Review of "Superfreakonomics"

Maybe I've read too many of these kinds of books or maybe this one didn't have as much "edge" as some of the other "social science for laymen" monographs, but for all practical purposes, "Superfreakonomics" went down the hatch without much impact on the system. It's a month after I finished the book, for example, and all that I really recall is that I enjoyed the experience and that the main methodology appeared to be "randomized experiments." There were a few tidbits that stayed with me (like walking drunk being more dangerous per mile than driving drunk), but I'd have to dig it up again to see if there was anything else that I learned that might be worth hanging onto down the road.

More on Making Teachers Better

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html?pagewanted=1&emc=eta1

Another article that emphasizes the ability of the teacher as the crucial element in improving education. A few quotes.

"When Doug Lemov conducted his own search for those magical ingredients, he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise."

"Lemov's odyssey produced a 357-page treatise known among its hundreds of underground fans as Lemov’s Taxonomy. (The official title, attached to a book version being released in April, is “Teach Like a Champion: The 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College.”)"

"Mathematicians need to understand a problem only for themselves; math teachers need both to know the math and to know how 30 different minds might understand (or misunderstand) it. Then they need to take each mind from not getting it to mastery. And they need to do this in 45 minutes or less. This was neither pure content knowledge nor what educators call pedagogical knowledge, a set of facts independent of subject matter, like Lemov’s techniques. It was a different animal altogether. Ball named it Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching, or M.K.T. . . . At the heart of M.K.T., she thought, was an ability to step outside of your own head. “Teaching depends on what other people think,” Ball told me, “not what you think.”

"Indeed, while Ball has proved that teachers with M.K.T. help students learn more, she has not yet been able to find the best way to teach it. And while Lemov has faith in his taxonomy because he chose his champions based on their students’ test scores, this is far from scientific proof. The best evidence Lemov has now is anecdotal."

More on the direction of higher education?

This from an Eduventures report. Even more reason why private higher education has to focus on its distinctive Christian mission and its "engaged learning" educational philosophy.

https://www1.vtrenz.net/imarkownerfiles/ownerassets/884/Eduventures%202009%20Annual%20Report%20Summary.pdf

In a very simple sense, a college or university is three things in combination: curriculum, faculty, and credentials. Students, for the most part, attend these institutions in order to study subjects with experienced teachers to earn degrees. Together, these three elements comprise a “value chain,” or set of interlocking
services and products that in combination are transacted in such a ways as to provide more value than they might independently. Recent, disruptive innovations within higher education, however, suggest that new forms of value might be emerging that could undo the traditional higher education value chain. Take, for example,
MIT’s Open Courseware initiative, nearly a decade old now, which allows individuals from around the world to view digital materials associated with nearly all of the courses delivered by the institution. Consider also the growing interest in competency-based credentials such as those offered by Western Governors University.
And fi nally, look at StraighterLine, a recently launched subscription service that offers self-paced, online general education courses at $99 a month. Through its relationship with the American Council on Education’s Transcript Services, StraighterLine offers its customers access to college credits at a fraction of the cost of traditional colleges and universities. Interestingly, StraighterLine emerged as a standalone enterprise after being incubated within the online tutoring company Smarthinking – suggesting that the establishment of a curriculum company was a natural outgrowth from what is essentially a teaching organization.

Now imagine a scenario where an individual (the “student”) somewhere in the world hires a tutor (the “faculty”) somewhere else in the world to guide her through freely available course materials (the “curriculum”), which might be available anywhere in the world, before taking a competency-based exam (the “credential”) that has recognized market value in one or another profession. Would there even be a
need for universities anymore?

The effectiveness of "awe"?

This article offered an interesting explanation for why I so frequently forward articles to people around JBU and around the world (i.e. I'm really looking for emotional bonding?).


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/science/09tier.html?em

The "Future of the Library" Debate?

There have been a lot of these types of pieces recently regarding whether the library will increasingly go virtual or, more accurately, how fast the library will go virtual and in what form. As this article suggests, I tend to think it will happen more slowly with incremental gains over a couple of decades.

"Taken together, these studies point to twin conclusions: The sooner professors and students embrace e-books, the sooner their libraries can start saving money -- but that might not happen for a while."

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/02/10/libraries

Attention and learning

Basically, most scholars think multi-tasking is bad for learning, even to the point of banning people from taking notes (let alone having any electronic devices) in class. A small cadre, however, thinks that we should be leveraging our students’ “hyper-attentive” proclivities instead of trying to reroute them into “deep attention.” But the bottom line is that those who think they are good multi-taskers probably aren’t. They’re just getting a buzz from juggling all of these balls at the same time.

http://chronicle.com/article/Scholars-Turn-Their-Attention/63746/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Losing the faith at college?

This study says similar things to what I’ve seen for other studies on faith-based institutions. If people lose their faith, they tend to go down that path in their teens and twenties. They are most likely to lose their faith, however, if they never attend college. Fewer lose their faith if they attend any college, even a secular institution. Even fewer lose their faith if they attend a faith-based institution. What I believe has the Cardinal Newman society upset is not just the loss of faith by some at Catholic colleges but that the type of faith students come out of college with tends to skew more to the political left than it did when students come into those institutions. Again, that’s fairly typical of people in their teens and twenties, but perhaps it’s even more so the case in our contemporary academic culture. (I’m reminded of Churchill’s self-serving quotation that “if you’re young and conservative, you have no heart, but if you’re old and liberal, you have no mind.”)

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/02/01/catholic

And to confirm the point that people who go to college tend to be more liberal (whether there's causation or just correlation here is another question), there's this recent study from ISI, a study which also shows that colleges don't appear to foster much in the way of civics education.

http://chronicle.com/article/College-Makes-Students-More/64040/?sid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en