Category — Social Policy

University Instruction as Toilet-cleaning: “

From a student column in the Oregon Daily Emerald:

Students pay teachers to educate us, yet they are then allowed to tell us how much we’re learning. The whole situation seems akin to a boss paying her employee to clean toilets and the employee turning around and telling the employer how much she is or isn’t happy with the cleaning job. If I’m paying someone to do my housekeeping, I’ll be the one to tell the receiver of my hard-earned money exactly how well they did. Shouldn’t it be the same with education?

We are currently paying a large amount of money to attend this University and receive an education. If I have paid to be taught something, shouldn’t there be a repercussion for the teacher rather than, or at least as well as, the student when knowledge has not been taught?

“

(Via Kairosnews – A Weblog for Discussing Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy.)

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yet one more example of how students don’t know what university is about. of course, it doesn’t help that most parents don’t, and more teachers don’t, and for that matter most everyone doesn’t including universities. there is a great loss of anything other than the symbolic identity and certificatory identity of universities. the norms and traditions and expectations that were implied are slowly withering away.

for me universities are locations where people are supposed to learn, they are libraries and people who foster that learning, and they do not have any specific duty to any specific student for any given amount of money. they have a duty to ensure that students learn material and that learning is guaranteed, but not that they learn, people can fail.

Le blogs: “In an intriguing development, Le Monde has begun to offer its readers weblog hosting in partnership with Typepad. As Loïc Le Meur (of Typepad’s parent company, SixApart) points out, Le Monde’s top 10 blogs features a mix of the blogs…”

(Via Guardian Unlimited Newsblog.)

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this is pretty cool too.

It’s Miller Time at UM: “

UM Medical School announced a $100 million gift today, from the family of the late Leonard Miller, a longtime South Florida businessman and philanthropist.. The Medical School will be renamed the “Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine”.

Officially, anyway. That same announcement also refers to it as “The University of Miami Miller School of Medicine”.

The Med School Miller School is the biggest academic unit at UM. I bet for half that, or even less, you could name the law school almost (but not quite) anything you wanted.

Meanwhile, this enormous gift means that the university is 80% of the way towards its billion-dollar fund-raising goal, with $500+ million going to the Med School.

“

(Via Discourse.net.)

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this is yet one more example of age demographics serving their own interests…. don’t you think? i expect to see many med schools getting similar large gifts….

frontline: the persuaders: neuromarketing | PBS: “But 30 years after the commercials debuted, neuroscientist Read Montague was still thinking about them. Something didn’t make sense. If people preferred the taste of Pepsi, the drink should have dominated the market. It didn’t. So in the summer of 2003, Montague gave himself a ‘Pepsi Challenge’ of a different sort: to figure out why people would buy a product they didn’t particularly like.

What he found was the first data from an entirely new field: neuromarketing, the study of the brain’s responses to ads, brands, and the rest of the messages littering the cultural landscape. Montague had his subjects take the Pepsi Challenge while he watched their neural activity with a functional MRI machine, which tracks blood flow to different regions of the brain. Without knowing what they were drinking, about half of them said they preferred Pepsi. But once Montague told them which samples were Coke, three-fourths said that drink tasted better, and their brain activity changed too. Coke “lit up” the medial prefrontal cortex — a part of the brain that controls higher thinking. Montague’s hunch was that the brain was recalling images and ideas from commercials, and the brand was overriding the actual quality of the product. For years, in the face of failed brands and laughably bad ad campaigns, marketers had argued that they could influence consumers’ choices. Now, there appeared to be solid neurological proof. Montague published his findings in the October 2004 issue of Neuron, and a cottage industry was born.”

(Via .)

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manage my brain, know my interests, make me happy…..

well, this is perhaps not as interesting as one would hope, but it does show the extent that the market is reconstructed as scientific object…..

Amateurs and professionals: “The distinction between professionals and amateurs is one that’s so familiar today as to seem perfectly natural. Professionals are serious, amateurs are dilettantes; professionals know what they’re doing, and have credentials and training, amateurs don’t; professionals get paid, amateurs are hobbyists. Of course, in a few fields there are exceptions to the rule: astronomy, for example, continues to have a place for amateur comet-watchers. —snip—

(Via Future Now.)

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I generally term this the professionalization of leisure in the DIY culture. this theory fits with some of my thoughts though.

Black is White . George Will is…: “

Black is White. George Will is joining the chorus of attack on the universities: Academics, such as the next secretary of state, still decorate Washington, but academia is less listened to than it was. It has marginalized itself, partly by political shrillness and… [Leiter Reports]

Ahh. I was all set to write something about this but anyone who thinks and who has read George Will knows that he is the absolute model of modern day pundit. Meaning that facts and knowledge enter little in their world.“