The Last Professor - Stanley Fish Blog - NYTimes.com
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/the-last-professor/

discussion on the changing attitiudes of higher learning

In previous columns and in a recent book I have argued that higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects [sic] in the world.

The sad truth is acadaemia is now a pragmatic, utilitarian enterprise, populated by those who measure and observe and produce - but there once was a place where learning meant inquiry, explanation and understanding.

lectures top academics

Web education is out of date and fragmented. There are good people working hard to change this, but because of the structure of higher education, it will take time. As part of a year-long journey to discover where we are in web education and where we need to go, Leslie Jensen-Inman interviewed 32 web design and development leaders. The consensus: technology moves too fast for college and university curricula to keep up. How, then, can educators create a sustainable foundation for the future?

Sponsor an Educator...sounds like a new nonprofit idea to me.

Web education is out of date and fragmented.

test

This is my University website

I go here

This is my where I go to school.

This is my University homepage.

This is my university. Testing is done.

University where I'm getting my teaching credential

This is my Unversity Website.

This is the university I attend for now. Currently I am a junior.

My University's website

This is my University.

my university

Preparing Humanity for Accelerating Technological Changes

La Universidad de la Singularidad:Silicon Valley, la cuna mundial de la alta tecnología, abrirá este verano la Universidad de la Singularidad, un centro académico único que, financiado entre otros por Google y la NASA, formará a los futuros líderes "para que identifiquen los grandes retos de la humanidad"

Preparing Humanity for accelerating technological change - Nasa & Google

"Singularity University, based on the NASA Ames campus in Silicon Valley, is an interdisciplinary university whose mission is to assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies (bio, nano, info, AI, etc.), and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges."

share

U.S. News has collected data from more than 1,400 colleges to bring you this year's rankings

check out the best places to attend college!

US News and World Report ranks colleges

Sweet. OCW

lists of sites to visit for resources

The course teaches the basics of functional programming using the language Haskell. The main goal is to acquaint the student with fundamental programming concepts such as recursion, abstraction, higher-order functions and data types, whilst at the same time emphasizing the practical use of such constructs by applying them within a graphical environment.

haskell教程

an educational hub “volunteer project sparked by a group of employees who wanted to find a better way to collect and highlight all the great educational content being uploaded to YouTube by colleges and universities”

want to read this, but only just started it

nice op-ed on the future of the university

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

If higher education is to thrive, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured.

an article about graduate education in US

End the University as We Know It

I don't agree with all of his solutions, but I do agree that higher education, like much of our society, is too much about producing a product rather than about helping individuals learn, change and grow.

From New York Times

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.

Higher education is structured in a way that encourages insular departments and hyper-specialization

video lectures around the world

Videos and Channels from college and university partners of YouTube

Les idéos éducatives sur Youtube

video free howto online education social learning youtube training directory college lectures university videos courses visual directories youtubeedu

Officiellt akademiskt Youtube-material.

author of Growing Up Digital

not so sure

Besides the fact that this comes from the NY Post, this article raises some legitimate causes for concern about our education system. Jack also provides some solutions worth thinking about and discussing...

Suppose all goes well. He'll be sitting in front of a teacher a good 18 months after first deciding to learn. What folly. The answer is to relieve schools of the job of validating knowledge and return them to a role of spreading it. Colleges should no more vouch for their own academic competence than butchers should decide for themselves whether their meat is USDA prime. As I write this, Google is putting every book ever written online. Apple is offering video college lectures for free download through its iTunes software. Skype allows free videoconferencing anywhere in the world. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and many other schools have made course materials available for free on their Web sites. Tutors cost as little as $15 an hour. Today's student who decides to learn at 1 a.m. should be doing it by 1:30. A process that makes him wait 18 months is not an education system. It's a barrier to education.

"A student who secures a degree is increasingly unlikely to make up its cost, despite higher pay, and the employer who requires a degree puts faith in a system whose standards are slipping. Too many professors who are bound to degree teaching can't truly profess; they don't proclaim loudly the things they know but instead whisper them to a chosen few, whom they must then accommodate with inflated grades. Worst of all, bright citizens spend their lives not knowing the things they ought to know, because they've been granted liberal-arts degrees for something far short of a liberal-arts education."

Como usan algunas universidades al social media

Universities are constantly exploring new ways to use social media to fulfill their missions of engaging and sharing knowledge with their constituents. Below are just 10 highlights of how universities are using social media for public affairs. As always, please share other examples you have used or come across in the comments below.

Here are 10 social media resources for high school students (and their parents) to use in order to find out more about what college life is really like at the school they plan to attend.

However, social media can drastically reduce much of the overhead involved with higher education — such as administrative costs and even the campus itself — and open source or reusable and adaptive learning materials can drive costs down even further.

the nature of information is such that it can be created once at cost and distributed and consumed over and over again for free.

Greatest U in the Cedar Falls

Greatest University in Cedar Valley

Greatest University in Cedar Falls

Greatest University in Midwest

Greatest University in the Cedar Valley

the best school in the land

Greatest University

A great University!

Greatest university in the Midwest

School

Free university level courses. The mission of P2PU is to leverage the power of the Internet and social software to enable communities of people to support learning for each other. P2PU combines open educational resources, structured courses, and recognition of knowledge/learning in order to offer high-quality low-cost education opportunities. It is run and governed by volunteers.

The Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) is an online community of open study groups for short university-level courses. Think of it as online book clubs for open educational resources. The P2PU helps you navigate the wealth of open education materials that are out there, creates small groups of motivated learners, and supports the design and facilitation of courses. Students and tutors get recognition for their work, and we are building pathways to formal credit as well.

Learning agents and open education

An interesting peer to peer university drawing upon freely available resources.

StraighterLine is the brainchild of a man named Burck Smith, an Internet entrepreneur bent on altering the DNA of higher education as we have known it for the better part of 500 years. Rather than students being tethered to ivy-covered quads or an anonymous commuter campus, Smith envisions a world where they can seamlessly assemble credits and degrees from multiple online providers, each specializing in certain subjects and—most importantly—fiercely competing on price. Smith himself may be the person who revolutionizes the university, or he may not be. But someone with the means and vision to fundamentally reorder the way students experience and pay for higher education is bound to emerge

Luckily for Solvig, there were new options available. She went online looking for something that fit her wallet and her time horizon, and an ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. This was hardly unusual—hundreds of institutions are online hawking degrees. But one thing about StraighterLine stood out: it offered as many courses as she wanted for a flat rate of $99 a month. “It sounds like a scam,” Solvig thought—she’d run into a lot of shady companies and hard-sell tactics on the Internet. But for $99, why not take a risk?

This seems very interesting.. but its only basic math, writing, and econ.. bah...

The next generation of online education could be great for students—and catastrophic for universities.

Noticias de última generación.

news from research universities

Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which "going to college" means packing up, getting a dorm room and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges cannot survive.

This article proposes that many traditional universities are going to change as online, cheap education gets better and better.

Louis Menand outlines the changes afoot with regard to graduate education (and education in general?) and notes the danger of losing academia's contributions to social criticism and reflection.

The following excerpts, from the third and fourth chapters and his conclusion, probe the professionalization of a research-oriented professoriate and the practice and consequences of contemporary doctoral education, and the resulting implications for liberal-arts colleges, universities, and the wider society.

Quote: "A college student who has some interest in further education, but who is unsure whether she wants a career as a professor, is not going to risk investing eight or more years finding out"

It is amazing how easy it is to sail through a Computer Science degree from a top university without ever learning the basic tools of software developers, without ever working on a team, and without ever taking a course for which you don’t get an automatic F for collaborating. Many CS departments are trapped in the 1980s, teaching the same old curriculum that has by now become completely divorced from the reality of modern software development.

To learn to program effectively you need to work collaboratively on projects with other people.

Do you ever wonder why the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) might be more memorable than other technological schools? To become memorable, a school must reach out to people in ways that seem beneficial. Alumni organizations can help spread the word about their alma mater. Great sports teams and debate teams also can help boost a school’s standing. But, another fork to take in the marketing path is through the Internet, as MIT and other schools have done in sharing courses online and without charge.

via kedrosky .... greenspun is right of course but that doesn't mean i've stopped thinking he's kind of an asshole

I don't agree with all of his points, but I do like some of his proposals as to how to restructure pedagogy to make classes far more practical.

"This article is about why educational performance is critical to a society's wealth, how the modern university is not appreciably improved over the template established in 1088, and proposes some simple changes that should greatly improve the effectiveness of undergraduate education."

What universities need to change to improve society

This article is about why educational performance is critical to a society's wealth, how the modern university is not appreciably improved over the template established in 1088, and proposes some simple changes that should greatly improve the effectiveness of undergraduate education.

f you are like most college students, you want to have a second set of eyes look over…

School Research, Degree Options, Career Planning, University & College Reviews

like the layout

The best college resource online ever -- according to the website.

Unique way to use wordpress recommended by Randa Clay

HomePage

school

Kansas State University Main Site

home

K-State home webpage

by Wendy Boswell

Sammanställnig av öppna & gratis kurser från många stora universitet etc.

We’ve scoured the internet to bring you the top 50 university courseware collections. If you’re interested in learning more about a particular subject, or seeing if you like what a particular university has to offer in terms of courses, then this is the list for you.

for a life filled with learning

The OER Center for California provides support for community college educators to find, create, remix, use, and share openly licensed learning content. Together, as knowledge workers, we can learn to share...and share to learn.

"A new Web site, Open Educational Resources Center for California, brings together information on free and open textbooks and course materials in one location. Though the Web site was designed for California's community-college faculty members, it could be a useful resource for anyone trying to find learning materials in the public domain."

School related information found here.

Salisbury University's Homepage

School Website

Salisbury's main page

philosophy

Video lectures. There is one thing I can be sure of: I am going to die. But what am I to make of that fact?

Audio, video, and course materials.

PHIL 176: Death

Yele lections

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors. In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

Our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities. Kant wrote that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.” Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization.

Research and publication has become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages faculty members to cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.

On the first day of his fourth-year physics class, University of Ottawa professor Denis Rancourt announced to his students that he had already decided their marks: Everybody was getting an A+.

very interesting. top marks for the courage to experiment. Geddit?! :)

I hate grading...

Hard to believe, but you can get a degree without paying for it. Tell your students.

<<higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world.>>

"Except in a few private wealthy universities, the splendid and supported irrelevance of humanist inquiry for its own sake is already a thing of the past."

著者の生物学の分野以外には一概に当てはまらないが、学部学生は読むべき。まぁ、大学院に入ればどのみち身をもって知ることになるのだけど。

長い．

http://riywo.tumblr.com/post/71955065

March 2009

News about MIT OA mandate: http://tinyurl.com/c9w4cl [from http://twitter.com/MyOpenArchive/statuses/1399671252]

Peter Suber writes about and comments on MIT's decision to adopt a faculty-wide OA policy, the first of a university doing so across all its departments unanimously. As he rightfully points out, this will send out strong signals to lawmakers and other educational institutions.

0309 - Each Faculty member grants to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nonexclusive permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination. In legal terms, each Faculty member grants to MIT a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Provost or Provost's designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written notification by...

折田先生像に対する見解といい、京大はしぶすぎる。

兄弟かこよす

これが正しい態度ですね。

University offers social media degree about Facebook, Twitter and Bebo

Masters in Social Media

Reading: "University offers social media degree about Facebook, Twitter and Bebo - Telegraph" ( http://tinyurl.com/dbda3c ) [from http://twitter.com/markivey/statuses/1418394247]

ז'רום בורדון, שים לב. אוניברסיטת בירמינגהם פותחת מסלול ללימודי תואר שני ב... מדיה חברתית. פייסבוק, טוויטר, בלוגים ופורומים הם רק חלק מהסילבוס של המסלול הייחודי, הראשון מסוגו בעולם. הטלגרף הבריטי מדווח ששכר הלימוד יעמוד על כארבעת-אלפים וארבע-מאות פאונד. להרשמה: http://www.bcu.ac.uk/courses/media/socialmedia

""I have been increasingly convinced that the business model based on printed monograph was not merely failing but broken," said Phil Pochoda, director of the Michigan press. "Why try to fight your way through this? Why try to remain in territory you know is doomed? Scholarly presses will be primarily digital in a decade. Why not seize the opportunity to do it now?""

"Michigan officials say that their move reflects a belief that it's time to stop trying to make the old economics of scholarly publishing work. 'I have been increasingly convinced that the business model based on printed monograph was not merely failing but broken,' said Phil Pochoda, director of the Michigan press. 'Why try to fight your way through this? Why try to remain in territory you know is doomed? Scholarly presses will be primarily digital in a decade. Why not seize the opportunity to do it now?'"

Scholarly publishing takes a digital hit.

The University of Michigan Press is announcing today that it will shift its scholarly publishing from being primarily a traditional print operation to one that is primarily digital. Within two years, press officials expect well over 50 of the 60-plus monographs that the press publishes each year -- currently in book form -- to be released only in digital editions. Readers will still be able to use print-on-demand systems to produce versions that can be held in their hands, but the press will consider the digital monograph the norm. Many university presses are experimenting with digital publishing, but the Michigan announcement may be the most dramatic to date by a major university press.

"The University of Michigan Press is announcing today that it will shift its scholarly publishing from being primarily a traditional print operation to one that is primarily digital."

The University of Michigan Press is announcing today that it will shift its scholarly publishing from being primarily a traditional print operation to one that is primarily digital. Michigan officials say that their move reflects a belief that it's time to stop trying to make the old economics of scholarly publishing work. Michigan officials said that they don't plan to cut the budget of the press -- but to devote resources to peer review and other costs of publishing that won't change with the new model. Significantly, they said, the press would no longer have to reject books deemed worthy from a scholarly perspective, but viewed as unable to sell. ...move to the idea that a university press should be judged by its contribution to scholarship, not "profit or loss," which has become too central as the economics of print publishing have deteriorated. The shift is not designed to save money, but to make better use of the money being spent on the press. [good stuff in comments too]

OCW Search is a search engine dedicated to helping you find the best free university courses online. Several universities publish their course materials for free online, under the OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative. OCW Search is an independent search engine that indexes all these courses so you can find these courses faster. Universities in OCW Search Currently, the following universities' OpenCourseWare are included in OCW Search: 1. School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins (institution:jhsph) 2. MIT (institution:mit) 3. Notre Dame (institution:nd) 4. The Open University UK (institution: openuniversity) 5. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (institution:politecnicamadrid), Spanish courses 6. Stanford Engineering Everywhere (institution:stanford) 7. Delft University of Technology (institution:tudelft), English and Dutch courses 8. UMass Boston (institution:umass) 9. The University of Tokyo (institution:utokyo), both English and Japanese OCW collections 10. Y

OCW Search is a search engine dedicated to helping you find the best free university courses online. Several universities publish their course materials for free online, under the OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative. OCW Search is an independent search engine that indexes all these courses so you can find these courses faster.