At the risk of raising the ire of many researchers, I should note that I am not basing my assessment on the rapid growth in educational neuroscience. You know, the kind of study where a subject is slid into an fMRI machine and asked to solve math puzzles. Those studies are valuable, but at the present stage, at best they provide at most tentative clues about how people learn, and little specific in terms of how to help people learn. (A good analogy would be trying to diagnose an engine fault in a car by moving a thermometer over the hood.) One day, educational neuroscience may provide a solid basis for education the way, say, the modern theory of genetics advanced medical practice. But not yet.

Keith Devlin, talking sense — again. I want to believe the the rest of the article but, worry it may not be so. But it contains some gems:

Classroom studies invariably end up as studies of the teacher as much as of the students, and often measure the effect of the students’ home environment rather than what goes on in the classroom.

This just adds to the problem that Geoff Norman (DOI 10.1007/s10459-016-9705-6) and others have talked about in course evaluations, namely that many studies — even accepting of the limitations outlines above — are riddled with pseudoreplication.

And:

What is missing is any insight into what is actually going on in the student’s mind—something that can be very different from what the evidence shows, as was dramatically illustrated for mathematics learning several decades ago

But, like many outwith medicine, I think he puts too much store by the robustness of the RCT approach — even with digital tools to allow large scale measurement. RCT: ‘randomised, confounded and trivial’, as has been said before (Norman).

“Trouble is, the intrusions cannot be ignored or wished away. Nor can the coercion. Take the case of Aaron Abrams. He’s a math professor at Washington and Lee University in Virginia. He is covered by Anthem Insurance, which administers a well­ness program. To comply with the program, he must accrue 3,250 “HealthPoints.” He gets one point for each “daily log-in” and 1,000 points each for an annual doctor’s visit and an on-campus health screening. He also gets points for filling out a “Health Survey” in which he assigns himself monthly goals, getting more points if he achieves them. If he chooses not to participate in the program, Abrams must pay an extra $50 per month toward his premium.

Abrams was hired to teach math. And now, like millions of other Americans, part of his job is to follow a host of health dictates and to share that data not only with his employer but also with the third-party company that administers the program. He resents it, and he foresees the day when the college will be able to extend its surveillance.”

Cathy O’Neil, ‘Weapons of Math Destruction’, excerpt on Backchannel.

This sort of thing is going to be all over education and our private lives. Big data masquerading as big ideas, or just ‘big money’. Its just because ‘we care’.

Nice essay and phrase from Audrey Watters:

Credential creep doesn’t solve the problem of credentialing at all, of course. But it’s great business for all these new credential providers and their investors (or so they hope).

It is (in part) what is driving an educational bubble

(aside)

I remember this as a medical student game. A ‘scab of dermatologists’; a ganglia of neurologists; a ‘bone of orthopods’; a ‘pulp of dentists’. Sam Shuster’s contribution (from memory…) was: a ‘dementia of statisticians’.

In the Economist, Donald Norbert comes up with one for Economists: a ‘disutility of economists’. (Economist, 7/1/2017)

Laurie Taylor in fine form

“Our university is to appoint a “nostalgia liberation officer” to protect the small number of academics who are unable to come to terms with the exciting new nature of higher education.

Concerns that even these steps may not prove sufficient have raised the prospect of the university creating “a safe space” where nostalgia dons would be free to talk endlessly about the time when universities were “a community of thinkers engaging in intellectual pursuits not for any external purpose but as an end in itself”.”

I fully understand the pharmaceutical industry’s frustration with NICE – it stops them making so much money at taxpayers expense. What I don’t understand is why we are paying them any attention.

Comment from FinPhil in the FT. Most recent egregious example of pharma here, although this is not the NICE example. 2016 was the year when pharma began to boast about  their new ‘we do not need to invent drugs’ financial model. Then they got embarrassed, as commentators like Martin Wolf of the FT pointed out that many people now  viewed pharma like they viewed bankers. Financial engineering is much easier than biological engineering.

“Four decades ago The City University of New York charged no tuition fees, and all its students were taught by full-time staff. Today, fees cover half of all teaching costs and half of professors are part-timers.”

Danny Dorling in the THE, reviewing Austerity Blues: Fighting for the Soul of Public Higher Education By Michael Fabricant and Stephen Brier

“Throughout her career, Gonzalez has done “a bit of everything” at LIGO, she says. For a while, she took on the crucial task of diagnosing the performance of the interferometers to make sure that they achieved unparalleled sensitivity — which is now enough to detect length changes in the 4-kilometre-long arms of the interferometers to within one part in 1021, roughly equivalent to the width of DNA compared with the orbit of Saturn. “

It ain’t biology, then. Nature

“Like bank robbers of old, investors turn to students “because that is where the money is”.”

Danny Dorling in the THE, reviewing Austerity Blues: Fighting for the Soul of Public Higher Education By Michael Fabricant and Stephen Brier

“…professors fixated on crawling alone the frontiers of knowledge with a magnifying glass.”

Quoted in the Economist 10/12/2011