A bit of context.

I think this an interesting point considering how casually some may view education to be. Once we learn new information, especially that which sparks our interests we begin embedding it into our everyday actions and/or thoughts. And not only does it change our personal lives, but it contributes to how we treat those around us. - Kayla Thomas

It is interesting to see the acknowledgement of those who would oppose the creation of a public university. It is a gesture that displays the maturity and certainty of the founders. They know that their goals for their university wouldn't settle well for many people. However, they still called them "good men" with "respectable information" suggesting they are surprised that intelligent men can still disagree with their plans, yet they are respectful of their opinions. Instead of trying to persuade them to side with their plans, they cleverly resolve to allow them privately and individually abide by their opinions. Education is difficult to define for many people and the founders were well aware of that. -Yuki Zheng

Here are some very strong views advocating the importance of knowledge and education. It is amazing to see such emotional and energetic argument for public education at that time, when illiteracy was pervasive and education was only for the elite. Education was often out of public reach, unlike what it is now. As advocates for university, these people were clear and aware of the importance of education, and the result of the lack of education. Education is the key to empower humanity. Just as sated here, although the tone is quite cynical when its writer makes comparison with the native uneducated people and the educated white people, education inspires people, liberates people, fosters people with knowledge and norm, and develops people from pray to predator and finally to the supervisor of the earth. Education as well as knowledge is the best gift and legacy that our ancestors leave to us. And it is knowledge which distinguish humanity and everything else. -- Haoyu Li

There was an interesting example of this during a short conference on digital textbooks, back in late 2014. Cindy Ives interim VP Academic at Athabasca (!) presented the etext pilot project in partnership with publishers. Ives’s approach was quite pragmatic and there’s nothing wrong with doing a pilot project on something like this. By that time, Ives was already involved in OER projects. It still struck a chord with those of us who care about OER, including Éric Francoeur who took an active part in the event and did work to create a free textbook through international and interlinguistic collaboration.

To me, a key notion from the ‘r’ in “OER” is the distinction with those content bundles we still call “textbooks”. Sure, it’s already in the 5-R model. But the “Remix” idea in music is to a large extent about unbundling.

Sounds a bit like what Clay Shirky was trying to say about the Napster moment coming to Higher Education, five years ago. Skimmed the critique of Shirky’s piece and was mostly nodding in agreement with it. But there might be a discussion about industries having learnt from the Napster moment. After all, the recording industry has been able to withstand this pressure for close to twenty years. Also sounds like this could be a corollary to Chris Anderson’s (in)famous promotion of the “free” (as in profit) model for businesses, almost ten years ago. In other words, we might live another reshaping of “free” in the next 9-10 years.

While I've experimented with many alternatives to traditional assessment, I have primarily relied on self-assessment. I turn in final grades at the end of the term, but those grades usually match the grades students have given themselves. (I do tell students 'I reserve the right to change grades,' but this is rare and I mostly have to raise them, because students are often their own harshest critics.)

Jesse Stommel

Why is all the focus on teaching lay people how to code, and not teaching computer scientists and people who work in tech companies to center empathy and humanity in their work?

. . .

I think there should be an element of infusing discussions of ethics, humanity and social consequences into computer science curricula, and I believe that even human-centered design does not go far enough; I suggest that designers of tech consider more “empathetic and participatory design” where there is some degree of involving people who are not in the tech company as autonomous persons in product design decisions, and not just using them as research/testing subjects.

This section reminded me of the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes who believed the nature of man is inherently bad and the purpose of government and education is to control man's selfish desires. In my opinion, I side more with John Locke's philosophy that the nature of man is inherently good but society is corrupted by certain negative people. Education's purpose should be to remind people of their virtuous nature and not become distracted by the inequalities and failures of society.

Within this paragraph, the authors and early founders of UVA made several points on why education was necessary by countering some of the current one-sided beliefs of society, with some key words. Man was not stagnant and his improvements did not need to be a chimaera, or a thing that is hoped or wished for but in fact is illusory or impossible to achieve. The other definition of chimaera is a fire-breathing monster from Greek mythology, which I think can be an interpretation that improvements to one’s morality and state of mind did not need to feel like some huge obstacle that we needed to face, but rather were very possible through knowledge. Then later, they speak about how the effects of education are not some far-fetched, optimistic, or “sanguine” hope, and marketing strategy, but a reality that is backed by proof. I found this all very interesting because, back then, education was still a point of debate, whereas now it’s one the most easily agreed solutions for a various of world problems.

While it is interesting to see that Anglo-Saxon is considered an important language at the founding of the school, it is also interesting to see what is not considered to be important. Most of these languages are either Western or Antiquity; a microcosm showing how small the world was to the educators of 1818.

I am very curious as to why studies are separated into specifics; practically all of physics has been sequestered into many sub categories. I personally think that it might be because at this point and time physics isn't complete yet. Physics as a study/field is pretty new, and more and more discoveries are being added to list as it grows (for instance, electricity). The document is an interesting window into the education material of a bygone age and I honestly wonder if the cutting edge science we have now will become as mundane as physics in the next one hundred years.

p. 75 Two interesting points about mismatch between university and students:

(1) Many of the students who are being processed have little inclination or capacity for the rigours of a liberal education. Fine. But I object to the game of pretending that they would be able to achieve liberal goals within the system we offer, if only they tried harder. That is simply not true, and it does bad things to their psyches to encourage them to believe it. It would be far more honest, and I should think more fruitful, to accept most university education as having different aims from the liberal. Once drop that pretence, in both rhetoric and practice, and you could begin meeting the great bulk of students where they actually are.

(2) Some students at least would be capable of an education far superior to the one the system enforces. They are being positively harmed by their university education, since they have to meet its demands before their liberal (and usually private) pursuit begins. (And before you ask, "Why can't the two coincide?" ask a good student how much of the university's instruction moves him toward the first-hand apprehension of his discipline's coherence and beauty.)

Using inclusive approaches to ensure all students have access to quality teaching and learning and why it shouldn't be limited to the mobile few. I find it interesting since a lot of research focuses on the gain for international students only.

ed

Hypothesis can be part of this support system: peer to peer support; teacher intervention.

Acceleration v remediation?

I found this particular quotation particularly interesting because of the amount of irony and hypocrisy that it is riddled with. It speaks of the importance of education to create "a new man", however we know that this new man is of only a light skin color and most likely a slave-owner, not to mention the exclusion of women. Moreover, in my engagement Making the Invisible Visible, a key focal point is that what is unwritten is often just as important as what's written. Here, in the mentioning of the fact that education is better for the "well-being of mankind", it is implied that solely educating the white male slave owners will be progressive to civilization because of newfound knowledge that will be entrusted with them. As such, in mentioning that education is meant to be passed down to successive generations, the unwritten irony is in the fact that increasingly only a smaller amount of the entire population will be educated because of the ratio to the enslaved people population to the non-enslaved people population. This quotation shows the naive yet justified mindset of the elite class in education administration and society as a whole in the early 19th century America.

• Muhammad Amjad

informal digital education

ITU/UNESCO Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development

Kuhn on lack of training science students receive on how knowledge is constructed.

for teachers as "citizen scientists"

not surprising: everything is heavily mediated by contextual factors like culture

I wish this article had also looked at how much a given underrepresented group's graduation rate has changed as well (for the same group of schools). Even if a group's enrollment in top colleges has gone down, the data could show that a given group's graduation rate from those same colleges has increased over the same time period. Info on changes in enrollment and graduation rate would be so much more informative than studying each statistic alone.

MIT is running a master's program in data, economics, and development policy with unique admission requirements. Anyone can apply after completing five online courses through edX with in-person exams.

https://micromasters.mit.edu/dedp/

Or supplement with technology?

Alberta Geological Survey information page on the Alberta Oil Sands.

What a crass analysis.

Does it really have to do anything with state regulation? Didn't the cost of education increased because of the increased demand?

I have a hard time knowing where digital literacy falls in terms of priority for students with disabilities. While it is no doubt just as important for them to grasp in order to better interact with our rapidly changing world, it is difficult to integrate the use of technology when trying to help students grasp certain skills.

This is something I might want to fold in.

families and education

families are a unit of consumption that accept the quo and reproduce inequality – children of the rich grow rich, while the children of the poor remain poor.

education supports the existing distribution of power and wealth. maintains order, control and ensures dominant culture is passed on. reflects organization of production

Key Institution. Site of the normalization of discreet groupings of information and production, unequal social relations and powerlessness of the subordinate, production for profit - through learning for grades vs learning to learn, and undermining of the original act (learning or production).

Could this be the fall of the world's largest education company? I sense the urgency to innovate harder. This is crucial now than at any other time

Recess has been decimated across the board and it should be criminal to do so.

Gardner Campbell on self-directed learning.

There will always be an impulse toward self-directed learning, and part of my job as a teacher is to amplify, and make even more effective, the students' disposition toward it, as well as point them toward more opportunities for self-directed learning.

But then we come to the second part of my answer, which is that while self-directed learning may establish a kind of ecosystem of its own, it's not an ecosystem in which learning will necessarily live up to its potential. And it's not an ecosystem that will necessarily bring forward considerations of what it means to be an individual in a community, who works for the common good.

So at some point, self-directed learning, which is now an absolutely vital concept in higher learning, has to be considered as part of a larger conceptual framework. The larger framework incorporates the institution, the curriculum, and the faculty that you asked about.

That larger framework should stress the role of expert-directed study and expert-facilitated encounters, especially in opportunities for self-directed learning.

Theory

Population size

The population.

Definition

Barry Schwartz proposed this idea in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2005: http://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-psychology/11/

I think this is cool!

Some girls born into affluent families may have been educated at home by parents, a live in governess, tutor, or may have gone off to a private boarding school. Since women did not go on to have careers in this day, education and knowledge was something reserved primarily for boys.

Domestic trainings were a more appropriate education for a woman to receive. "For women of the 'genteel' classes the goal of non-domestic education was thus often the acquisition of 'accomplishments,' such as the ability to draw, sing, play music, or speak modern (i.e. non-Classical) languages (generally French and Italian)" (The Republic of Pemberley, "Education, Women's Education, and Accomplishments")

Although I wouldn't overstate it's importance to contemporary rhetorical practice, "Reflection" is the third, and kind of also the final, step in the Ignatian paradigm of teaching. It's very much a process of looking back at past experiences and actions and reassessing them, and I'm interested in how those practices work with Boyles' warning that excess metacognition can become a bad habit of division.

Dhawal Shah, founder of class-central.com, outlines the price schemes of the major MOOC providers. Courses from these providers started out free in 2011, but have gradually put more content behind paywalls. (Some of them haven't really been MOOCs for a long time now.)

https://twitter.com/grandeped/status/855435067400826881 Matt Crosslin points out that they were never completely free. You can't take one without a fairly new computer and fast Internet connection.

There is still very little thinking about digital education from a policy/discourse/politics-of-education perspective. Interesting work by Ben Williamson, Greg Thompson, Ian Cook.

amen.

Informal and open education has been largely overlooked, probably due to social and cultural stigmas attached to learning from places besides traditional campuses. Our education system ends where autodidactism (self-learning) commences: we are content with spoon-feeding our students from textbooks, with no focus on extensive learning. Students learn from topics, as opposed to problems (problem-based learning). It cannot be emphasised enough that research stems from problem-solving buttressed by necessary instruction.

difines education dually, as the process of giving and receiving systematic instruction (education) and as an enlightening experience (‘an’ education). Enlightening-giving greater understanding.

frances bell on purpose of education

https://connectedlearning.uci.edu/

new Connected Learning Lab (CLL) at UC Irvine, an interdisciplinary research center dedicated to studying and mobilizing learning technologies in equitable, innovative, and learner-centered ways.

Now every student will have one.

On the importance of social skills for PhD candidates -- and anyone, actually.

Many of the most productive and accomplished scientists, mathematicians, writers, and musicians do most of their work in no more than 4-6 hours per day. The musicians break that time up into shorter sessions. During that time, they are focused, and engage in deliberate practice. They tend to take a nap during the afternoon.

The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, Tom Nichols

These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learning anything. In the United States and other developed nations, otherwise intelligent people denigrate intellectual achievement and reject the advice of experts. Not only do increasing numbers of lay people lack basic knowledge, they reject fundamental rules of evidence and refuse to learn how to make a logical argument.

Counting those who transfer, I wonder?

time change long

When asked to explain a topic, students often realize that they don't understand it as well as they thought. The same thing happens when someone is asked to explain the consequences of a government policy. They tend to realize they don't understand the issue very well, and moderate their opinion.

Seems that Distill is a perfect candidate for integrating Hypothes.is / web annotations by default.

This is such a great idea!

Yep. Not everyone who goes can benefit from this aspect...

Very sad.

Cool idea!

Official FERPA text

Also relevant for Spencer, but we don't really teach the figures of speech so much. If I recall correctly, they were a big deal for Ramus, because it allowed more classification and division, so it might be due to his relative influence.

I have never heard of this before. Not entirely sure why'd you do it? Googling isn't turning up all that much except other people talking about how to do it. Did turn up a program for automatically converting the other direction, which is pretty interesting.

Yes. Because publishers will always be able to beat OER on price as they mine new business models. Not hard to image where the content becomes the loss leader for the publishers in order to get faculty buy-in into tools that have the real gold - data.

But think about how this creates a divide in rhetorical understanding between class (and other socioeconomic divisions i.e. gender and race), especially in regards to the question of rhetorical definition. If one group of people is learning about language, philosophy, religion, etc. in the Classical sense and another in the vernacular sense, then will they end up having the same understanding of rhetoric? I would guess not. It would seem that rhetoric at the end of the eighteenth century (and onward) cannot be properly examined without considering a certain dimension of economic influence, especially in regards to class tension.

I do wonder what the reasoning was for this (I mean, besides the blatant "women and the lower class are too stupid to understand our Great Books and/or will lead lives that do not require a 'polite' education"). We've already read arguments that the "polite" education supposedly improved the virtues as well as the mind, right? Wouldn't all of society benefit if women and the lower class were virtuous, as much as possible?

Interesting that these topics of study were made available to women even before they were granted the right to vote in the United States (the beginning of the paragraph says "By the end of the nineteenth century," and the 19th Amendment was not passed until 1920). I wonder how the women's suffrage movement affected the types of education that were made available to women? In turn, how did rhetoric influence women's suffragists and their strategies to gain the right to vote? How did the suffrage movement influence rhetoric?

I thought this was interesting in connection with Hume and taste. For Hume, it's important to approach things in an unbiased way in order to properly judge the quality of something. But education is also important for Hume in being able to judge something. Grimke here is pointing out that education itself is biased, as it has privileged white men, meaning that texts will be read through a sexist lens.

It's odd how the completely abhorrent racism lends particular credence to the argument in favor of the humanities. "Even the worst people imaginable grasp the importance and liberating power of education!"

We've had a number of authors advocating for education (Vico, Astell, etc.), so it's also good to see someone threatened by and terrified of it.

Morris Pelzel on Doug Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.

the presentation and arrangement of symbolic data is crucial, and any given arrangement may be more or less conducive to discovery. That is why Engelbart’s observation about “playing” with and “rearranging” the materials we are dealing with strikes such a resonant chord. Even if we are only dealing with text, the ease of recombining and manipulating our words and phrases enables our writing to more quickly reach a suitable form of expression.

as we are social animals, our intellects work most effectively, not in isolation but in connection with others. When thoughts and ideas are externally represented, they thereby enter to some degree a public space,

Gardner Campbell on Doug Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.

even as modes of comprehension increase for some, modes of incomprehension increase for others. The person who sits with “Joe” as Joe demonstrates his new symbol-manipulating capacities reacts in ways that many of us may recognize

...

It takes humility, and hospitality, to spend time with new ideas ... to go deep and go long with concepts that ask us to re-examine many things we take for granted.

So, middle school is rough for parents also. I think we should get rid of it...

I hadn't realized this. Interesting...

Great to see Hypthesis used in class!

So it sounds like writing, speeches, teaching, other forms of communication are supposed to elevate individual taste or establish some sort of standard in taste.

These are new example of open pedagogy for me.

This seems like a really cool program that could benefit students all across the country.

See this talk: "Changing Education Paradigm"

Again, with Sheridan and Austin, education that builds up the disadvantaged, as opposed to Vico, a rhetoric that reaches down to the masses.

Though "standard" English is still important, it seems that there was more anxiety about standardization and prescriptive language/grammar during the Enlightenment than there is now. What accounts for this concern? Does it have anything to do with expansion in education, or leaning more towards the vernacular in school?

Building on my note with Vico, who emphasized Rhetoric as the tool that enables reaching the bodily-minded vulgus, Sheridan thinks the issue is that we need to elevate the generally-prevailing taste. The dynamic here is simple: how much can you expect to be able to shape your audience?

Fact sheet on DeVos: https://www.aclu.org/other/betsy-devos-facts.