Category — Higher Education

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this is an interesting presentation for a center for new humanities at rutgers.

I’m not sure that humanities are centered around creativity, but I am sure that i think that they humanities lead the way in terms of the skills that allow creativity and innovation to flourish.

THES – QS World University Rankings

[From QS Top Universities: THES - QS World University Rankings - top university rankings from around the world]

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the new rankings are out for the best universities. these are the times higher education supplement rankings. they have some interesting numbers.

Policy Research Tool:
UNESCO is launching a new tool to support policy-making based on research results from international social and human sciences.

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this is a cool tool. this post is also post 5900 according to the numbering system….

Too many students attend college:
Too many students attend college
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I actually agree to some extent with this idea, but not the evidence presented here. I think people need time to explore and find something they are passionate about before they engage in college. Too many students enter college, I think, with an unpurposefulness, which while fine in a general sense, is not conducive to learning. This combined with the problem of credentialism that students are taught by their high school and parents (cause i don’t teach that), causes dynamics in the classroom where students want you to tell them ‘what will be on the test?’ amongst other things. In other words, they don’t seem to want to learn as much as they want to pass the test. Those are not the same thing.

Mission to Learn: OER – Open Educational Resources:
OER – Open Educational Resources

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oer introduction.

It was the only right (ethical) choice that I had. You see I went down to google’s new york office tonight to see a colleague of mine speak on the future of the internet. I thought it was an open invite without any specific rules as to what I could do with the knowledge that I found there. I registered and attended until Google asserted the rules.

Sometimes… Google gets it wrong. You see I did not have any prior ruleset to know that they do not allow people to blog or otherwise publish their visit to such talks. They did not send one, it was not in any announcement that I received, and I’ve otherwise not seen one. However, there is a set of rules that prohibit blogging or publishing that they announced before the talk. Google said that if i wanted to blog or publicly discuss the event, I had to get their permission. If I’d have known, I would not have attended or been affiliated with the event in any way. I am a professor, was and still am, and by the very nature of my job, i cannot guarantee that I will follow their rules about publication or blogging. I couldn’t consent to them, so I had to leave. I don’t want to have to ask google for permission to speak about something that I already know a good deal about and am perfectly happy dashing an email off to colleagues to learn more. I don’t want to be obliged to them for any intellectual content or public knowledge at all beyond the general service they provide.

The rational that google said justified this request for secrecy and the privatization of knowledge was one of collegiality. I found that justification to be ironic. Colleagues share within the limits of their judgment. Collegiality is broken as soon as the judgment is turned into a ruleset, as soon as trust becomes moot and i no longer have to trust you, instead i just have to trust that you are following the pre-ordained rules. At that point in time of the announcement of rules, anyone in the room could be called colleagues, afterwards we were all subjects to Google and any collegiality was limited by Google’s rules. We were all constructed as lesser beings, less equal, more likely to damage others. We were ‘other’, and untrustworthy, which is the implication of the ‘no blogging’. If you want people to be friends, to become a community, you have to let them communicate, you have to let them establish the common ground by consent.

Thus I had to leave, as I was not going to be subject of Google beyond what I’ve already contracted. I could not consent to silence. I am surprised that the speaker in question would allow this rule, but not that surprised in the end.

Please if you have a talk where people who take ethics seriously are present, never change the rules after the fact, make them public beforehand.

Now I know 2 things,
1. Google changes the rules of public engagement to suit it’s own interpretations
2. Before I attend any future Google event, I should ask for clearly defined rules to be made public and distributed, so that I can decide to either be complicit or not beforehand.

T4 – Pay Attention:
Pay Attention

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how should we teach our students…. this video presents some concerns…. about the digital learner… and how we can play to them.

Online Degrees vs. Brick-and-Morter. The $100K Interview | SummitLearners – Education Online:
I hit the proverbial “glass ceiling” about 2 months ago. After working at my company for the last 3 years and steadily moving up from programming lacky to project manager, I had finally hit the point at which my bachelors degree just was not going to justify the pay raise. I suppose this happens to a lot of people, but I really had no idea what to do

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so he sends out 51 resumes with varying degrees and finds no significant differences based in hiring practice for online vs offline degrees.

G8-UNESCO World Forum on ‘Education, Research and Innovation: New Partnership for Sustainable Development’

G8-UNESCO World Forum on ‘Education, Research and Innovation: New Partnership for Sustainable Development’

Trieste, Italy, 10-12 May 2007

The Forum builds on the discussion launched at the
St. Petersburg summit on the interconnections between the three components of the triangle of knowledge—education, scientific research and technological innovation—from the perspective of sustainable development, and seeks to identify risks and opportunities for industrialized countries as well as developing and low-income countries.The discussion will be presented by speakers of the highest level from the educational, scientific and entrepreneurial worlds, drawn from G8 countries as well as developing countries. Attention to developing countries will augment the Italian initiative with respect to discussions within the G8 framework. The Forum is intended as an opportunity for discussion and no final document is foreseen.

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hmmph, missed the deadline for this.

One thing that I managed to do recently was finally pay off my smallest student loan, that was a minor accomplishment, it was a perkins loan through virginia tech. I consolidated my other student loans through the ford program a few years ago to lower my student loan interest. The amount of pressure that student loans put on people is incredible. While my loan payments are not high, they are important and they do limit my options. For instance, I cannot take a low paying job and pay my student loans and pay rent. But my interest rate on loans is not high, but I could probably lower it if I tried. I think about my students, who are taking out student loans for library school and I wonder if they will be able to pay them back on that salary. It is unclear to me whether that will be possible. It also worries me that people are taking out more than 100k of loans to go to school these days. I think that signals a major problem for the economy in the future.