Category — Higher Education

Online Education Database – Accredited Online Colleges and Universities | OEDb:
Welcome to the Online Education Database. OEDb currently contains reviews of 620 programs from 57 accredited online colleges. Unlike other leading online education directories, our database only lists accredited online colleges so that you can be sure that these degrees will be respected by potential employers. Our database allows you to sort reviews by program, college, or degree level. Our library section will educate you on the basics of online universities.

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Interesting tool

OpinionJournal – Extra:
The university system has also become efficient in shipping large numbers of the most talented high-school graduates to the most prestigious schools. The allocation of this human capital can be criticized–it would probably be better for the nation if more of the gifted went into the sciences and fewer into the law.

snip
Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones. That the gift brings with it obligations to be worthy of it. That among those obligations, the most important and most difficult is to aim not just at academic accomplishment, but at wisdom.

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Ok, while I buy that not everyone should pursue higher education… This bit above.. it is just fabrication, a fiction, and an ideological one. There is no proof that this has ever been the case and there have been recent books showing that elite university and colleges.

Intelligence is not a gift, it is a natural capacity. I’m really not even sure it exists beyond a statistical inference. I know that some people seem to lack certain mental capacities that others seem to have, and that some people can master some skills of thought easily, but not everyone can master all skills of thought simply. I start from the idea, in my thinking, that the brain is a remarkable organ that is capable of all kinds of adaptations and transferrences in order to do something, but sometimes… it just can’t do something, but learning that it can’t do something is fascinating. Almost everyone that enters the educational system can learn from experience and can learn to be creative and inventive in interesting ways. They key is to take that and find a way to get them to be able to do that in our world. There is no single solution…. like ‘liberal arts’ that will work for this.

OpinionJournal – Extra:
While concepts such as “emotional intelligence” and “multiple intelligences” have their uses, a century of psychometric evidence has been augmented over the last decade by a growing body of neuroscientific evidence. Like it or not, g exists, is grounded in the architecture and neural functioning of the brain, and is the raw material for academic performance. If you do not have a lot of g when you enter kindergarten, you are never going to have a lot of it. No change in the educational system will change that hard fact.
That says nothing about the quality of the lives that should be open to everyone across the range of ability. I am among the most emphatic of those who think that the importance of IQ in living a good life is vastly overrated. My point is just this: It is true that many social and economic problems are disproportionately found among people with little education, but the culprit for their educational deficit is often low intelligence. Refusing to come to grips with that reality has produced policies that have been ineffectual at best and damaging at worst.

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I think we can see this pretty clearly in reading ability. However, I’m not sure that things are as determinist as this author seems to think.

The ACLS is pleased to announce that “Our Cultural Commonwealth: The final report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences” was released December 13, 2006.

In 2004, ACLS appointed the Commission and charged it to recommend how the humanities and social sciences could develop online research environments that would empower scholars and students. The Commission, chaired by John Unsworth, Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science and Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has worked over two years to present a guide to achieving that goal.

A grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supported the work of the Commission and the publication of the report.

Additional print and digital copies of Our Cultural Commonwealth may be obtained at no charge at http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/.

Is College Worth It?:
Few young people will be able to independently assess the value in advance and counter the societal and parental pressures which push them to attend college at any price. It’s imperative those with influence over young people make an unemotional analysis prior to college and point them to an appropriate path. For top students this means selecting public schools instead of private. Mediocre students should take advantage of lower cost options like Junior colleges to reduce costs and insure they are benefiting from advanced education. Both should be sensitized to the importance of selecting a high income major to increase the likelihood of a positive outcome. Half the students should be discouraged from attending college and pointed to a vocational career path. The expensive traditional 4 year liberal arts education approach is now failing the majority from an economic perspective. New approaches with a greater emphasis on direct vocational skills are required. Quick realization of the economics of college education is imperative to avoid dooming half a generation of young people to inescapable, life limiting debt.

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this is an interesting economic argument about whether college is ‘worth it’

Cyborg citizens and digital natives:
Patrik Hernwall discussed the notion of Educology, and how, within this framework, the learning subject can be defined. Building on theories of constructivist learning, he suggested that the learning subject should be viewed as an active, intentional, meaningmaking subject in context. An important part of the context is the tools available and what actions they afford, and this reasoning brought Hernwall to the conclusion that it is fruitful to view the (young) learner as a cyborg citizen.
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Here I take issue with the understanding of citizen. What it means to be a citizen is heavily contested, but qualitatively i think a citizen needs to: participate, be free to dissent(and really actually to dissent)… and that is about it. however, schools and technology have never been very good about encouraging participation and dissent. They are more in line with producing informed, agreeing subjects– subjects that are submissive to their informatic and mediated environments. Digital natives, in my mind, show no significant difference in the capacity to participate and dissent.

http://www.prattsenate.org/nytimes_07_02_06.htm
http://www.internationaled.org/mathsciencereport.htm
http://www.pekingduck.org/archives/003837.php

to the NYT articles and letters above…. I respond thusly:

I tend to agree more with the Letters, than with the nyt article and even less so with the report.

I think we have to be very careful about accounting for the cultural institutionalization of learning in China and the U.S. We need to be much more careful than the 29 page report. The report does not do that very well at all, it basically assumes a ‘most similar systems’ model of society and culture to make its comparison. This model is not justified in my mind. The U.S. and China are involved in fundamentally different projects in their educational systems though they have similar goals. Time on task type training, which is ‘efficient’ in China, might not be ‘efficient’ in the U.S. where we likely focus on a different sense of freedom, creativity and progress in learning.

I think it would be far more productive, policy-wise, to actually address the issues within the u.s. in regards to graduation and retention rates. Achievement measurement is grossly affected when there are an overwhelming percentage of people who are being ‘left behind’ or ‘unaddressed’ by the school systems in the u.s. In fact, i think we can probably fairly easily show that the single norm distribution basis for ’science and math education measurements’ is actually multi-modal and the arguments based on the covering norm are actually hiding very serious social and educational issues. If the needs of the people represented in the lower achieving modes of the population were addressed and they were taught and graduated, I think you would see the measured norm of science and math education change dramatically in the u.s.

What then is the real politics and policy behind the report? It seeks to legitimize national standards and national testing, taking away a power that has been relegated to local democracies and replacing it with national bureaucracies. It seeks to remove teacher control of the curriculum. It seems better teaching of teachers (ok, i agree with this one, give us educated and inspired teachers). It seeks to replace the open system of education and admissions with examination based access to education, (given what we know about cultural biases in the sat and act … ), etc. etc. In short, I think what we have is just a document that seeks to expand the currently promoted educational regime, which in the last 7 years or so has demonstrated significant problems addressing the needs of all students in the U.S.

far too many groups in the fields that i work with accept the singular account of economics…. so i’m distributing this.
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“Economic Pluralism for the 21st Century”
June 1-3, 2007
University of Utah (Salt Lake City, Utah, USA)

In the second half of the 20th century, neoclassical economics and its derivatives came to dominate economic thinking, teaching and policymaking. Humanity is increasingly feeling the consequences of this blinkered vision: the ever-widening gap between the very rich and all the rest; growing divergences in economic performance across nations and regions; globalization without global coordination for the common good; and economically induced climate change, with the mid-century prospect of an Earth unable to support even current levels of human population. Meta-externalities from economic systems are draining the resources on which they depend, from families and other institutions that educate and socialize human beings, to water, air, soil, and the diversity of species.

In a positive vein, economics in the 21st century has already taken a decidedly pluralist turn, spurred in part by the struggles of economists – mainstream and heterodox – to increase the relevance of economic theory, policy, and education in a changing and challenged world where no single theoretical tradition or institutional structure can reasonably claim to hold “the key” to human betterment.

ICAPE and the organizers of “Economic Pluralism for the 21st Century” invite proposals for papers that discuss or demonstrate the value of economic pluralism in any of its domains: economic theory and philosophy, economic institutions and policies, or economic education.

Panels will be organized around thematic topics, with an eye to encouraging dialogue among authors whose papers address similar issues from different points of view. In this fashion, we hope to promote critical engagement and mutual learning among conference participants.

Submission of Proposals

All paper and panel proposals should be submitted to Rob Garnett at r.garnett@tcu.edu, or by post to:

Rob Garnett
Department of Economics
Box 298510
Texas Christian University
Fort Worth, TX 76129

Proposal deadline: January 15, 2007
Notification deadline: February 15, 2007

For individual paper proposals, please include the following:

Paper title
Brief abstract (200-250 words)
Your name and contact addresses (including institutional affiliation)

For panel proposals (3-4 papers), please include:

Panel title
Brief description of the panel’s focus
Brief abstract (200-250 words) for each paper
Each panelist’s name and contact addresses (including institutional affiliations)

When submitting a panel proposal, you are encouraged (but not required) to designate a session chair. Also, you are encouraged to propose a format for your session, including non-traditional formats such as roundtables, workshops, or presenter/audience dialogues.

Conference Fees and Registration

The conference will be held over three days, beginning on Friday morning, June 1, 2007, and ending midday on Sunday, June 3.

The conference fee covers Friday and Saturday lunches, a conference dinner Friday evening, tea/coffee breaks throughout the conference, and all printed conference materials.

Between now and April 1, 2007, the fee structure will be:

Regular rate: $150
Low-income rate (for graduate students, underemployed Ph.D.s, and others): $75

After April 1, 2007, the fee structure will be:

Regular rate: $175
Low-income rate: $75

To register for the conference, please fill out the registration and payment form (available at www.icape.org) and send it to:

Ed McNertney
Department of Economics
Box 298510
Texas Christian University
Fort Worth, TX 76129

OA book series from the U of Helsinki:

UNESCO’s Basic Texts on the Information Society:

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some interesting key unesco texts.