education Archives | Page 6 of 11

Tageducation

America’s misplaced disdain for vocational education

July 2, 2010 / Klint Finley

Dude building a robot

Vocational education has been so disparaged that its few advocates have resorted to giving it a new name: “career and technical education” (CTE). Academic courses that prepare students for getting into universities, by contrast, are seen as the key to higher wages and global prowess. Last month the National Governors Association proposed standards to make students “college and career ready”. But a few states, districts and think-tanks favour a radical notion. In America’s quest to raise wages and compete internationally, CTE may be not a hindrance but a help.

America has a unique disdain for vocational education. It has supported such training since 1917; money now comes from the Perkins Act, which is reauthorised every six years. However, many Americans hate the idea of schoolchildren setting out on career paths—such predetermination, they think, threatens the ethos of opportunity. As wages have risen for those with college degrees, scepticism of CTE has grown too. By 2005 only one-fifth of high-school students specialised in an industry, compared with one-third in 1982. The share of 17-year-olds aspiring to four-year college, meanwhile, reached 69% in 2003, double the level of 1981. But the fact remains that not every student will graduate from university. This may make politicians uncomfortable, but it is not catastrophic. The Council of Economic Advisers projects faster-growing demand for those with a two-year technical-college degree, or specific training, than for those with a full university degree.

The Economist: Too narrow, too soon?

(via Kristin Wolff)

Look at that guy above. He’s building a freaking robot. What did you learn in your B.A. program? How to write really long papers that the undergrads grading them would rubber stamp? How to shotgun beers?

Anyway, yes I think this type of thing is great. The “everyone must go to college” mantra beat into students brains in high schools in this country sets too many people up to fail. Too many people end up thinking “Oh, I didn’t go to college, guess I have to work at Wal-Mart forever” or “I went to college and now society owes me a job” or “I went to college and now I can’t find a job. There must be something wrong with me. Guess I’ll be a cook forever.”

All of those ideas are bullshit, but they’re socially re-enforced ideas that get pounded into our brains in school.

Inevitably when I go off on an anti-college rant there are those who argue “Well, it’s an enriching experience” or “What about learning for the sake of learning?” or accuse me of being anti-intellectual or over-intellectual or whatever.

Look. I learned a lot and grew a lot as a person and made long-lasting, important friendships in college. It’s where I was from the ages of 18-21 – pretty formative years. I wouldn’t trade those experiences and relationships for anything. But I still wouldn’t recommend other people do it. And it’s not like I don’t think I would have had an enriching experience going to trade school, or majoring in a scientific or professional field.

Going into a crazy amount of debt really young in life just isn’t worth it if you don’t come out of it with more job skills than a short-order cook.

Most universities require a byzantine set of required courses outside your major in order to graduate. What if these were put to better use? What if in order to get a degree, any degree, you had to learn a basic set of competencies that actually prepares you for the work place? That actually gives you skills beyond “written communication,” “public speaking,” and “Microsoft Word” – (which we all dutifully put on our resumes as if there were all these college graduates who wrote their uncommunicative papers in crayon and never gave presentations).

Here are some ideas for required college courses:

Career management – Where you learn not just how to search for a job, but principles of career advancement, etc. This would actually be an applied organizational psychology class.

Accounting – Even if you’re not going to work in the fiscal department of an organization, you should know how it works if you’re ever going to be in a role with real responsibility.

Project management – Even if you’re not going to be a PM, you should probably learn about gant charts and stuff.

Spreadsheets

Database design and management

A few web development courses, sufficient to introduce: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP or like language (presumably you’ll learn SQL above).

In other words, courses sufficient to understand how organizations function and how to process and manage information. The core skills for any type of “knowledge work” in any size of organization, public, private, or non-profit. Probably a lot more useful than college algebra or “8 credits of social science credits outside the students major.”

People with Negative Attitudes More Likely to Learn From Mistakes

June 11, 2010 / Klint Finley

negative attitude

Interesting:

This research focused on the relationship between negative emotionality and learning from errors. Specifically, negative emotionality was expected to impair learning from errors by decreasing motivation to learn. Perceived managerial intolerance of errors was hypothesized to increase negative emotionality, whereas emotional stability was proposed to decrease negative emotionality. All the hypotheses were tested in a laboratory simulation. Contrary to the prediction, a positive association was found between negative emotionality and motivation to learn. The effects of perceived managerial intolerance of errors and emotional stability on negative emotionality were as predicted. Moreover, exploratory data analyses were conducted at the level of specific negative emotions and revealed differentiated effects of specific negative emotions on learning from errors.

Barking up the wrong tree: Does a positive attitude make you more motivated to learn from your mistakes?

Earn 45% of Credits Towards a Bachelor’s Degree by Working at Wal-Mart

June 6, 2010 / Klint Finley

Wal-Mart University

I’m all for awarding college credit for real world experiences, but this seems a little ridiculous:

Under a program announced Thursday, employees of Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club will be able to receive college credit for performing their jobs, including such tasks as loading trucks and ringing up purchases. Workers could earn as much as 45 percent of the credits needed for an associate or bachelor’s degree while on the job.

The credits are earned through the Internet-based American Public University, with headquarters in Charles Town, W.Va., and administrative offices in Manassas. […]

American Public University is one of a growing number of so-called career colleges that operate on a for-profit model, rather than as state institutions or private foundations. APU’s parent company is publicly traded and its reported revenue jumped 43 percent to $47.3 million during the most recent quarter, while profit rose 46 percent to $7.6 million.

Washington Post: Wal-Mart partners with online school to offer college credit to workers

(Thanks Trevor)

Will any employer other than Wal-Mart have any respect for American Public University degrees? Will Wal-Mart actually have any respect for the degrees themselves?

It’s hard to blame Wal-Mart employees for taking APU up on this offer, though, with the economy in the toilet and with universities across the country raising tuition faster than inflation (recent examples: Oregon, Illinois, Virginia)

But I’m worried this will only lead to increased academic inflation. This will be especially problematic for Wal-Mart employees/students who get low-value degrees like B.A.s communications and political science, like the person the WaPo quoted for the story. Students who focus on sciences and professional degrees will obviously have more success, but they will probably be either less prepared by an APU degree degree or be able to earn far less of their degree by working at Wal-Mart (or both). (Maybe accounting would work.)

Sadly, it sounds like this program is mostly designed to grift Wal-Mart employees for the private gain of APU.

Arizona school white washing children’s faces to appease bigots

June 5, 2010 / Klint Finley

A Prescott, AZ school is demanding that a mural depicting its black and Latino students be modified to depict only white children – by having the black and Latino children’s faces painted over. The decision was apparently motivated after a rash of people drove by yelling racial slurs at children, spurred on by a local city council man and morning radio host Steve Blair.

Remember where you were, when you could still laugh about teabaggers and racists and Arizonans, because funny time is almost over. If the unemployment keeps up — one in five adult white males has no job and will never have a job again — and people keep walking away from their stucco heaps they can’t afford and the states and cities and counties and towns keep passing their aggressive racist laws to rile up the trash even more, shit’s going to very soon become very bad, and whether it’s the National Guard having wars in the Sunbelt Exurbs against armies of crazy old white people who are finally using their hundreds of millions of guns, or whole Latino neighborhoods burned to the ground the way the Klan used to burn down black neighborhoods a century ago, we are in for a long dark night and no light-colored paint is going to fix that.

Wonkette: Arizona School Demands Black & Latino Students’ Faces On Mural Be Changed To White

(Thanks Josh)

Texas re-writing history books for the entire country

May 19, 2010 / Klint Finley

Greatest Texan Ever
Art by Matthew Clay-Robison

“We are fighting for our children’s education and our nation’s future,” Dunbar said. “In Texas we have certain statutory obligations to promote patriotism and to promote the free enterprise system. There seems to have been a move away from a patriotic ideology. There seems to be a denial that this was a nation founded under God. We had to go back and make some corrections.”

Those corrections have prompted a blizzard of accusations of rewriting history and indoctrinating children by promoting rightwing views on religion, economics and guns while diminishing the science of evolution, the civil rights movement and the horrors of slavery.

Several changes include sidelining Thomas Jefferson, who favoured separation of church and state, while introducing a new focus on the “significant contributions” of pro-slavery Confederate leaders during the civil war.

How does the effect the rest of the country?

The curriculum has alarmed liberals across the country in part because Texas buys millions of text books every year, giving it considerable sway over what publishers print. By some estimates, all but a handful of American states rely on text books written to meet the Texas curriculum. The California legislature is considering a bill that would bar them from being used in the state’s schools.

Guardian: Texas schools board rewrites US history with lessons promoting God and guns

(Thanks Katie Monster!)

Update: Some doubts about Texas’s national influence on textbooks from the Texas Tribune (via Jon Lebkowsky)

Kyoto’s student-run dormintory/squat

May 7, 2010 / Klint Finley

Kyoto squatters

Actually, I don’t fully understand why they are called squatters if they pay rent and are authorized to live there. But the photos are cool.

Nearly a century old, and looking every day of it, Yoshida-ryo is very likely the last remaining example of the once common Japanese wooden university dormitory. This building was built in 1913. Organized from the very beginning to be self-administering through a dormitory association (????), the students themselves have been responsible for selecting new applicants for residency. This autonomy, however, came under full-scale assault in 1971, when the Ministry of Education began a policy of regulating or closing dormitories, which were seen as “hotbeds for various kinds of conflict.” University authorities first tried to close Yoshida-ryo completely in 1979, and after failing to overcome opposition over the next 10 years finally closed the Western Yoshida-ryo across the street.

With the death of Japan’s violent student activism, the campaign to close the dormitory subsided for a time, but in the aftermath of the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake there were new calls to replace the poorly aged building, which had already seen its maintenance neglected for decades by a university that had wanted to demolish it.

At present, the future of the dormitory is unclear.

CNNGO: Yoshida-ryo dormitory at Kyoto University

(via Arthur Magazine)

Guru Fatigue: Getting Paid Without Being The Wizard

April 22, 2010 / Klint Finley

Guru fatigue

I was glad to read this, since it’s stuff I’ve been thinking about as I work on Mediapunk and the hypersigil project:

Truth is, I’ve seen an increasingly level of what I’d call “Guru Fatigue” these days.

For a long time, the wisdom in the word of “making money from what you know” was you had to position yourself as the wizard. The top dog. And, for certain clients and fields, that’s likely still true.

But, over the last few years, I’ve sensed a growing movement of people who are really looking not for the opportunity to worship at the feet of the guru or rulebook, but the chance to connect, to be listened to, to be valued, to join in something bigger than themselves, to be inspired and rekindle hope and to learn something that will take them or their companies a serious bit further down the path than they are now from somebody who’s a serious bit further down that road…who they trust.

They’re not looking for the wizard, but rather, someone real they can trust to get them to the next level. Which, interestingly enough, is much closer to the literal definition of the word guru.

Jonathan Fields: Guru Fatigue: Getting Paid Without Being The Wizard

Teachers hate creativity?

April 20, 2010 / Klint Finley

just another brick in the wall

Eric Barker recently referred me to this interesting study, which looked at how elementary school teachers perceived creativity in their students. While the teachers said they wanted creative kids in their classroom, they actually didn’t. In fact, when they were asked to rate their students on a variety of personality measures – the list included everything from “individualistic” to “risk-seeking” to “accepting of authority” – the traits mostly closely aligned with creative thinking were also closely associated with their “least favorite” students. As the researchers note, “Judgments for the favorite student were negatively correlated with creativity; judgments for the least favorite student were positively correlated with creativity.”

This shouldn’t be too surprising: Would you really want a little Picasso in your class? How about a baby Gertrude Stein? Or a teenage Eminem? The point is that the classroom isn’t designed for impulsive expression – that’s called talking out of turn. Instead, it’s all about obeying group dynamics and exerting focused attention. Those are important life skills, of course, but decades of psychological research suggest that such skills have little to do with creativity.

Frontal Cortex: Classroom Creativity

(via Mind Hacks thanks to Duff)

Projection: digital textbooks will be 18% of the market in 5 years

April 20, 2010 / Klint Finley

five year digital textbook projection

I take projections with a heaping lump of salt, but this is interesting:

Considering current digital textbook sales increases, and basing our assumptions of the favorable evolution of factors contributing to increased digital textbook availability and access, we project the digital textbook market to surpass 18% of combined new textbook sales for the Higher Education, and Career Education markets in the U.S. by 2014. Overall digital textbook sales will increase 100% year-over-year in 2010, and continue to grow at rates of 150% and 120% respectively in 2011 and 2012. As publishers struggle with the eventuality of transforming their product models to digital-first, and as they adjust their sales efforts to address the growth in the digital market, we expect a certain amount of churn and an adjustment to sales growth in 2013 and 2014. In those years, digital textbook sales will increase 90% and 80% respectively.

Digital Textbook Sales in U.S. Higher Education — A Five-Year Projection

(Thanks Wes)

“DIY U”: The end of university prestige

March 31, 2010 / Klint Finley

DIY U

Interview with DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education author Anya Kamenetz:

In the future, I don’t think it’ll go back to the old model, where colleges have this brand name that everyone respects. We still use college as shorthand for prestige, but eventually that should be just one marker among many. You’re not going to be applying for jobs on the strength of your WGU diploma — you’re going to have to rely more on your assessments in the field. But grads of WGU have found they can satisfy employers by showing them what they’ve done, more than where they’ve studied. […]

I was very good at traditional school and college, where I graduated with honors. All the time while absorbing literature and Russian, I was also learning the meta-skills of how to please my teachers and how to stay away from any classes that might be too challenging or outside my comfort zone. I made an attempt to design my own major around literature and psycholinguistics, but Yale threw up a lot of barriers to that.

My most relevant learning experiences took place outside the classroom, editing my student magazine and working as an intern at several different publications. Out in the real world I was challenged to the max, pulling far more all-nighters than I did for my papers. I was always a bookworm, so I had to develop new ways of dealing with people, whether sources, fellow writers or editors, and gathering information from being on the scene. I actually cut back on my class load my senior year so I could commute to New York three days a week to intern at the Village Voice, which is pretty rare among Ivy Leaguers. But it turned out great: I found great mentors there, and I was writing a column for the Voice just a couple years later.

Salon: “DIY U”: The end of university prestige

(via Global Guerrillas)

Technoccult

Mutate Your Mind