Our study of the choice program in the Boulder Valley School District adds to the growing body of research documenting serious flaws in the theory, procedures, and outcomes of school choice. Advocates of school choice contend that competition gives parents a voice and the power to vote with their feet. Schools that consistently perform poorly will lose "clients" and be forced to go "out of business," resulting in overall improvement in both achievement and parental satisfaction. Advocates of choice also contend that school choice can better accommodate a diversity of student interests and needs than the "one-size-fits-all" approach they ascribe to traditional public schools. Finally, they contend that school choice can reduce inequities. School choice is really nothing new, according to them, for parents have long chosen schools by choosing their place of residence.
Fabian Aguilar

What Do School Tests Measure? - Room for Debate Blog - NYTimes.com - 1 views

roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/...what-do-school-tests-measure

nytimes all_teachers math science

shared by Fabian Aguilar on 12 Aug 09 - Cached
  • According to a New York Times analysis, New York City students have steadily improved their performance on statewide tests since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took control of the public schools seven years ago.
  • Critics say the results are proof only that it is possible to “teach to the test.” What do the results mean? Are tests a good way to prepare students for future success?
  • Tests covering what students were expected to learn (guided by an agreed-upon curriculum) serve a useful purpose — to provide evidence of student effort, of student learning, of what teachers taught, and of what teachers may have failed to teach.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • More serious questions arise about “teaching to the test.” If the test requires students to do something academically valuable — to demonstrate comprehension of high quality reading passages at an appropriate level of complexity and difficulty for the students’ grade, for example — then, of course, “teaching to the test” is appropriate.
  • Reading is the crucial subject in the curriculum, affecting all the others, as we know.
  • An almost exclusive focus on raising test scores usually leads to teaching to the test, denies rich academic content and fails to promote the pleasure in learning, and to motivate students to take responsibility for their own learning, behavior, discipline and perseverance to succeed in school and in life.
  • Test driven, or force-fed, learning can not enrich and promote the traits necessary for life success. Indeed, it is dangerous to focus on raising test scores without reducing school drop out, crime and dependency rates, or improving the quality of the workforce and community life.
  • Students, families and groups that have been marginalized in the past are hurt most when the true purposes of education are not addressed.
  • lein. Mayor Bloomberg claims that more than two-thirds of the city’s students are now proficient readers. But, according to federal education officials, only 25 percent cleared the proficient-achievement hurdle after taking the National Assessment of Education Progress, a more reliable and secure test in 2007.
  • The major lesson is that officials in all states — from New York to Mississippi — have succumbed to heavy political pressure to somehow show progress. They lower the proficiency bar, dumb down tests and distribute curricular guides to teachers filled with study questions that mirror state exams.
  • This is why the Obama administration has nudged 47 states to come around the table to define what a proficient student truly knows.
  • Test score gains among New York City students are important because research finds that how well one performs on cognitive tests matters more to one’s life chances than ever before. Mastery of reading and math, in particular, are significant because they provide the gateway to higher learning and critical thinking.
  • First, just because students are trained to do well on a particular test doesn’t mean they’ve mastered certain skills.
  • Second, whatever the test score results, children in high poverty schools like the Promise Academy are still cut off from networks of students, and students’ parents, who can ease access to employment.
  • Reliable and valid standardized tests can be one way to measure what some students have learned. Although they may be indicators of future academic success, they don’t “prepare” students for future success.
  • Since standardized testing can accurately assess the “whole” student, low test scores can be a real indicator of student knowledge and deficiencies.
  • Many teachers at high-performing, high-poverty schools have said they use student test scores as diagnostic tools to address student weaknesses and raise achievement.
  • The bigger problem with standardized tests is their emphasis on the achievement of only minimal proficiency.
  • While it is imperative that even the least accomplished students have sufficient reading and calculating skills to become self-supporting, these are nonetheless the students with, overall, the fewest opportunities in the working world.
  • Regardless of how high or low we choose to set the proficiency bar, standardized test scores are the most objective and best way of measuring it.
  • The gap between proficiency and true comprehension would be especially wide in the case of the brightest students. These would be the ones least well-served by high-stakes testing.
Dennis OConnor

Internet Search Challenge: Adults Do Better - 0 views

internetsearchchallenge.blogspot.com/...adults-do-better.html

21cif website evaluation investigative searching moodle

shared by Dennis OConnor on 14 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Need proof that adults search and evaluate better than youth? These charts show how students in middle school and high school compare to teachers and librarians. The assessment is the pretest from a course we call "Investigative Searching 20/10."
  • To date, 449 middle schoolers, 414 high schoolers and 28 adults have taken the 10-item pretest that measures the ability to find critical information and evaluate its credibility. There are several differences that really stand out.
  • Are these the results you would expect? Do you think they are artificially low or about right? That's hard to say without seeing the pretest. Without disclosing specific items (in case you want to take the test), the 10 items focus on skills that have been described in previous posts, requiring the application of appropriate techniques to find the author of articles, the name of the publisher, the date of publication, other instances of the content on the Internet and references to web pages.
Fabian Aguilar

Tom Vander Ark: The Role of the Private Sector in Education - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...of-the-private-s_b_277312.html

shared by Fabian Aguilar on 07 Sep 09 - Cached
  • The education sector bias (and related legal prohibitions) against investment by private companies is remarkable in contrast to other public delivery systems.
  • We don't mind if textbook publishers update versions, but hackles go up when private operators propose school management. Most of this is just disguised job protection; the rest is historical bias.
  • Mosaica and NHA are offering a service that is clearly superior to near by public schools and doing it for less money. They usually have to provide their own facility with no public funding. Yet they are prohibited from holding charters directly in most states. They find or construct a non-profit corporation which seeks a charter and then contracts with them for school management services. They run the risk of being kicked out of a school that they invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to open.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The $650 million Invest in Innovation Fund (i3) will soon be doled out primarily to school districts -- folks with very little ability to invest in, manage, or scale innovation. Unlike the Department of Energy, public-private partnerships are prohibited. If the US Department of Education was able to invest half of i3 in private ventures, it would be multiplied several times over by private investment (10x in some cases), it would fund scalable enterprises with the potential for national impact, and the innovation would be sustained by a business model.
  • We send our kids to privately run hospitals, we travel over privately constructed roads, and we buy power from private companies. Private sector investment and innovation should play a more important role in American education.
Dennis OConnor

Google Wave Use Cases: Education - 20 views

www.readwriteweb.com/...e_wave_use_cases_education.php

GoogleWave education google wave tools web2.0

shared by Dennis OConnor on 06 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Google Wave is a much hyped new Internet-based communications and collaboration platform. It was announced at the end of May, released as a 'Preview' product shortly after tweetmeme_url = 'http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_wave_use_cases_education.php'; tweetmeme_source = 'rww'; and 100,000 more invites were made available at the end of September.
Iris Deters

8 weird ways to save the Earth - Cloud whitening (1) - CNNMoney.com - 5 views

money.cnn.com/...index.html

science

shared by Iris Deters on 23 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Turns out particles, in this case the salt in the sea mist, will cause clouds to become denser, reflecting more sunlight back into space and keeping the planet cooler.
  • The nove
  • t crossed the Atlantic. The mist towers are hollow and rotate in the wind, acting as sails. It can cross the Atlantic faster than a conventional sail boat and do so without a crew.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • How it works: The idea here is to use satellite-guided sailing ships to crisscross the oceans, constantly spewing a fine stream of sea mist into the clouds
  • Each ship would cost $2 or $3 million, making the entire program cost just a few billion dollars.
Caroline Bucky-Beaver

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education - 1 views

wwwdev.ncte.org/...fairusemedialiteracy

medialiteracy bestpractices copyright fairuse 5 principles 2008 digitalcitizenship

shared by Caroline Bucky-Beaver on 12 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Fair use is the right to use copyrighted material without permission or payment under some circumstances -- especially when the cultural or social benefits of the use are predominant. It is a general right that applies even in situations where the law provides no specific authorization for the use in question -- as it does for certain narrowly defined classroom activities.
  • guide identifies five principles that represent the media literacy education community’s current consensus about acceptable practices for the fair use of copyrighted materials
  • code of best practices does not tell you the limits of fair use rights. Instead, it describes how those rights should apply in certain recurrent situations.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • Media literacy education distinctively features the analytical attitude that teachers and learners, working together, adopt toward the media objects they study. The foundation of effective media analysis is the recognition that: All media messages are constructed.Each medium has different characteristics and strengths and a unique language of construction.Media messages are produced for particular purposes.All media messages contain embedded values and points of view.People use their individual skills, beliefs and experiences to construct their own meanings from media messages.Media and media messages can influence beliefs, attitudes, values, behaviors, and the democratic process. Making media and sharing it with listeners, readers, and viewers is essential to the development of critical thinking and communication skills. Feedback deepens reflection on one’s own editorial and creative choices and helps students grasp the power of communication.
  • Lack of clarity reduces learning and limits the ability to use digital tools. Some educators close their classroom doors and hide what they fear is infringement; others hyper-comply with imagined rules that are far stricter than the law requires, limiting the effectiveness of their teaching and their students’ learning.
  • Educators and learners in media literacy often make uses of copyrighted materials that stand far outside the marketplace, for instance, in the classroom, at a conference, or within a school-wide or district-wide festival. Such uses, especially when they occur within a restricted-access network, do enjoy certain copyright advantages.
  • Law provides copyright protection to creative works in order to foster the creation of culture. Its best known feature is protection of owners’ rights. But copying, quoting, and generally re-using existing cultural material can be, under some circumstances, a critically important part of generating new culture.
  • In reviewing the history of fair use litigation, we find that judges return again and again to two key questions: Did the unlicensed use "transform" the material taken from the copyrighted work by using it for a different purpose than that of the original, or did it just repeat the work for the same intent and value as the original? Was the material taken appropriate in kind and amount, considering the nature of the copyrighted work and of the use? If the answers to these two questions are "yes," a court is likely to find a use fair. Because that is true, such a use is unlikely to be challenged in the first place.
  • Both key questions touch on, among other things, the question of whether the use will cause excessive economic harm to the copyright owner. Courts have told us that copyright owners aren’t entitled to an absolute monopoly over transformative uses of their works.
  • Another consideration underlies and influences the way in which these questions are analyzed: whether the user acted reasonably and in good faith, in light of general practice in his or her particular field.
  • Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education
  • Through its five principles, this code of best practices identifies five sets of current practices in the use of copyrighted materials in media literacy education to which the doctrine of fair use clearly applies. These practices are associated with K–12 education, higher education, and in classes given by nonprofit organizations. When students or educators use copyrighted materials in their own creative work outside of an educational context, they can rely on fair use guidelines created by other creator groups, including documentary filmmakers and online video producers.
  • These principles apply to all forms of media.
  • The principles apply in institutional settings and to non-school-based programs. 
  • The principles concern the unlicensed fair use of copyrighted materials for education, not the way those materials were acquired. 
  • where a use is fair, it is irrelevant whether the source of the content in question was a recorded over-the-air broadcast, a teacher’s personal copy of a newspaper or a DVD, or a rented or borrowed piece of media. Labels on commercial media products proclaiming that they are “licensed for home [or private or educational or noncommercial] use only” do not affect in any way the educator’s ability to make fair use of the contents—in fact, such legends have no legal effect whatsoever. (If a teacher is using materials subject to a license agreement negotiated by the school or school system, however, she may bebound by the terms of that license.)
  • TWO:  Employing Copyrighted Materials in Preparing Curriculum Materials
  • fairness of a use depends, in part, on whether the user tookmore than was needed to accomplish his or her legitimate purpose.
  • PRINCIPLES
  • ONE:  Employing Copyrighted Material in Media Literacy Lessons
  • The principles are all subject to a “rule of proportionality.” 
  • THREE:  Sharing Media Literacy Curriculum Materials
  • In materials they wish to share, curriculum developers should beespecially careful to choose illustrations from copyrighted media that are necessaryto meet the educational objectives of the lesson, using only what furthers theeducational goal or purpose for which it is being made.
  • FOUR:  Student Use of Copyrighted Materials in Their Own Academic and Creative Work
  • Students should be able to understand and demonstrate, in a mannerappropriate to their developmental level, how their use of a copyrighted workrepurposes or transforms the original. For example, students may use copyrightedmusic for a variety of purposes, but cannot rely on fair use when their goal is simplyto establish a mood or convey an emotional tone, or when they employ popular songssimply to exploit their appeal and popularity.
  • FIVE:  Developing Audiences for Student Work
  • If student work that incorporates, modifies, and re-presents existingmedia content meets the transformativeness standard, it can be distributed to wideaudiences under the doctrine of fair use.
  • Educators and learners in media literacy often make uses of copyrighted works outside the marketplace, for instance in the classroom, a conference, or within a school-wide or district-wide festival. When sharing is confined to a delimited network, such uses are more likely to receive special consideration under the fair use doctrine.
  • Especially in situations where students wish to share their work more broadly (by distributing it to the public, for example, or including it as part of a personal portfolio), educators should take the opportunity to model the real-world permissions process, with explicit emphasis not only on how that process works, but also on how it affects media making.
  • The ethical obligation to provide proper attribution also should be examined.
  • This code of best practices, by contrast, is shaped by educators for educators and the learners they serve, with the help of legal advisors. As an important first step in reclaiming their fair use rights, educators should employ this document to inform their own practices in the classroom and beyond
  • MYTH:  Fair Use Is Just for Critiques, Commentaries, or Parodies. Truth:  Transformativeness, a key value in fair use law, can involve modifying material or putting material in a new context, or both. Fair use applies to a wide variety of purposes, not just critical ones. Using an appropriate excerpt from copyrighted material to illustrate a key idea in the course of teaching is likely to be a fair use, for example. Indeed, the Copyright Act itself makes it clear that educational uses will often be considered fair because they add important pedagogical value to referenced media objects.
  • So if work is going to be shared widely, it is good to be able to rely on transformativeness. As the cases show, a transformative new work can be highly commercial in intent and effect and qualify under the fair use doctrine.
  • Caroline Bucky-Beaver on 12 Nov 08
     
    Great article outlining copyright, fair use and explaning the 5 principles of fair use in education.
Ed Webb

Why hard work and specialising early is not a recipe for success - The Correspondent - 0 views

thecorrespondent.com/...5432867990-073c5173

education LiberalArts psychology training

shared by Ed Webb on 09 Mar 20 - Cached
  • dispelling nonsense is much harder than spreading nonsense.
  • a worldwide cult of the head start – a fetish for precociousness. The intuitive opinion that dedicated, focused specialists are superior to doubting, daydreaming Jacks-of-all-trades is winning
  • astonishing sacrifices made in the quest for efficiency, specialisation and excellence
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • Most things that people want to learn do not resemble language, golf or chess, but rather a game in which the generalist has an advantage. A hostile learning environment
  • Seemingly inefficient things are productive: expanding your horizons, giving yourself time, switching professions. 
  • early specialisation is a good idea if you want to become successful in certain fields, sports or professions. In fact, in some cases, it’s the only option. Take chess, for example: if you don’t start early, you won’t stand a chance at glory.
  • learning chess is not a good model for learning other things. Epstein explains this using the work of psychologist Robin Hogarth, who makes the distinction between friendly (kind) and unfriendly or hostile (wicked) learning environments.
  • In a friendly learning environment, such as chess, the rules are clear, the information is complete (all pieces are visible on the board), and you can (ultimately) determine the quality of every move. In other words, the feedback loop
  • friendly learning environments are the exception. The world is not as clear-cut as golf or chess. So early specialisation is often a bad idea. 
  • In hostile learning environments without repetitive patterns, mastery is much harder to achieve. The feedback loop is insidious. Unlike chess, experience does not necessarily make you better. You may stick with the wrong approach because you’re convinced it’s the right one. 
  • The better a teacher scored on their own subject (i.e., the higher the grades their students got in that subject), the more mediocre students’ scores were across the complete programme (all modules). The explanation? Those teachers gave their students rigidly defined education, purely focused on passing exams. The students passed their tests with high marks – and rated their teachers highly in surveys – but would fail later on. 
  • In learning environments without repetitive patterns, where cause and effect are not always clear, early specialisation and spending countless hours does not guarantee success. Quite the opposite, Epstein argues. Generalists have the advantage: they have a wider range of experiences and a greater ability to associate and improvise. (The world has more in common with jazz than classical music, Epstein explains in a chapter on music.)
  • Many modern professions aren’t so much about applying specific solutions than they are about recognising the nature of a problem, and only then coming up with an approach. That becomes possible when you learn to see analogies with other fields, according to psychologist Dedre Gentner, who has made this subject her life’s work.
  • Another advantage generalists and late specialists have is more concrete: you are more likely to pick a suitable study, sport or profession if you first orient yourself broadly before you make a choice.
  • Greater enjoyment of the game is one of the benefits associated with late specialisation, along with fewer injuries and more creativity.
  • which child, teenager or person in their 20s knows what they will be doing for the rest of their lives?
  • Persevering along a chosen path can also lead to other problems: frustrations about failure. If practice makes perfect, why am I not a genius? In a critical review,
  • The tricky thing about generalist long-term thinking versus specialist short-term thinking is that the latter produces faster and more visible results.
  • specialising in short-term success gets in the way of long-term success. This also applies to education.
  • (Another example: the on-going worry about whether or not students’ degree choices are "labour market relevant".)
  • Teachers who taught more broadly – who did not teach students readymade "prescribed lessons” but instilled "principles" – were not rated as highly in their own subject, but had the most sustainable effect on learning. However, this was not reflected in the results. These teachers were awarded – logically but tragically – lower ratings by their students.
  • the 10,000 hour gang has considerable power with their message "quitters never win, winners never quit".Epstein’s more wholesome message seems weak and boring in comparison. Some things are simply not meant for everyone, doubt is understandable and even meaningful, you can give up and change your choice of work, sports or hobby, and an early lead can actually be a structural disadvantage. 
  • "Don’t feel behind." Don’t worry if others seem to be moving faster, harder or better. Winners often quit.
Ed Webb

Liberal Education after the Pandemic | AAUP - 1 views

www.aaup.org/...beral-education-after-pandemic

LiberalArts liberal_arts education future US USA pandemics economy sustainability science climate opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Sep 20 - Cached
  • The current massive and unanticipated experiment in online education could transform higher education as we know it. We should begin these difficult conversations about the future of the liberal arts now, in cyberspace, before the new normal takes shape—whenever that may be. Even if we feel trapped in our own homes and beset with anxiety and cabin fever, we also have an opportunity to reconsider the aims of higher education not in the abstract but in this concrete historical moment, with attention to specific institutional needs, public policy proposals, ideological pressures, and the overarching economic crisis.
  • A genuine commitment to ethical, historically aware, egalitarian, or democratic principles can land an individual in a world of trouble. I am thinking, for example, of the basic scientific literacy, historical awareness, and ethical commitment that equip an individual citizen to recognize the expertise of infectious disease specialists and reject the common sense of neighbors or the priorities and demands of an employer—or to spot the bogus claims, fundamental incompetence, or ethical depravity of some elected leaders. Such scientific literacy and basic familiarity with statistical analysis allow nonexperts to understand the arguments of climatologists and reject the sophistry of coworkers or talk show hosts or governors who point out, for example, that “the climate has always been changing.”
  • The reason that individual institutions cannot pitch such potential outcomes under ordinary circumstances is that these intellectual faculties serve the public good but do not necessarily advance the economic interests or career objectives of individual prospective or current students, especially those incurring significant debt. Being a whistleblower, for example, is generally a costly, painful career move—but the public needs to know nonetheless if the US military is shooting civilians in the streets of Baghdad; or the pharmaceutical industry is engineering a profitable opioid epidemic; or the health insurance industry is denying legitimate claims.
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  • just as the current crisis represents an opportunity for the people who have been working hard to privatize everything imaginable, dismantle public education, sink net neutrality, and align higher education with the demands of prospective employers and industry moguls (think here of the interventions of the Koch brothers in higher education, for example), it also represents an opportunity to push for the basic conditions under which a liberal education might properly serve its public functions. We should use these months to advocate for the kinds of public policies, such as tuition-free higher education, that recognize liberal education as a common good. We must articulate the reasons why a liberal education is in fact a common good and why a liberal education is disfigured if it is made to promote the demands of prospective employers.
  • We need a society capable of devising new and more humane social contracts, new political economies, new food and energy grids, and sustainable use of resources—whether or not these projects produce financial dividends for individual graduates or for their employers. An accessible, publicly funded liberal education decoupled from the demands of industry and prospective employers is the best way to prepare people to do these things.
  • we should use these months of confinement to strategize about a long-term case for liberal education and for public investment in an educated citizenry. Now is the time to invest some of our intellectual capital in education advocacy that ultimately makes a difference not only in the lives of students but also for the collective well-being of our nation and the world
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