education
grrlscientist | January 8, 2008"Bart! Don't make fun of graduate students. They just made a terrible life choice!" [0:19]
No. Fucking. Shit.
gregladen | January 8, 2008 What if Napster stocked textbooks? Engineering professor Richard Baraniuk talks about his vision for Connexions, an open-source system that lets teachers share digital texts and course materials, modify them and give them to their students -- all free, thanks to Creative Commons licensing.
drorzel | January 8, 2008One final note on the teachers-unions argument: The comments to the original post on the low regard for teachers relative to lawyers immediately jumped on the union thing. Commenter Doug Hering provided what's probably the best statement of the causal link:
I do agree that teachers must be treated as professionals. However, part of that is eliminating a union. How many professional groups have unions? It seems to me that gives the impression of a non-professional class of employees.
You hear this sort of thing all the time, most frequently from engineers and computer-industry people, and…
kcontreary | January 8, 2008From my hometown paper, the one and only New Orleans Times Picayune.
Deion Dedeaux sensed that sixth grade at Martin Behrman Elementary in New Orleans would be full of possibilities. A new school. A chance to improve his grades. A teacher who seemed like a father.
And no girls.
"You know girls," Deion said. "They like to talk. I just knew it was going to be better this way."
Apparently the national trend in single-sex public education is taking root in New Orleans, already home to a large parochial single-sex education community. Nationwide, single-sex public school programs or…
drorzel | January 8, 2008Commenter "Matt" wrote a comment that pissed me off, and while it's probably futile to take on union-bashing again, it does highlight a couple of the things that make this so frustrating.
In response to several people observing that teaching is not the cushy 8-to-3, summers-off job that lots of people claim, he writes:
Here are the facts. Teachers do not "have" to work harder than the rest of us. They do not "have" to deal with different or unique problems. Granted, some choose to work hard and some choose to deal with parents, misbehaving kids, etc. But people the world over in all jobs have…
grrlscientist | January 8, 2008tags: academe, professor on food stamps, academic poverty, streaming video
I thought my employment situation was solely due to some mysterious and horrible flaw that is obvious to everyone except me, but here is a man who has the same complaints and problems, almost word-for-word as I have, except he actually managed to get tenure -- after ten years of living in poverty in the academic system. However, I doubt I will be so lucky as to get a tenure-track position (provided that I manage to survive that long)! [5:17]
Like this guy, I was also told not to take money from the public coffers (in…
drorzel | January 7, 2008On Friday, Steinn was playing dictator of the universe, and presented a modest proposal to reform US public education. It's a mix of pretty good idea and cosmetic changes to make things more like Europe, and I agree with a good deal of it. I do want to highlight one thing, though:
Teachers could probably do with being paid better, and they could also probably do with being quality controlled a little better. Teachers in middle and high schools ought to have BA/BSc degrees in their fields, with MEds or equivalent for pedagogy.
This is particularly interesting, in light of Sunday's New York…
gregladen | January 5, 2008Christian Creationists are accusing scientists of being defensive, ignorant, reprehensible, and troubling. They might be right.
The NAS just published the latest version of its book on Evolution and Creationism (free, by the way: Your tax dollars at work) and we are now seeing the trickle of reaction from the largely creationist Christian community turn from a trickle to a drizzle.
I myself think it is a good book, but I believe they made two very important (and closely linked) errors. First, they should not have discussed creationism at all. It should be a book about evolution, with a…
gregladen | January 4, 2008Indeed, in science. The current issue of Science reviews the positions of each of the major presidential candidates in the area of science.
Writing the overview to this collection of views, Jeffrey Mervis states:
Many factors can make or break a U.S. presidential candidate in the 2008 race for his or her party's nomination. The ability to raise millions of dollars is key, as are positions on megaissues such as the Iraq war, immigration, and taxes. Voters also want to know if a candidate can be trusted to do the right thing in a crunch. Science and scientific issues? So far, with the…
gregladen | January 2, 2008This is the inaugural post in a new category I call "Stoopid News."
One of our local affiliates, WCCO News (Twin Cities Channel 4), ran a an interminable trailer claiming that a new study indicated that "teacher burnout" was not caused by low pay, not caused by working conditions, not caused by students, and not caused by workload. It was caused by something else. Details later on during the news broadcast. And so on.
When the story was finally aired, it turned out that the study was done in Germany of German teachers.
Fine.
Now, this is an international blog, and I don't want you to…
gregladen | December 28, 2007... Or so intoned the Janesville, Wisconsin student during show and tell just before he started ripping his Bible to shreds.
The school responded to this as a "safety matter."
One child felt particularly "endangered" by this show of bravado, and her father has pulled his kids out of the school and has apparently forced school administrators to treat this as a safety issue, and punish the student. The school is silent on the nature of the punishment, but insists that while the student is constitutionally protected in his decision to rip pages out of his own bible, he was being punished…
pontiff | December 19, 2007I grew up in the middle of nowhere. I read all, and I mean all, of the science and math books in my local library (and nearly all of the Scientific American magazines as well.) Because this was before the internet was ubiquitous these were the only resources I had. These days I often wonder how my life would have been different if I would have had access to open courses like the one described in this article.
There is one part of me that thinks this will change the entire landscape of learning for rural kids. On the other hand, by not having total access to the entire world of knowledge…
gregladen | December 19, 2007African American children may have reduced verbal ability compared to other children to a degree that is roughly equivalent to missing a year in school, according to a recently published paper. Is this evidence of a racial difference?
The study by Sampson et.al., published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences included more than 200 children aged 6-12 living in Chicago, and followed these children over seven years. The study controlled for poverty, and interestingly, poverty was not found to be a good predictor of differences in verbal ability.
The researchers consider…
gregladen | December 19, 2007Popular Mechanics (one of those magazines that genteel people refuse to admit they read, but that is actually a blast) has published a thing called "Geek the Vote." According to an email from PM, this is:
...an online guide to all the candidates' stances on issues related to science and technology including energy policy and climate change, gun control, science education and infrastructure investment. The full chart, which can be navigated by candidate or issue, is [provided]
The site is here.
This is apparently in response to (maybe not, but there is evidence to suggest this) the Science…
gregladen | December 18, 2007I wanted to point out two interesting posts both having to to with the nature of knowledge, or as we call it here in Minnesota (where the "k" in "Knute" is proudly pronounced).
The first is The Problem with Google's Knol Initiative (aha, you see, there's that "k" again...). This is about Google's idea of starting up it's own version of Wikipedia. Pierre Far of BlogSci questions the wisdom of Google's approach. The Google version of a wiki that is an encyclopedia promises to be better because it will recruit, and rely on, expertise. However, Far suggests that this could backfire, and asks…
grrlscientist | December 17, 2007Since we all had so much fun explaining the video to each other, I thought that all of you might be interested to read physicist Chad Orzel's explanation, along with cool pictures, of the physics underlying the 'two-fork toothpick trick' video.
drorzel | December 17, 2007Chris Mooney posted a couple of things last week-- one article at ScienceProgress and one blog post-- talking about the supposed shortage of scientists in the "pipeline." Following an Urban Insitute study, he says that there's really no shortage of scientists being trained, but rather a shortage of jobs for those scientists. Coming as he does from the policy/ journalism side of things, he brings the article to a ringing conclusion:
The numbers presented by the Urban Institute lead to an uncontestable conclusion: Some young scientists aren't going to be working in purely scientific positions.…
mikethemadbiologist | December 17, 2007ScienceBloging Greg Laden reports that the Texas Board of Higher Education is considering accrediting The Texas Based Institute for Creation Research so it could offer an online course in Science Education.
ScienceBlogling PZ offers one solution to stop the inanity (or at least limit the damage if Texas proceeds):
I hope Texas scientists can slap that Board into wakeful reality before that meeting, because if this goes through, the trust I can give Texas-trained teachers is getting flushed right down the sewer. And if Texans can't fix this, the rest of the country has to step up and deny…
gregladen | December 15, 2007Google is building its own version of communally-constructed online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which consistently ranks among the most visited websites in the world.
The Internet search powerhouse is inviting chosen people to test a free service dubbed "knol," to indicate a unit of knowledge, vice president of engineering Udi Manber said Friday in a posting at Google's website.
"Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it," Manber wrote.
"There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there…
gregladen | December 15, 2007The Texas Based Institute for Creation Research would offer an online degree in Science Education. Approved by a State Advisory Board yesterday, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board will consider the degree in January.
Could this be why there has been a shakeup at the Texas Higher Education department?
The prospect of the ICR offering a degree is at the same time chilling and satisfying. Accroding to NCSE Director Eugenie Scott:
They teach distorted science ... Any student coming out from the ICR with a degree in science would not be competent to teach in Texas public schools…