July 2011
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What if broadband DOESN’T eat everything?
From A.V. Club: The sky is still up and water is still wet, but the truism that the music industry is circling the drain appears—at least for now—to be reversing itself ever-so-slightly. Consequence Of Sound gathers the evidence, beginning with a story from Exclaim noting that album sales in North America are up for the Continue reading
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Great base rate fallacy explanation
From (what else?) a debunking of one of Gladwell’s heroes: In statistics, you can’t judge the predictive oomph of anything without knowing the population prevalence of the event or condition you’re studying. Here’s a simple way to see how easy it is to fall into what they call, in the field, “base-rate neglect”: Suppose you’re Continue reading
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Teaching Workshops Fail to Spur Learner-Centered Teaching
Teaching Workshops Fail to Spur Learner-Centered Teaching New article to be published in BioScience. Ebert-May and her five coauthors examined data from two multi-day programs, one of which occurred over several years and one of which was repeated annually. Both programs led to participating faculty knowing more about inquiry-based teaching, as expected, and a large Continue reading
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Don’t Show, Don’t Tell? Direct Instruction Can Thwart Independent Exploration
Don’t Show, Don’t Tell? Direct Instruction Can Thwart Independent Exploration New study, to be published in Cognition. Far from being a salvo in the never-ending direct instruction vs. discovery learning war, this a cautionary tale about the subtleties of presentation, especially with small children: So what’s a teacher or parent to do? Schulz is quick Continue reading
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The Great Threat to Higher Education is Medical Costs, Not Bubbles
To be clear about my last post, there are some catastrophic economics of higher education down the pike; they just aren’t bubbles. The biggest one? Rising health costs for seniors and the disabled. As health care takes bigger and bigger chunks out of the GDP it is going to crowd out spending on a lot Continue reading
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The “Tuition Bubble” and Degree Oversupply
There’s a lot of neat stuff in Carnevale and Rose’s The Undereducated American (and if you can’t read the whole thing, the first ten or so pages are essentially a Powerpoint of the findings — they will take you all of two minutes to flip through; you have no excuse). One of my favorite pieces Continue reading
Hapgood 