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British universities need urgent reform - 1 views

  • British universities are undergoing an identity crisis
  • They no longer relate comfortably to schools, parents, students, would-be students, the examination system, the education marketplace, the British government – or each other.
  • As we report today, as many as one in five universities is staging its own entrance exam because it no longer trusts the state's A-levels to distinguish between averagely bright and very bright pupils: teenagers from both these groups routinely arrive on their doorsteps with grades worthy of a Nobel prize winner.
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  • Clearly, they are here to stay – unless the Government summons up the nerve to reform education far more radically than it is already doing.
  • Tuition fees reflect fast-changing circumstances that will force good universities to raise the academic as well as the financial bar in order to compete internationally. As they do so, they will increasingly question the arguments for remaining shackled to a British state that not only genuflects in front of the altar of egalitarianism (albeit a bit less piously than before) but also, as we are reminded again today, cannot even devise a proper set of exams for sixth-formers.
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    Telegraph View: British universities no longer know exactly what they are and what they are for. - British universities are undergoing an identity crisis. They no longer know exactly what they are and what they are for, now that social engineering has stretched the definition of "university" to breaking point. They no longer relate comfortably to schools, parents, students, would-be students, the examination system, the education marketplace, the British government - or each other. Every week brings fresh evidence of the weakening of these bonds, even in the middle of the Christmas holidays. - As we report today, as many as one in five universities is staging its own entrance exam because it no longer trusts the state's A-levels to distinguish between averagely bright and very bright pupils: teenagers from both these groups routinely arrive on their doorsteps with grades worthy of a Nobel prize winner...
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    news popularity Shoes information Home design interior all about insurance
Ed Webb

Our Digitally Undying Memories - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

  • as Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues convincingly in his book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton University Press, 2009), the costs of such powerful collective memory are often higher than we assume.
  • "Total recall" renders context, time, and distance irrelevant. Something that happened 40 years ago—whether youthful or scholarly indiscretion—still matters and can come back to harm us as if it had happened yesterday.
  • an important "third wave" of work about the digital environment. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, we saw books like Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital (Knopf, 1995) and Howard Rhein-gold's The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Addison-Wesley, 1993) and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Perseus, 2002), which idealistically described the transformative powers of digital networks. Then we saw shallow blowback, exemplified by Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason (Pantheon, 2008).
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  • For most of human history, forgetting was the default and remembering the challenge.
  • Chants, songs, monasteries, books, libraries, and even universities were established primarily to overcome our propensity to forget over time. The physical and economic limitations of all of those technologies and institutions served us well. Each acted not just as memory aids but also as filters or editors. They helped us remember much by helping us discard even more.
    • Ed Webb
       
      Excellent point, well made.
  • Just because we have the vessels, we fill them.
  • Even 10 years ago, we did not consider that words written for a tiny audience could reach beyond, perhaps to someone unforgiving, uninitiated in a community, or just plain unkind.
  • Remembering to forget, as Elvis argued, is also essential to getting over heartbreak. And, as Jorge Luis Borges wrote in his 1942 (yep, I Googled it to find the date) story "Funes el memorioso," it is just as important to the act of thinking. Funes, the young man in the story afflicted with an inability to forget anything, can't make sense of it. He can't think abstractly. He can't judge facts by relative weight or seriousness. He is lost in the details. Painfully, Funes cannot rest.
  • Our use of the proliferating data and rudimentary filters in our lives renders us incapable of judging, discriminating, or engaging in deductive reasoning. And inductive reasoning, which one could argue is entering a golden age with the rise of huge databases and the processing power needed to detect patterns and anomalies, is beyond the reach of lay users of the grand collective database called the Internet.
  • the default habits of our species: to record, retain, and release as much information as possible
  • Perhaps we just have to learn to manage wisely how we digest, discuss, and publicly assess the huge archive we are building. We must engender cultural habits that ensure perspective, calm deliberation, and wisdom. That's hard work.
  • we choose the nature of technologies. They don't choose us. We just happen to choose unwisely with some frequency
  • surveillance as the chief function of electronic government
  • critical information studies
  • Siva Vaidhyanathan is an associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia. His next book, The Googlization of Everything, is forthcoming from the University of California Press.
  • Nietzsche's _On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life_
  • Google compresses, if not eliminates, temporal context. This is likely only to exacerbate the existing problem in politics of taking one's statements out of context. A politician whose views on a subject have evolved quite logically over decades in light of changing knowledge and/or circumstances is held up in attack ads as a flip-flopper because consecutive Google entries have him/her saying two opposite things about the same subject -- and never mind that between the two statements, the Berlin Wall may have fallen or the economy crashed harder than at any other time since 1929.
Ed Webb

Views: How Tweet It Is - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • Part of my interest in this turn to Twitter comes from disappointment with most university press blogs, which often seem more like PR vehicles than genuine blogs with discussion, disagreement, expressions of real enthusiasm or curiosity or whatever. Reading very many of them at one sitting feels like attending a banquet where you are served salt-free soda crackers and caffeine-free Mountain Dew that's gone flat.By contrast, university-press publicists seem more inclined to experiment and to follow tangents with Twitter than they do on their own official websites. They link to material they have posted at the press’s blog, of course – but also to news and commentary that may be only obliquely related to the books in their catalog. It’s as if they escape from beneath the institutional superego long enough to get into the spirit of blogging, proper.
  • The range and the interest of Duke's tweets make its presence exemplary, in my opinion. Between drafting and rewriting this column, for example, I followed Duke's tweets to a newspaper article about whether or not English was approaching one million words, a blog post about rock songs cued to Joyce's Ulysses, and the Twitter feed of Duke author Negar Mottahedeh, who has been posting about events in Iran.
  • She then makes a point that bears stressing given how often university-press blogs tend to be coated in institutional gray: “I think that any kind of social networking needs to have a personality tied to it in order for it to be successful. Also, I think you really need to participate in the media in order for it to be successful. We ask people for questions and opinions, offer giveaways sometimes. My main goal is to try to get people talking -- either with me or with each other about our books and authors.... You can't just provide information or news feeds to reviews and articles about your books. Involving the Press in what is going, contributing to the various discussions, and asking (and answering) questions is really the way to grow your following.”
Valentina Dodge

YouTube - English360's Channel - 1 views

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    With English360, English teaching is changing. Our web-based learning platform can be used to create and deliver face-to-face, online and blended courses. Teachers an create personalised courses using digital authoring tools that let you combine coursebook content from Cambridge University Press
Maggie Verster

140 University from C4LPT - 1 views

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    "Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz are great places to discover and share new things - and therefore to build and extend your education. Discover new classes in the form of knowledge nuggets and related links to supporting FREE resources (web pages, videos, podcasts, etc) - in less than 140 characters. Explore the classes that you are interested in! Share your comments. Classes are delivered daily - 7 days a week. Saturday is quiz day"
Ed Webb

Admission Officials' Tweets Fall on Deaf Ears - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher ... - 0 views

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Rebecca Whitehead, assistant director of campus visits and engagements at Winthrop University, maintains the admissions office’s Twitter account, which currently has 373 followers. She says she uses it largely to connect with other higher-education professionals, to find out about upcoming events or research.
    • Ed Webb
       
      This seems right to me. Twitter is most effective in building and sustaining personal and professional learning networks.
Ed Webb

Neuro-tweets: #hashtagging the brain - Research - University of Cambridge - 0 views

  • human brain networks represent a balance between high efficiency of information transfer and low connection cost
  • Members of the audience and other Twitter users were asked to tweet during the lecture about the concepts that were being discussed, using the hashtag #csftwitterbrain. At the end of the talk Professor Bullmore displayed the resulting image showing the interconnectivity of the hashtagged tweets, and explained how Twitter networks can be compared to the human brain network. “We found that the #twitterbrain network was somewhat like the brain network in being small-world and modular with highly connected hub nodes; however the brain network was more clustered and less efficient than the twitter network. So at first sight there were some points in common and some points of difference between these two information processing networks.”
  • “It has been intriguing to see the spectacle of watching the twitter network grow or evolve over the course of several days. And I have learnt a lot about the power of new media to engage and communicate, and the potential scientific value of using Twitter to map and measure social networks.”
Fabian Aguilar

The powerful and mysterious brain circuitry that makes us love Google, Twitter, and tex... - 0 views

  • Google searches are becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore judges' instructions and go look up facts for themselves.
  • "My boyfriend has threatened to break up with me if I keep whipping out my iPhone to look up random facts about celebrities when we're out to dinner."
  • In 1954, psychologist James Olds and his team were working in a laboratory at McGill University, studying how rats learned.
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  • He eventually discovered that if the probe was put in the brain's lateral hypothalamus and the rats were allowed to press a lever and stimulate their own electrodes, they would press until they collapsed.
  • For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs.
  • when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing.
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