I actually found this quite witty. But it is more than that. It playfully raises some of those issues about education, assessment, and certification. I would love to say medical education has got this right, but I do not believe that. It is easy to list the problems, but hard to solve them. Numbers and formal systems will always be used by those who understand them least, to exile judgement.

1. Foundational knowledge does exist, it is just not as common as many believe. Teachers, accreditors and other institutions always want to exaggerate the importance of foundational learning because they rent seek on it: the more there is, the more money they make. They will create a world which suits them. It is not just the world some of use live in.
2. Assessment may drive learning, but assessment frequently wrecks the learning that is education. I post this on the day that the ‘O’ level results come out: education as a proxy war for  politicians seeking reelection.
3. Demands for better ‘metrics’ will often come at the cost of what many consider most important. Defending exam procedures, may lead to a quasi- legalistic obsession with reliability at the expense of education. This is not a new problem, and is far broader than psychometrics and indeed permeates much science (see Cornfield, J., & Tukey, J. W. (1956). Average values of mean squares in factorials. The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 27, 907–949). The danger is people think that metrics are ‘theory free’ and forget that in education (and many other domains) metrics causally alter subject behaviour.
4. Education is about the future. Any designer or educator has to live in the future. And since most of have enough difficulty understanding the present, we can only see it using metaphor. Blake said it well: every honest man is a prophet. Universities increasingly like to spell that sound with different letters.

For British academics, and probably students too, the heyday of university life came straight after the Second World War. British universities, tiny and cosy by today’s standards, enjoyed enormous autonomy over degree content, expenditure and admissions. Wealthy Oxford and Cambridge enjoyed the highest prestige, but there was no fixed hierarchy, and the standards for a first-class degree seem genuinely to have been quite uniform across the sector.

None of this could survive rapid expansion.

Alison Wolf as ever talking sense. Terrific article.

”On the business side , its advertising inventory, whether it is sold directly or via third parties, is made of different kinds of ads, ranging from high-value brands such as Rolex or Lexus to low-paying advertisers, like the toe fungus ads used to fill unsold spaces.”

You can’t sell news for what it costs to make – The Walkley Magazine – Medium

Awhile back the University of Edinburgh changed some of their guidance around passwords. In my 1Password app, I counted over 250 passwords. Some of these are old and no longer used, but the large number reflects the nature of academic life, in which information and knowledge flow is more outside the institution than within it. My bugbear is of course the NHS and the practice of making people remember hard passwords and change these passwords every 3-4 weeks. This is just bad practice, and leads to people writing them down close to where they use them, or choosing more guessable passwords. Another example of bad practice is below.

Slashdot asks if password masking — replacing password characters with asterisks as you type them — is on the way out. I don’t know if that’s true, but I would be happy to see it go. Shoulder surfing, the threat it defends against, is largely nonexistent — especially with personal devices. And it is becoming harder to type in passwords on small screens and annoying interfaces. The IoT will only exacerbate this problem, and when passwords are harder to type in, users choose weaker ones.

Original link Bruce Schneier.

“What we see unfolding right before our eyes is nothing less than Moore’s Law applied to the distribution of misinformation: an exponential growth of available technology coupled with a rapid collapse of costs.”

Frederic Filloux.

“In a profession that is all about untapping individual potential, increasingly impersonal corporatism hangs like a dark cloud”

Interview with Stephen Milner

”There are the cohorts of bureaucrats in every university making a living out of keeping score of publications and citations, manipulating the impact of papers and producing empty marketing verbiage extolling the supposed research excellence of their institutions.”

• Yiannis Gabriel. We must rescue social science research from obscurity.

“Fortunately, Bowie’s schooling didn’t interfere with his education.”

• My friend David Bowie, by Hanif Kureishi

“Management is the antidote to innovation.”

FT. Comment on an article about GSK.

Veblen’s conspicuous consumption rides on:

Rather than filling garages with flashy cars, the data show, today’s rich devote their budgets to less visible but more valuable ends. Chief among them is education for their children: the top 10% now allocate almost four times as much of their spending to school and university as they did in 1996, whereas for other groups the figure has hardly budged.

Book review in the Economist: The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class. By Elizabeth Currid-Halkett