Via Professor Mike Klymkowski, here’s “Afraid of Your Child’s Math Textbook? You Should Be,” a long, thoughtful piece by Salon blogger Annie Keeghan on the state of the textbook business. It’s not a pretty picture.
Keegan describes in detail the consolidation of the industry into a few huge publishers and the market forces that impel them to push sales and volume over accuracy and coherence. For writers it means a pay cut. For students, something even worse. This has to change.
Via Naked Capitalism comes this video. You never know. Could be true.
Meet the ancestors. They are very, very different from you and me.
My friend Jeffrey Klein, after reading Robert Trivers’s The Folly of Fools, opines that self-deception is our defining characteristic. It’s much easier to deceive others if we fool ourselves first.
Bruce Alberts, the preternaturally accomplished editor of Science Magazine, has written a great editorial about bio education. I’d post the link, except that it leads to an onerous registration process. Instead, here are some quotes:
“When we teach children about aspects of science that the vast majority of them cannot yet grasp, then we have wasted valuable educational resources and produced nothing of lasting value. Perhaps less obvious, but to me at least as important, is the fact that we take all the enjoyment out of science when we do so.”
“The preference for “rigor” in science education can also interfere with the teaching of science at the college level. For example, in an introductory biology class, students are often required to learn the names of the 10 enzymes that oxidize sugars in a process called glycolysis. But an obsession with such details can obscure any real understanding of the central issue, leaving students with the impression that science is impossibly dull, causing many to shift to a different major.”
“Tragically, we have managed to simultaneously trivialize and complicate science education.”
Sounds as if he’s calling for a more—dare I say it?—cartoony treatment. The second part of his editorial, due out later this week, will let us know if I’m right.
Here’s the video. I don’t know which shoulder to look over any more.
Via Brad DeLong, some insightful thoughts from Felix Salmon about Khan Academy and some other online instructors. (Salmon’s post is mostly about a new enterprise called Udacity, which I hadn’t heard about before.)
Here’s Salmon:
“A large part of the success of both Khan’s courses and Thrun’s is the way that they’re presented and executed, rather than any business model behind them. Khan, in particular, is a hugely gifted natural educator…
I think that Khan and Thrun are at the forefront of a new, more personal way of teaching — think of them as having screen-actor skills in a world which has historically rewarded stage-actor skills. When you teach online, you’re teaching in a conversational manner, in a one-on-one space. And it turns out that many students — quite possibly most students — prefer being taught that way, as opposed to the old-fashioned model where a lecturer stands up in front of a crowded classroom and declaims to many people at once. Most students are naturally shy; they don’t like speaking up in class and saying that they don’t understand something. Online, they can just rewind and replay, or pause and look it up on Wikipedia.
And then of course there’s the fact that the incentives for the teacher are so much greater online, if like most teachers you’re driven by the opportunity to impart knowledge to students. “This is the best thing I can do in my life,” says Thrun. “I empowered more students in 2 months than in my entire life before. On that scale, I was off the charts in the last quarter.” And of course Thrun is barely on the charts if you compare him to the number of students that Khan has reached.
What Khan and Thrun and others are creating is a new educational paradigm, which promises not only much greater scalability than anything we’ve had until now, but also higher-quality education. That’s the real lesson of Thrun’s Stanford students taking his class online: it means that the online model really can have its cake (reach millions of people) while eating it too (be better for students than the courses offered at elite institutions).”
…is the title of a talk I’ll be giving in NYC on March 1. That’s me in the background.
I’m looking for biologists/biology teachers to discuss a biology project. The current state of biology textbooks alarms me for many reasons, and I’d like to develop a way to present important biological concepts clearly, concisely, attractively, and comprehensibly. If you’re interested in exploring the possibilities, please contact me. If you can’t do it but know someone who might, please send him or her my way. If you don’t know anyone who might, please pass the word along, in hopes it crosses the right virtual desktop somewhere in cyberspace.
“Ever since its birth in the Ionian islands almost three thousand years ago, Western philosophy has been divided between two seemingly opposed attitudes. According to one of them the authentic and ultimate truth of the world can reside only in perfectly immutable forms, by essence unvarying. According to the other, the only real truth resides in flux and evolution. From Plato to Whitehead and from Heraclitus to Hegel and Marx, it is clear that these metaphysical epistemologies were always closely bound up with their authors’ ethical and political biases. These ideological edifices represented as self-evident to reason, were actually a posteriori constructions designed to justify preconceived ethico-political theories.” —Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity
