34 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
    1. scholastic learning

      How much different things may have been if the state, and not the Church, had been the progenitor and supporter of the early university?

      How might education have been different if it came out of itself (or something like curiosity or even society in general) without the influences on either church or state?

    2. centralizing reforms of Pope Gregory VII calledfor a more professionalized clergy. Church officials should now betrained administrators, versed not only in the scriptures but also inthe principles of accounting and law. A papal decree of 1079 orderedthat cathedrals should establish schools for the training of priests,
  2. Mar 2023
  3. Feb 2023
  4. Apr 2022
    1. We headed to the recent meeting of the Universities Studying Slavery (USS) consortium eager to learn about the work of others. We returned with valuable lessons about ourselves. At USS meetings, research teams like Hard Histories compare notes with colleagues across the country engaged in similar projects. In late March, Guilford College and Wake Forest University hosted a two-day-long deep dive into research underway in North Carolina and beyond.

      There are now enough colleges and universities looking into the overlap of their own histories and that of slavery and its effects on their development that there is now a consortium of them (the Universities Studying Slavery (USS)) and two day long conference.

  5. Dec 2021
  6. Nov 2021
  7. Oct 2021
    1. Academia: All the Lies: What Went Wrong in the University Model and What Will Come in its Place

      “Students are graduating into a brutal job market.”

      The entreprecariat is designed for learned helplessness (social: individualism), trained incapacities (economic: specialization), and bureaucratic intransigence (political: authoritarianism).


      The Design Problem

      Three diagrams will explain the lack of social engagement in design. If (in Figure 1) we equate the triangle with a design problem, we readily see that industry and its designers are concerned only with the tiny top portion, without addressing themselves to real needs.

      Figure 1: The Design Problem

      (Design for the Real World, 2019. Page 57.)

      The other two figures merely change the caption for the figure.

      • Figure 1: The Design Problem
      • Figure 2: A Country
      • Figure 3: The World
    1. To date, there is no single accounting of how much money flowed from the slave economy into coffers of American higher education. But Wilder says most American colleges founded before the Civil War relied on money derived from slavery. He suspects that many institutions are reluctant to examine this past. "There's not a lot of upside for them. You know these aren't great fundraising stories," Wilder says. Some people say that institutions must do more than make apologies and rename buildings. They insist that scholarships and other forms of monetary reparations are due. And others argue that whatever colleges and universities are doing to acknowledge their slave-holding past — a campus memorial to slaves, for example — is motivated by public relations and does nothing to ameliorate the legacy of slavery and systemic inequality. Brown University was the first to confront its ties to slavery in a major way. In 2003, Brown president Ruth Simmons appointed a commission to investigate. "What better way to teach our students about ethical conduct than to show ourselves to be open to the truth, and to tell the full story?" she says.

      This is important research to do so as not to conveniently forget the past. If all were equal today, that would have happened as the proper outcome of proactive, widespread and impactful recognition of the injustice of the past. Inequality has persisted, transmuted into structural inequality, especially manifesting in economic legacy of inherited wealth. It could be interpreted as unconducive for fundraising, but so can opaqueness of a proactive strategy.

    2. "The story of the American college is largely the story of the rise of the slave economy in the Atlantic world," says Craig Steven Wilder, a historian at MIT and author of "Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities."

      In this way, the past seeps into the present. This is a literal example of the legacy of structural inequality.

  8. Aug 2021
  9. Apr 2021
    1. what's happening at the college level which is a bit different than at the university level

      Another important point. Our college-based network is leading some OER initiatives, these days. Partly because our needs are quite specific. Most of the OER scene focuses on universities (or merges colleges and universities, since they are very similar in some contexts).

  10. Feb 2021
  11. Dec 2020
  12. Aug 2020
  13. Jul 2020
  14. Dec 2019
    1. St. Andrews

      St. Andrews is a town on the east coast of Fife in Scotland, 30 miles northeast of Edinburgh. It is home to the University of St Andrews, the third oldest university in the English-speaking world.

    2. university of Ingolstadt

      Founded in 1472 in Bavaria, about 400 miles northeast of Geneva, this university became a leading center of scientific learning in the eighteenth century; the emergence of the Illuminati in 1776 also identified the university with the radical enlightenment.

  15. Nov 2019
    1. As educational technologies, instructional design and online learning/content delivery platforms keep evolving, more learners with more needs and motives will be drawn to taking online courses – a growing demand that in turn will spur further improvements in technology and delivery.

      Educational Technology offers free articles with sources.

      Rating: 5/10

  16. Mar 2018
    1. Last month at Portland State University, when biologist Heather Heying made the point that women and men are biologically different, protesters in the audience screamed and excoriated her and tried to damage the sound system before they were removed. “We should not listen to fascism. Nazis are not welcome in civil society,” a protester scowled.

      The belief that sexism is at the root of fascism, although well founded, causes hyperactivists to censor scientists.

  17. Dec 2017
    1. Lazy rivers, while still relatively rare in higher education, are becoming a staple at public universities known for big-time college sports and vibrant social scenes.

      Seriously? How have I never heard about them. Too much...

    1. The contemporary university is a strange chimaera. It has become an institution for teaching undergraduates, a lab for medical and technological development in partnership with industry, a hospital, a museum (or several), a performance hall, a radio station, a landowner, a big-money (or money-losing) sports club, a research center competing for government funding, often the biggest employer for a hundred miles around, and, for a few institutions, a hedge fund (“with a small college attached for tax purposes,” adds one wag).

      What the university has become...

  18. Oct 2017
    1. p. 77 Description of Rochdale in 1967 (i.e. before the tower went up)

      At the moment there are some 30 full-time members of the college, who come from all over North America and range from Ph.D.'s to high school dropouts. They are much younger than a cross-section of the university, but somewhat older than a cross-section of undergraduates. There are another 50-200 part-time participants, mostly students or teachers at degree-granting institutions in Toronto. We occupy six rented houses this year; next fall we'll move into an 18-storey building which is under construction at the corner of Huron and Bloor. It will house 850 residents, who will own and operate the building cooperatively; it will also become a focal point for the college's external members. It is up to each member to determine the extent, form, and content of his participation in the college's educational life--including, in a number of cases, none at all.

    2. p.74 Summarises the place of the university/multiversity

      (1) The multiversity is a place where great thought and great research are often possible.

      (2) The multiversity is a place from which great contributions can often be made to society.

      (3) The multiversity is a place in which the claims of institutional continuity and efficiency come to head-on collision with its educational aims; the latter are normally wiped off the map.

      (4) The multiversity is a place in which the education of the vast majority ranges from the mediocre to the pernicious. This fact creates new educational norms, which become positive deterrents to the education of any who wish to go beyond the majority. It is for these students -- the bright ones, the original or independent ones, the ones who care deeply --that the university is such bad news. It is in the crazy position of obstructing their education.

      (5) Education at the multiversity is post-secondary, encouraging the transfer of discrete units of information and theory, rather than liberal, encouraging the contemplation of energizing form in what a student comes to know. And the system of lectures, essays and exams, and the root assumptions of thousands of the university's members, canonize the post-secondary version of education. It is possible to go beyond it, but only by radically dissenting from the university. For the twenty-year-old who does not know what he is dissenting in favour of, this is either very isolating or very undermining.

  19. Apr 2017
    1. Srigley explores a couple of points that I touched on in my article, but didn’t fully understand. This first is what I’ve referred to as the “bullshit factor,” or the ability that my English major friends and I believed we possessed to “bamboozle” our professors with our sparkling prose and strikingly original analysis. It took me into my fourth year to realize that, in my arrogance, I hadn’t realized who was playing who. The professors saw right through our bullshit, but for various reasons were unwilling to call us on it. Instead they coddled us, encouraged us, praised us – and awarded us grades we didn’t deserve.

      The Bullshit factor! Interesting argument that the faculty realise but don't call the students on it. But I wonder. It can also be a question of effort: if you want to bullshit your way through college, who am I to stop you? As a rule, I'm generally not interested in those students, as opposed to either the ones who are doing great work or poor work but are not BSers.

  20. Nov 2016
    1. The education sector is witnessing the immense boom in the UK. It has various elements like schools, universities, institutions and nowadays the tutoring classes have been increased tremendously. It all creates the strong educational structure within the UK. The demand for the tuitions is increasing.http://blog.selectmytutor.co.uk/demand-for-extra-tuition-is-rising-as-britishers-are-likely-to-pay-high/

  21. Jul 2016
    1. For-profits typically take those funds and spend way more on advertising and profit distribution than on teaching.

      Don’t know what the stats are for “non-profit universities and colleges” but it does feel like an increasing portion of their budgets go to marketing, advertising, PR, and strategic positioning (at least in the United States and Canada).

  22. Jun 2016
  23. Mar 2016
    1. The scientific enterprise is characterized by competition for priority, influence,prestige, faculty positions, funding, publications, and students

      Bok on how universities compete.

    2. Bok, D. (2003).Universities in the marketplace: The commercialization of higher education.Princeton: Princeton University Press

      Sources of competition among universities

  24. Oct 2015
    1. Still, it’s reasonably certain that in the late eleventh century a group of students in Bologna got together and decided to pool their resources—financial, intellectual, and spiritual—in order to learn.

      Student-driven beginning for universities.

  25. Jul 2015
    1. I think it is possibly too early to tell.

      As Steven Hill of HEFCE recently suggested, it might be far better for UK institutions to reject these tables: "What if all UK institutions made a stand against global rankings, and stopped using them for promotional purposes? The reputation of the UK’s higher education sector would stand firm, and a really strong signal would be sent to the rest of the world. Not drifting, but steering purposely through the metric tide." http://blog.hefce.ac.uk/2015/07/08/the-metrics-dilemma/