Links for 2011-05-17

"In humanistic writing, I'm struck by the sometimes uncomfortable mixing of a romanticist vision of authorship with the value of scholarship as a collaborative, collective and accumulative enterprise. In peer review, tenure review, grant applications and other venues where we set the benchmark for what counts as excellence, we often expect scholarly work to exhibit the author's "quality of mind", and that in turn is often best established by the degree to which the analysis and interpretation in scholarly writing appear to be original and highly individualistic, all values that I think trace back to a romanticist vision of cultural creation as the expression of a liberated and extremely distinctive self. We often insist that the act of research in the humanities reveal or uncover something that we did not yet know, and suggest that this is both a mark of the individual quality of mind of the author of that research and a benchmark of its contribution to a shared project."

"Many people aren't getting the nuances of my recent Khan Academy arguments. I'll make my final remarks and then put this thread to rest.

Khan Academy videos are nothing new. MIT OpenCourseWare has been around for TEN YEARS now. Walter Lewin's awesome physics lectures have been available for most of those 10 years -- despite the fact they are pseudoteaching, and his students emerged with no greater understanding of physics than those of professors before him.

And I didn't have a problem with Khan Academy (as a collection of videos) until very recently.

For me, the problem is the way Khan Academy is being promoted. The way the media sees it as "revolutionizing education." The way people with power and money view education as simply "sit-and-get.""

"With the new books out, some people have been asking me what's the "best" place to buy a book, by which they mean what will lead to giving me the most money. So I thought I'd just go through the options, but those who don't want to read a whole post about shopping, here's the shorter version: look, it doesn't matter, or at least not enough to inconvenience yourself."