Tag Archives: Education

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.