Nice comment on a good article by Rich DeMillo (good==I agree with it). “It has much more to do with a lack of understanding of the idea of universal education. All those pegs in our system have to fit through the circular holes through which we force them…whether they be round, square, hexagonal, icosahedral, or whatever. We accomplish this by making the holes larger and larger. “ [direct link to this post]

 

“One of the things that is extremely challenging to my teaching now is the possibility that there are some things you can learn only from experience and can’t be taught. The pathos of teaching is that some things can’t be taught – and one of them might be political judgement. I don’t think that’s a despairing thought, but it does induce humility in a teacher and make the job much more interesting.”

And what about clinical judgement?  Michael Ignatieff quoted in the THE. There is a pithy comment on the article by Steven McGannety : “He brought a syllabus to a gun fight and lost. Canada lost more.” 

An article in PNAS highlighting poor standards of reproducibility of many published finding, links to a John Hopkins ‘MOOC’ on ‘Data Science’. The course includes modules on R programming, experimental design and analysis. It all looks nicely laid out, although initially I thought you had to pay to run through the course — this is however not the case. You just have to pay if you want certification. This is via the Coursera platform. I know there are other courses covering some of the same topics, and it strikes me that teaching statistics without small group interaction is a hard task. But surely we must see this approach spread to use at the undergraduate level in subjects like medicine, where the best students will be able to demonstrate that they can acquire skills without the limitations of course structures designed for those who are less capable. But more importantly, it really is not hard to imagine that this approach will be superior to our current attempts to cover topics in which medical schools appear unable to invest in teaching staff or high level materials.  I am quite optimistic about the latter but less so about such courses eradicating  dodgy science.

It’s an open question whether it is the health care industry or the educational one which is the most corrupt in this country. In comparison the legal profession, the Military Industrial Complex and telecom/cable duopolies are rank amateurs at the game of rent-extraction.

A comment by Fazal Majid on Phil Greenspun’s blog.[Link to this post]

For the next time you use JSTOR and think about the openness of science, John Naughton’s review of the ‘Internet’s own boy’ (on BBCiPlayerfor the next few weeks, and soon in iTunes). For an earlier piece by the scholar Tim Wu see here.

MOOCs and the distance-learning mirage, by the ever insightful thinker Nicholas Carr.

The legend and legacy of Bob Marley. Students: remember not all melanomas are UVR related.

From Davos Man to Davos Bot. Automate the CEO or Vice Chancellor. In many walks of life the higher you climb, the less need there is for deep thinking, and hence the easier it should be to replace humans with robots.

And since the picture tells what I have been doing. A song from somebody whose album I first bought ‘blind’ on walking into a record shop on a skiing trip to Banff many years ago, and being unable to leave without parting with my money. Yes, there are thousands of singer songwriters, but this one has something special. There was a really cheap EP with an even better version of this tune on iTunes.

Frédéric Filloux writes in the Monday Note that  ‘For news organizations, the key challenge is to lift value-added editorial above Internet noise.’ I think this is the problem for any modern university too: it is about lifting learning above ubiquitous content. [link to this post]

Well his father was a dermatologist, and he held the first patent on an antihistamine, but I knew neither of these facts before reading this obituary of the great Carl Djerassi.

Dr. Djerassi (pronounced jer-AH-see) arrived in America as World War II engulfed Europe, a 16-year-old Austrian Jewish refugee who, with his mother, lost their last $20 to a swindling New York cabdriver. He wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, asking for assistance, and obtained a college scholarship. It was a little help that made a big difference.

 

I think it was Jacob Bronowski who said that most of twentieth century physics was made by the sons of cobblers, but just note the phrase: he wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, asking for assistance, and obtained a college scholarship. If you haven’t read any of his fiction, you are missing something. (and I assume it wasn’t an Uber cab).

Who Should Have Access to Your DNA? Eric Topol .

Prince Charles ‘silenced’ professor over row on complementary medicine. Edzard Ernst No surprises here.

Draw-me! Audrey Watters on the parallels between MOOCS and correspondence courses on ‘How to draw’ and how to code (only this time, from the 1970s, for the latter)

Speaking out against the GMC. A turning point for medical regulation Authors: Hilarie Williams, Christoph Lees . I am not so optimistic. There are far too few predators for regulators.

Culture lost. More on the mess of postgraduate medical training in the UK.

Arizona State University is indistinguishable from Amazon. Sort of Club 18–30, seems to me.

But lecture capture has always riled me. The thought of filming a 3 hour lecture then slapping it onto a virtual learning system and expecting students to watch this in their own time seems more like a punishment than a good idea.

  Bex Ferriday via Stephen Downes. [link to this post]

The continuing mess of funding for students to receive higher education. The only certainty is that nobody will sort this out for the long term and that all suggestions will be for short term political gain.

More on the battle between about and capital (from Yochai Bencher). Just watch if you think the NHS and Higher Ed is immune.

Philip Greenspun and academic deceit: “Economists, who get paid to teach at colleges, experiment with ways to get more young people from poorer-than-average families to become customers of colleges.”

More on MOOCs and unbundling. We are still at the beginning.