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Efficiency = Feedback / Cost
This is exactly the kind of formulation that drives me mad sometimes. But in a time where our budgets are imploding it’s better to give management a simple formula that encapsulates much of the debate than to merely cross your fingers that they get it. We’re kind of blessed to have an enlightened administration here at Keene… Continue reading
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Two Educational Contexts
From Dan Kahneman: True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes. You are probably an expert in guessing your spouse’s mood from one word on the telephone; chess players find a strong move in a single glance at a complex position; and true legends of instant diagnoses are common among… Continue reading
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Quality time
I don’t know if you’ve seen this Microsoft vision of the future yet. On the whole it’s pretty standard. The weirdest things about these recent corporate visions of the future is how they are always about someone traveling. Remote video in these things is used not to eliminate the travel (via business videoconference) but to… Continue reading
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Pinker on Statistical Literacy
Better Angels, indeed: In a question and answer session on Freakonomics Radio, Pinker was asked what people can do to help society “resist the urge to think things are worse and worse and the world is less and less safe when this is manifestly not the case”. Pinker’s answer was interesting: “One necessity is greater… Continue reading
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Canvas Instructure and the de-commodification of the LMS
One of the oddest yet most exciting stories of the past year or so is how the LMS, which had sunk to the level of a utility, has suddenly been revived. There’s a common path software takes, where it moves from a feature and performance war cycle slowly into a commodity cycle where the product… Continue reading
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Why teens are wired for risk
Why teens are wired for risk Kind of important for higher education to think about, no? Scientists typically refer to “the teenage brain” in 13- to 17-year-olds, but that doesn’t mean that college students are totally “adults” yet. In fact, research from the National Institutes of Health has shown, the prefrontal cortex, a region of… Continue reading
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Education and Start-ups
From Will Dropouts Save America? If start-up activity is the true engine of job creation in America, one thing is clear: our current educational system is acting as the brakes. Simply put, from kindergarten through undergraduate and grad school, you learn very few skills or attitudes that would ever help you start a business. Skills… Continue reading
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That people can see goods and services in the shop window but have no money to buy them is the classic failure of capitalism. That people have money but there are no goods in the shop window is the classic failure of socialism. Not to be too simplistic but our current problem looks more like the first than the second.
That people can see goods and services in the shop window but have no money to buy them is the classic failure of capitalism. That people have money but there are no goods in the shop window is the classic failure of socialism. Not to be too simplistic but our current problem looks more like… Continue reading
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I don’t think you can call it remediation anymore when 1/3 of your students require it. At some point the problem is not the students or the high schools, but that we’ve built a higher education system based on false assumptions about who our students are and what they have when they get here. Our… Continue reading
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From Klein’s The student debt crisis in one chart (article here) Continue reading
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