Carnivorum

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theatlantic:

The Single Most Important Experiment in Higher Education

As of yesterday, a year-old startup may well have become the most important experiment yet aimed at remaking higher education for the Internet age.

At the very least, it became the biggest.

A dozen major universities announced that they would begin providing content to Coursera, an innovative platform that makes interactive college classes available to the public free on the web. Next fall, it will offer at least 100 massive open online courses — otherwise known as MOOCs— designed by professors from schools such as Princeton, CalTech, and Duke that will be capable of delivering lessons to more than 100,000 students at a time.

Read more. [Image: Reuters]

jtotheizzoe:

sciencepopularis:

Neil deGrasse Tyson - “When I think of science, I think of a truly human activity”

I’ll also suggest this more in-depth look at Dr. Tyson’s monologue from Maria Popova. My addition:

Our desire for answers and our ability to experiment extend far beyond the realm of the laboratory, although science is the example we can most easily distill. Especially easy for people like me, because I eat, sleep and breathe science prettymuch. But if we begin to look at how a child interacts with their world, completely wide open to both the question and the answer, immune to prejudices of observation and interpretation, we begin to see that what we may applaud as the “beauty of science” and the “power of technology” and the “fruits of dedicated research” are really just an extension of what makes us human.

“Every child is a scientist.”

Although women now make up the majority of college graduates, the number of female computer science grads has dropped precipitously over the past 25 years—from nearly 40 percent in the mid-1980s to 18 percent in 2009. As a result, only 2 in 10 programmers are women.

Attracting More Women to Computer Science Requires Shattering the ‘Brogrammer’ Culture - Education - GOOD (via infoneer-pulse)

(via futurejournalismproject)

futurejournalismproject:

Today, Harvard joined MIT in announcing edX, an online service allowing anyone anywhere to take Harvard and MIT classes online and free of charge. The pilot course is in Computer Science and runs through early June - enroll here.

The plans, though, go beyond what we’ve seen before. Namely, they open the door to new research.

via Fast Company:

Eventually, edx will offer a full slate of courses in all disciplines, created with faculty at MIT and Harvard, using a simple format of short videos and exercises graded largely by computer; students interact on a wiki and message board, as well as on Facebook groups, with peers substituting for TAs. The research arm of the project will continue to develop new tools using machine learning, robotics and crowdsourcing that allow grading and evaluation of essays, circuit designs and other types of exercises without endless hours by professors or TAs. Although edx is nonprofit and the courses are free, Agarwal envisions bringing the project to sustainability by one day charging students for official certificates of completion.

Besides Harvard and MIT, Stanford has taken the leap into MOOCs (massively open online courses) along with Princeton, Berkeley, Michigan-Ann Arbor, and University of Pennsylvania in a joint venture with Coursera. Check it out.

We’ve been hearing a lot about the war on women, which is real enough. But there’s also a war on the young, which is just as real even if it’s better disguised. And it’s doing immense harm, not just to the young, but to the nation’s future.

Let’s start with some advice Mitt Romney gave to college students during an appearance last week. After denouncing President Obama’s “divisiveness,” the candidate told his audience, “Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business.”

The first thing you notice here is, of course, the Romney touch — the distinctive lack of empathy for those who weren’t born into affluent families, who can’t rely on the Bank of Mom and Dad to finance their ambitions. But the rest of the remark is just as bad in its own way.

I mean, “get the education”? And pay for it how? Tuition at public colleges and universities has soared, in part thanks to sharp reductions in state aid. Mr. Romney isn’t proposing anything that would fix that; he is, however, a strong supporter of the Ryan budget plan, which would drastically cut federal student aid, causing roughly a million students to lose their Pell grants.

So how, exactly, are young people from cash-strapped families supposed to “get the education”? Back in March Mr. Romney had the answer: Find the college “that has a little lower price where you can get a good education.” Good luck with that. But I guess it’s divisive to point out that Mr. Romney’s prescriptions are useless for Americans who weren’t born with his advantages.

… What should we do to help America’s young? Basically, the opposite of what Mr. Romney and his friends want. We should be expanding student aid, not slashing it. And we should reverse the de facto austerity policies that are holding back the U.S. economy — the unprecedented cutbacks at the state and local level, which have been hitting education especially hard.

Yes, such a policy reversal would cost money. But refusing to spend that money is foolish and shortsighted even in purely fiscal terms. Remember, the young aren’t just America’s future; they’re the future of the tax base, too.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste; wasting the minds of a whole generation is even more terrible. Let’s stop doing it.

Paul Krugman, The New York Times, “Wasting Our Minds.”

Go read the whole damned thing.

(via inothernews)

All the adults are saying, ‘We need to improve science in the world. Let’s train the kids.’ I’ve never heard an adult say, ‘We need more science in the world. Train me.’

Neil deGrasse Tyson, on America’s lack of science literacy (via theatlantic)

It is time to acknowledge this failure and adopt a more effective course for the federal role in education. Policymakers must abandon their faith-based embrace of test-and-punish strategies and, instead, pursue proven alternatives to guide and support the nation’s neediest schools and students.

A policy assessment written by Lisa Guisbond, Monty Neill and Bob Schaeffer • Suggesting that No Child Left Behind, the Bush-era education law passed under bipartisan circumstances, should go the way of the dodo. The policy, now seen as an example of ineffective government overreach by many, celebrates its 10th birthday today, and politicians who once supported the law — including Rick Santorum, who voted for it and tried to push an intelligent design amendment into the bill — no longer do. Guisbond, Neill and Schaeffer’s report, which suggests revisiting the law based on the lessons learned from the past decade, is available to read over here. source (via • follow)

In the U.S., 63 million adults — 29 percent of the country’s adult population —over age 16 don’t read well enough to understand a newspaper story written at the eighth grade level.

(via firstbook)