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Technology and education

Read the question. You agree?

  • Yes

    Votes: 6 18.8%

  • No

    Votes: 26 81.3%
  • Total voters
    32
Peter Grimm said:
You know, the monarchs ultimately lost that debate. :2razz:
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The interesting thing is that the monarchy has a better reputation than the republicans.
 
Peter Grimm said:
How very convenient.
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Well it's reality. You want to demand that something which isn't a business should run on free market business principles, we don't even have businesses which do so.

All I can really see is that you have some personal axe against academia and University for some reason, you belittle the people who go through it, try to make it into something its not, all so you can herald its fall; that's it. Create cogs and nothing more; you'd make a great Cyberman.
 
Peter Grimm said:
Libraries exist to protect, nurture, and celebrate information. Don't you see that universities have a different and more active role in society?

Accrediting agencies are part of the problem, as is the federal oversight you discussed. Such things are inherently bureaucratic. That's a difficult concept to explain, really, but I'll try it with an analogy: A fence at the zoo is not meant to keep the animals in as much as it's meant to keep the people out. Similarly, degrees, issued by universities and given their stamp of approval by accrediting agencies, are not meant to reward the efforts of the person who earned the degree so much as they are meant to segregate out the people who did not earn that degree from any academic discussion.

The problem is that some of the smartest people I know don't have degrees.
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Some of the smartest people I've ever met didn't have much formal education either, but that's not really the point here.

You seem to be coming from a defensive and bitter place, and for that I'm sorry. If you think that a degree's purpose is to segregate, you are mistaken. Your take on academia is one of an outsider with only partial understanding. You asked whether I understand the role of universities in society, and the answer is yes, I do.
 
cpwill said:
Simple Answer: Yes. Everything we can do in a traditional classroom we are increasingly able to do online.
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Not as effectively. I was remained by students results this past semester how important the human element in education is. Many, many students simply do not do well with online courses.
 
Ikari said:
Well it's reality. You want to demand that something which isn't a business should run on free market business principles, we don't even have businesses which do so.

All I can really see is that you have some personal axe against academia and University for some reason, you belittle the people who go through it, try to make it into something its not, all so you can herald its fall; that's it. Create cogs and nothing more; you'd make a great Cyberman.
Click to expand...

I never "demanded" anything. I don't know whether you create straw men on purpose, or you just have trouble with reading comprehension. Either way, I shouldn't have to keep backtracking to repeat what I actually said, as opposed to what you want to think I said.
 
Peter Grimm said:
I never "demanded" anything. I don't know whether you create straw men on purpose, or you just have trouble with reading comprehension. Either way, I shouldn't have to keep backtracking to repeat what I actually said, as opposed to what you want to think I said.
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Backtracking is all you can do. You've said what you've said and it's been picked up by others. Your aggression against academia is well documented.
 
nota bene said:
Some of the smartest people I've ever met didn't have much formal education either, but that's not really the point here.

You seem to be coming from a defensive and bitter place, and for that I'm sorry. If you think that a degree's purpose is to segregate, you are mistaken. Your take on academia is one of an outsider with only partial understanding. You asked whether I understand the role of universities in society, and the answer is yes, I do.
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How is it off point to mention that some of the smartest people I know don't have degrees? Degrees come with benefits. The world is full of capable, deserving people who won't ever see those benefits. The process of getting a degree also increases knowledge. The world will never see the benefit of some of its most capable people being in possession of that knowledge.

Given that the topic of this thread is the role technology can play to bring access to education to a greater pool of people, I think pointing out that many of the world's brightest don't currently have a degree is very much on point.

Second, both you and Ikari seem to want to take this from being a debate on the issues to being a personal evaluation of my motives and feelings. It's disappointing, because two supposedly well-educated people shouldn't be lacking in logical debate skills to where they would resort to such simple-mindedness.

Since you brought it up, though, I certainly have no love for academe. It's a shady world of self-aggrandizement and resting entirely on one's laurels rather than on one's accomplishments, and it exerts entirely too much influence on the rest of society based on nothing more than smoke-and-mirrors. Academe is the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain - seemingly great and powerful, but the actual people running it are feeble and ordinary. The biggest problem I have with academe is that it is exclusive, rather than inclusive. It's an old boy's club in the worst way.

Like it or not, though, the internet will end that.
 
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Ikari said:
Backtracking is all you can do. You've said what you've said and it's been picked up by others. Your aggression against academia is well documented.
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You're just not very good with words, Ikari. I never "demanded" anything. I don't, however, have any love for academe. I don't deny that - academe is a cancer on society in its current form. See my answer above to nota bene.
 
Peter Grimm said:
How is it off point to mention that some of the smartest people I know don't have degrees? Degrees come with benefits. The world is full of capable, deserving people who won't ever see those benefits. The process of getting a degree also increases knowledge. The world will never see the benefit of some of its most capable people being in possession of that knowledge.

Given that the topic of this thread is the role in which technology can play to bring access to education to a greater pool of people, I think pointing out that many of the world's brightest don't currently have a degree is very much on point.

Second, both you and Ikari seem to want to take this from being a debate on the issues to being a personal evaluation of my motives and feelings. It's disappointing, because two supposedly well-educated people shouldn't be lacking in logical debate skills to where they would resort to such mindlessness.

Since you brought it up, though, I certainly have no love for academe. It's a shady world of self-aggrandizement and resting entirely on one's laurels rather than on one's accomplishments, and it exerts entirely too much influence on the rest of society based on nothing more than smoke-and-mirrors. Academe is the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain - seemingly great and powerful, but the actual people running it are feeble and ordinary. The biggest problem I have with academe is that it is exclusive, rather than inclusive. It's an old boy's club in the worst way.

Like it or not, though, the internet will end that.
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You don't see a problem relying on a mechanism constructed by the elite? That's the internet, however democratized it has become.
 
Peter Grimm said:
That's incidental. :2razz:
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Hardly so. It demonstrates whatever point Ikari and I pointed out or has pointed out numerous times in similar threads. Your progress, your ideas, your view of the world is built upon the efforts and works of the elite. Everything from your political ideology, your philosophy, your vehicles, and your computer screen. It's all been devised by those you don't care for.
 
Fiddytree said:
Hardly so. It demonstrates whatever point Ikari pointed out or has pointed out numerous times in similar threads. Your progress, your ideas, your view of the world is built upon the efforts and works of the elite.
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Actually, most inventions come from small businesses.

And the internet? You can thank the US military for that, not academe.
 
Peter Grimm said:
Actually, most inventions come from small businesses.

And the internet? You can thank the US military for that, not academe.
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And you think the academy was no large part of that development? How ignorant and naive.
 
Fiddytree said:
And you think the academy was no large part of that development? How ignorant and naive.
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I'm sure it was. Regardless, that's incidental, given that the vast majority of inventions come from outside academe.

The real thinkers and innovators in this country are small business owners.
 
Peter Grimm said:
I'm sure it was. Regardless, that's incidental, given that the vast majority of inventions come from outside academe.

The real thinkers and innovators in this country are small business owners.
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Yet the center for commerce, and you say, education, relies on a construction by the very people you think are not "real thinkers." It's amusing you don't see how ludicrous you sound.
 
Fiddytree said:
Yet the center for commerce, and you say, education, relies on a construction by the very people you think are not "real thinkers." It's amusing you don't see how ludicrous you sound.
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I never said academics weren't "real thinkers."

Ikari drew a contrast between the "thinkers" produced by academia and the "cogs" created outside academia. I was alluding to that - taking a jab, if you will.

Academics are, for the most part, smart people.
 
Peter Grimm said:
I never said academics weren't "real thinkers."

Ikari drew a contrast between the "thinkers" produced by academia and the "cogs" created outside academia. I was alluding to that - taking a jab, if you will.

Academics are, for the most part, smart people.
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And innovators?

Your disdain for the university has a hard time explaining why it is academics should be seen as a cancer to society, when in many respects, you rely on them from the ideas you have to the products you use.
 
Fiddytree said:
And innovators?

Your disdain for the university has a hard time explaining why it is academics should be seen as a cancer to society, when in many respects, you rely on them from the ideas you have to the products you use.
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Don't confuse the people with the structures. I have no problem at all with the people who work in academia. My problem is entirely with the system and the way in which it's structured. We essentially take the greatest resource this country has, intelligent people, and we waste their talents.
 
Fiddytree said:
And you think the academy was no large part of that development? How ignorant and naive.
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The anti-intellectuals rarely have any actual idea of what academia accomplishes and its necessity in continually pushing forwards human's collective knowledge base. In their zeal to decry the educated populace, they look over necessary dynamics and instead want to slander intellectuals as "snobby" or whatever other derogatory term they have for educated people. The idea that the internet would ever fully replace academia is foolhardy, and if we even consider the off chance that it does; it would be the end of base research as we know it. Without base research, there will be nothing left to engineer.

I've never quite understood the anti-intellectuals, but evolution has pushed intelligence as the primary instinct through which humanity prospers.
 
And intellectual curiosity too.
 
Peter Grimm said:
Don't confuse the people with the structures. I have no problem at all with the people who work in academia. My problem is entirely with the system and the way in which it's structured. We essentially take the greatest resource this country has, intelligent people, and we waste their talents.
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I'm guessing that your opinion is based on your personal experience in college. What's wrong with the general structure of the Academy? In what specific ways are intelligent folks' talents wasted? Examples? How do you waste talent anyway? Is it a finite source? Does it never thrive?

This much I know; the Internet is a valuable education tool. Its existence doesn't thwart academia; they aren't in opposition.
 
nota bene said:
What's wrong with the general structure of the Academy?
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Oh my goodness, where to begin? I'll throw out a few, but there are many, many things wrong with the way universities do business.

1. Tenure - Lifetime job security is the antithesis of competition. Competition leads to productivity and higher job performance.

Example: The University of Colorado professor who taught his students that the United States provoked the 9/11 attacks. CU refused to fire him, citing tenure, until the public scrutiny just got to be too much for them to bear. Ward Churchill September 11 attacks essay controversy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

University presidents have no power - all the major decisions are made by faculty. Collective decision-making by hundreds of prima donnas, none of whom can be fired or even demoted for being wrong, is not a system that any other institution has adopted anywhere else in the world. It is like Congress without elections -- a formula for total irresponsibility and self-indulgence.


2. College Athletics - If you want to see slave labor in action in 2012, look no further than college football. These student athletes bring in billions of dollars of revenue to the schools, to the television networks, yet they are entirely unpaid. Why? So that college athletics can keep its tax-exempt status. Unlike baseball, the NFL does not want to run a minor league. So they farm the work out to the universities, and everybody makes money. Everybody except, of course, the kids doing the actual labor.

Example: O'Bannon v. NCAA could impact more than video games - Michael McCann - SI.com


3. Scandals in College Athletics - The last point reminds me of this point. College athletes are not subjected to the same academic standards as other students. The University of North Carolina was recently found to have been giving out free "A's" to football players in an African American Studies course. Too bad the players never actually attended the courses.

But what really takes the cake is the Penn State scandal. Here you had nearly a decade of disgusting child abuse, which was knowingly covered up by the university. The Freeh Report on Pennsylvania State University | Judge Louis Freeh investigation on PSU

I know of only two elitist, closed societies capable of such a coverup.... academia and the catholic church.


4. Other coverups - It doesn't begin and end with athletes. A study conducted in 2009 found that many colleges were covering up the number of rapes on campus in order to make their campus appear safer and more attractive to parents. This is, in fact, a pattern: Campus Rape Victims: A Struggle For Justice : NPR


5. Grad Students - But let's get off the topic of coverups, and get back on the topic of slave labor. Big-name universities will lavish six-figure salaries on deconstructionist professors whose chief claim to fame is that other deconstructionist professors like them, while freshmen are being taught by low-budget graduate students, many of whom are from foreign countries and do not speak intelligible English.

That is why hundreds of students can be packed like sardines into a huge lecture hall for Economics 1, taught by some junior faculty member without enough clout to get out of teaching anything so elementary.

Meanwhile, some senior professor in the same department may hold a little boutique seminar for six in his pet sub-specialty, far off the beaten track from anything that undergraduates need to know.

When budget-crunch time comes, two classes of Economics 1 with 400 students each may be more likely to be combined into one class with 800 students than is the big-name professor's seminar to be touched.


6. University Admissions - They are just plain unfair, and do not reward achievement. For example, why do universities have legacy admissions? Who cares if your uncle attended Harvard, or if your mother attended Princeton? That should have nothing at all to do with whether you are admitted.

Then you have race and gender quotas. Rather than being admitted purely on academic merit, students are admitted due to the melanin count in their skin or their genitalia.

I haven't even mentioned the number of foreign students. Why should American taxpayers subsidize the education of a student from India or Korea?

Next, you have people with money. If you have money, you can get in anywhere, regardless of how dumb you are.


7. University Tuition - College tuition is just ridiculous. It is the most expensive thing most families will ever pay for aside from their home. It's the number one reason young people will go in to debt when they're starting out. In the past year alone, tuition for four-year public universities rose 8.3 percent for in-state students and 5.7 percent for out-of-state students. Why is that? Because they are run so inefficiently.

Ronald Ehrenberg, a labor economist at Cornell, cited “the shared system of governance between trustees, administrators, and faculty” at many universities, which “guarantees that ... institutions will be slow to react to cost pressures.”

http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffp0005s.pdf


8. Research Grant Funding - Research grant funding is a must to keep a scientific projects advancing. It costs money for materials and equipment in addition to personnel to undertake a research project.

Now, private money is private money, and I'm not really concerned about that.

Who gets the public money and why? As a taxpayer, I feel this process should be transparent and that I should have some input, along with other taxpayers. Instead, this process is farmed out to various government agencies who clearly have political agendas.

Funding of science - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


9. Wasteful Spending - This goofy grand funding process leads to a lot of studies being done that are simply a waste of money. But don't worry, Americans aren't the only ones. A group of Japanese scientists, led by a professor Yuki Sugiyama of Nagoya University, recently determined the reason commuters are occasionally caught in traffic jams is because there are too many cars on the road.

Groundbreaking stuff.

10. Left-wing Politics - Universities are the nerve center for liberal thought and liberal politics. The vastly disproportionate presence of leftist professors on university campuses across the United States has been well documented. One of the more significant studies on this subject was conducted in 2003 by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC), which examined the ratio of registered Democrats to registered Republicans on the faculties of 32 elite colleges and universities nationwide.

In its examinations of more than 150 departments and upper-level administrations at the 32 elite colleges and universities, the CSPC found that the overall ratio of registered Democrats to registered Republicans was more than 10 to 1 (1397 Democrats, 134 Republicans).
 
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Peter Grimm said:
Oh my goodness, where to begin? I'll throw out a few, but there are many, many things wrong with the way universities do business.

1. Tenure - Lifetime job security is the antithesis of competition. Competition leads to productivity and higher job performance.
Click to expand...

Isolates teachers from political discrimination in a school. A professor cannot be fired for their opinions. Not a bad thing, in fact necessary given certain dynamics of the Board. You can't fire someone for expressing or researching unpopular theories. There are methods through which a professor can be dismissed. In fact, the professor that you cited was fired. Guess maybe you should have researched that.

Peter Grimm said:
University presidents have no power - all the major decisions are made by faculty. Collective decision-making by hundreds of prima donnas, none of whom can be fired or even demoted for being wrong, is not a system that any other institution has adopted anywhere else in the world. It is like Congress without elections -- a formula for total irresponsibility and self-indulgence.
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This comment is not only absolutely retarded, it's absolutely false

Peter Grimm said:
2. College Athletics - If you want to see slave labor in action in 2012, look no further than college football. These student athletes bring in billions of dollars of revenue to the schools, to the television networks, yet they are entirely unpaid. Why? So that college athletics can keep its tax-exempt status. Unlike baseball, the NFL does not want to run a minor league. So they farm the work out to the universities, and everybody makes money. Everybody except, of course, the kids doing the actual labor.

Example: O'Bannon v. NCAA could impact more than video games - Michael McCann - SI.com


3. Scandals in College Athletics - The last point reminds me of this point. College athletes are not subjected to the same academic standards as other students. The University of North Carolina was recently found to have been giving out free "A's" to football players in an African American Studies course. Too bad the players never actually attended the courses.

But what really takes the cake is the Penn State scandal. Here you had nearly a decade of disgusting child abuse, which was knowingly covered up by the university. The Freeh Report on Pennsylvania State University | Judge Louis Freeh investigation on PSU

I know of only two elitist, closed societies capable of such a coverup.... academia and the catholic church.
Click to expand...

So you have a handful of scandals and all of a sudden it's a condemnation of academia as a whole? Oh yes, academia is a haven for pedophilia and rape :roll:
Sports have taken over to a near disgusting level. The NCAA is a scam, student athletes in some larger institutions don't have to do work, people come out with degrees which devalue the degrees of others. There should be more done on this front to bring it under control and not make it a focus at a University, as the primary function of University is education. But not all sports are bad, it's mostly just the degree that football and basketball have taken over and the amount of money the NCAA makes on it.

Peter Grimm said:
4. Other coverups - It doesn't begin and end with athletes. A study conducted in 2009 found that many colleges were covering up the number of rapes on campus in order to make their campus appear safer and more attractive to parents. This is, in fact, a pattern: Campus Rape Victims: A Struggle For Justice : NPR
Click to expand...

There are plenty of organizations and movements designed to promote awareness of this problem and the "cover-up" is not as widespread as you are pretending it is. As reporting becomes more common, we'll be able to better know the exact numbers and be able to not only go after anyone committing such a heinous crime; but also find ways to prevent them.

This, you've presented nothing thus far except for hysteria.

Peter Grimm said:
5. Grad Students - But let's get off the topic of coverups, and get back on the topic of slave labor. Big-name universities will lavish six-figure salaries on deconstructionist professors whose chief claim to fame is that other deconstructionist professors like them, while freshmen are being taught by low-budget graduate students, many of whom are from foreign countries and do not speak intelligible English.

That is why hundreds of students can be packed like sardines into a huge lecture hall for Economics 1, taught by some junior faculty member without enough clout to get out of teaching anything so elementary.

Meanwhile, some senior professor in the same department may hold a little boutique seminar for six in his pet sub-specialty, far off the beaten track from anything that undergraduates need to know.

When budget-crunch time comes, two classes of Economics 1 with 400 students each may be more likely to be combined into one class with 800 students than is the big-name professor's seminar to be touched.
Click to expand...

What the **** university did you go to? 6 figure incomes!? My adviser would have killed for a 6 figure income. Well maybe not literally, he was actually a very nice guy. You have no idea about classroom size, professor pay scales, or graduate students. This is nothing more than incorrect and ridiculous propaganda and stupidity. It has nothing to do with the reality of academia

Peter Grimm said:
6. University Admissions - They are just plain unfair, and do not reward achievement. For example, why do universities have legacy admissions? Who cares if your uncle attended Harvard, or if your mother attended Princeton? That should have nothing at all to do with whether you are admitted.

Then you have race and gender quotas. Rather than being admitted purely on academic merit, students are admitted due to the melanin count in their skin or their genitalia.

I haven't even mentioned the number of foreign students. Why should American taxpayers subsidize the education of a student from India or Korea?

Next, you have people with money. If you have money, you can get in anywhere, regardless of how dumb you are.
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Some of that is Federal law, not University planning. You bitch about subsidizing students and then you bitch about the cost of the University, so which is it? All in all, I would rather subsidize the Universities and lower tuition than anything else. Quotas for gender/race/whatever are rarely the choice of the University. As for foreign students, many of them stay in America and work in America; which is good. Not only is immigration necessary for innovation and to continually draw forward, but we're taking other country's smart people. I'm all for taking all the smart people in the world for America. In general I'd rather that University be very open, yet very competitive.

Peter Grimm said:
7. University Tuition - College tuition is just ridiculous. It is the most expensive thing most families will ever pay for aside from their home. It's the number one reason young people will go in to debt when they're starting out. In the past year alone, tuition for four-year public universities rose 8.3 percent for in-state students and 5.7 percent for out-of-state students. Why is that? Because they are run so inefficiently.

Ronald Ehrenberg, a labor economist at Cornell, cited “the shared system of governance between trustees, administrators, and faculty” at many universities, which “guarantees that ... institutions will be slow to react to cost pressures.”

http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffp0005s.pdf
Click to expand...

College tuition has been getting absurd for quite some time. It's not 100% the Universities fault, a lot of it comes through various regulations and how the government funds its state schools. I would certainly like to move University to more "public utility" (it's a bit of an overstatement; but essentially fund it more through government so that the individual can pay less). America has put behind it our old manufacturing past and we are now into high tech. For that, you need educated people. You also need educated people to help maintain and proliferate a Republic. University should be more accessible, and we should be doing more to make it cheaper and more accessible for the qualified student.

Peter Grimm said:
8. Research Grant Funding - Research grant funding is a must to keep a scientific projects advancing. It costs money for materials and equipment in addition to personnel to undertake a research project.

Now, private money is private money, and I'm not really concerned about that.

Who gets the public money and why? As a taxpayer, I feel this process should be transparent and that I should have some input, along with other taxpayers. Instead, this process is farmed out to various government agencies who clearly have political agendas.

Funding of science - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Click to expand...

You have absolutely no clue about research funding. There is not a lot of politics at all. There's some as you cannot escape politics with any government organization; but not really to the levels you seem to be suggesting. I think as a tax payer, military spending should be transparent as well. For research, it's not all public record depending on what's being funded and by who (a lot of it is military) but we could have more transparency. That's not to say that outsiders get a say in the decisions.

Peter Grimm said:
9. Wasteful Spending - This goofy grand funding process leads to a lot of studies being done that are simply a waste of money. But don't worry, Americans aren't the only ones. A group of Japanese scientists, led by a professor Yuki Sugiyama of Nagoya University, recently determined the reason commuters are occasionally caught in traffic jams is because there are too many cars on the road.

Groundbreaking stuff.
Click to expand...

But what if they had found something different? An algorithm that could have worked better for flow? The thing about research is that it's research....it's new. You don't actually know what comes out on the otherside. But you have to fund it all because sometimes the most brilliant of inventions is rooted in the most unbelievable of research results. Again, you just have no idea how this works.

Peter Grimm said:
10. Left-wing Politics - Universities are the nerve center for liberal thought and liberal politics. The vastly disproportionate presence of leftist professors on university campuses across the United States has been well documented. One of the more significant studies on this subject was conducted in 2003 by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC), which examined the ratio of registered Democrats to registered Republicans on the faculties of 32 elite colleges and universities nationwide.

In its examinations of more than 150 departments and upper-level administrations at the 32 elite colleges and universities, the CSPC found that the overall ratio of registered Democrats to registered Republicans was more than 10 to 1 (1397 Democrats, 134 Republicans).
Click to expand...

Oh noes! There are democrats in my University! Somebody get the torches.

This is just extremist non-sense. I don't even know the politics of the majority of the physics faculty, we did physics not politics. Out of this whole rambling mess, I've only found Sports and Tuition to have any valid claim to it. Christ, you should really research what you do first.
 
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