Geoffrey Boulton (University of Edinburgh) in, “What are Universities for?”

A university that moulds itself only to present demands is one that is not listening to its historians. Today’s preoccupations are inevitably myopic, often ephemeral, giving little thought for tomorrow. History is at its most illuminating when written with the full consciousness of what people wrongly expected to happen. Even in the domain of technology, future developments only a few years away have been shrouded from contemporary eyes. Many, possibly most, have arisen unexpectedly from research with other objectives, and assessments of technological potential have invariably missed the mark.

Thirty years ago, scientists who studied climate change, and I am one of them, tended to have long hair and very colourful socks. We were regarded as harmless but irrelevant. But the serendipitous investment in their work revealed processes that we now recognise as threatening the future of human society, and the successors to those scientists are playing a crucial role in assessing how we need to adapt.

A sensible way to start the year.

His introduction is  at 1:10 and his talk begins at 25:00. I would skip the Andreas Schleicher (aka Mr PISA) talk, although Roger has something to say about testing. His style of presentation may make you think he exaggerates.

A nice way to end the year.

 

 

A post by David Wiley and a response from Stephen Downes. I use the NC, and will continue to do so. Then again, whilst I want people to use my online material, I still think there is a legitimate debate to be had about how you finance teaching materials. The Ascent of Man cost a lot.

(The ever insightful) Gregory Clark, an economist at the University of California, Davis, finds that students with Norman surnames from Domesday are still over-represented at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Economist.

All to often people mortgage their honesty in order to purchase that which their colleagues mistake for rigour.

I think I get it. In fact, I wrote these words a few years back. The context was some of the absurdity of Bloom’s taxonomy and the empty rituals of learning outcomes. I haven’t changed my mind, but will keep saying the same thing until things change for the better. Original post here.

“In the village in which I live there is a pleasant doctor who is a little deaf. He is not shy about it and he wears a hearing aid. My young daughter has known him and his aid since she was a baby. When at the age of two she first met another man who was wearing a hearing aid, she simply said, ‘That man is a doctor.’ Of course she was mistaken. Yet if both men had worn not hearing aids but stethoscopes, we should have been delighted by her generalization. Even then she would have had little idea of what a doctor does, and less of what he is. But she would have been then, and to me she was even while she was mistaken, on the path to human knowledge which goes by way of the making and correcting of concepts.”

Science and Human Values, Jacob Bronowski

Geoff Norman opened my eyes to the (useful) parallels between cooking and medicine (‘Medical expertise and mashed potatoes’). This little quote from the Economist, is at a mature tangent:

Compare this to the fate of Lymeswold, which was created in the 1980s and touted as the first new English cheese in 200 years. It was initially highly successful, but when demand outstripped supply, the manufacturers cut corners and released stocks before they had matured, resulting in its demise less than a decade after its birth.

Sounds a little like some aspects of doctor training in the NHS.

“I think the dilemma Brexit poses for Scotland is pretty intolerable,” he says. “If Scotland has to clean out all its universities of European citizens there are really horrible things that are going to happen.”

The economist, Angus Deaton, in the FT

Roy Lilley:

“Banking regulators failed and now we have no money. Does the NMC make nursing safer? No. Does the GMC make doctors safer? No. Regulators are the dust-carts that follow the Lord Mayor’s Show of life. There is an utter fiction that regulation improves anything. The catastrophes of history are testimony to that.

Health regulation fails because humans, doctors and nurses fail. They may fail because we do not support them, educate them or motivate them, fund their purpose or demand too much. We regulate activities because they are complicated or vital. That is our mistake.”

Go read, The Audit Society: rituals of verification by Michael Power.

“David Cameron began 2016 in 10 Downing Street and ended it at DePauw University in a small Indiana town, speaking for a reported £120,000 an hour. The former British prime minister is now paid almost as much for a 60-minute speech as he used to earn in a year, as he tries to make sense of his own historic failure: Brexit.” FT