Links

1. Barbara Oakley in Nautilus: How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math. "Sorry, education reformers, it’s still memorization and repetition we need."

2. William Kremer in BBC: The strange afterlife of Einstein's brain. A truly bizarre story.

3. Steven Shapin in WSJ: Why Scientists Shouldn’t Write History. A review of Steven Weinberg's book To Explain the World. The following excerpt gets to the main problem with an enterprise like Weinberg's:

There’s a story told about a distinguished cardiac surgeon who, about to retire, decided he’d like to take up the history of medicine. He sought out a historian friend and asked her if she had any tips for him. The historian said she’d be happy to help but first asked the surgeon a reciprocal favor: “As it happens, I’m about to retire too, and I’m thinking of taking up heart surgery. Do you have any tips for me?”

The story is probably apocryphal, but it displays a real asymmetry between two expert practices. The surgeon knows that his skills are specialized and that they’re difficult to acquire, but he doesn’t think that the historian’s skills are anything like that. He assumes that writing history is pretty straightforward and that being a 21st-century surgeon gives you a leg up in documenting and interpreting, for example, theories of fever in the 17th century. Yet not every kind of technical expertise stands in this relation with the telling of its history. Modern installation artists don’t think they can produce adequate scholarly studies of Dutch Golden Age paintings, and it’s hard to find offensive linemen parading their competence in the writing the history of rugby.

"Wittgenstein, Schoolteacher"

That's the title of this charming Paris Review essay about the six-year slice of the philosopher's life spent as a teacher in several Austrian villages.

... [His] later work is full of references to teaching and children. His Philosophical Investigations opens with a long discussion of how children learn language, in order to investigate what the essence of language is. And Wittgenstein is sometimes explicit about the connection; he once said that in considering the meaning of a word, it’s helpful to ask, “How would one set about teaching a child to use this word?” If nothing else, the style of his later work is absolutely teacherly; his post-return writings are so full of thought experiments phrased in the imperative that they can feel like exercises in a textbook or transcripts of a class discussion. “Consider for example the proceedings that we call ‘games’ … What is common to them all?—Don’t say: ‘There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’—but look and see whether there is anything common to all … ”

The style reflects Wittgenstein’s new aim, which was pedagogical. [...]

A Wonderful Educational Module

Vi Hart and Nicki Case have created a web page with very instructive browser-based and visually attractive simulations: Parable of the Polygons: A Playable Post on the Shape of Society. It's also a practical and playful introduction to the 1971 classic, Dynamic Models of Segregation, by Thomas Schelling; the model itself is an interesting variation of the Ising model.

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Hat tip to: Joshua Gans at Digitopoly.

Fallen Hero

This was really sad to read about an academic superstar [see this NYTimes profile] with millions of student fans across the globe:

MIT indefinitely removes online physics lectures and courses by Walter Lewin
"MIT policy on sexual harassment was found to be violated."

MIT is indefinitely removing retired physics faculty member Walter Lewin’s online lectures from MIT OpenCourseWare and online MITx courses from edX, the online learning platform co-founded by MIT, following a determination that Dr. Lewin engaged in online sexual harassment in violation of MIT policies.

MIT’s action comes in response to a complaint it received in October from a woman, who is an online MITx learner, claiming online sexual harassment by Lewin. She provided information about Lewin’s interactions with her, which began when she was a learner in one of his MITx courses, as well as information about interactions between Lewin and other women online learners.

MIT immediately began an investigation, and as a precaution instructed Lewin not to contact any MIT students or online learners, either current or former.

The investigation followed MIT protocol for complaints of sexual harassment. The head of the physics department, Professor Peter Fisher, ensured an objective and timely review, which included a review of detailed materials provided by the complainant and interviews of her and Lewin.

Based on its investigation, MIT has determined that Lewin’s behavior toward the complainant violated the Institute’s policy on sexual harassment.

Giving All Your Students A+ Can Get You Fired

That's what happened to a physics professor at the University of Ottawa, where he gave an A+ grade to each of the 23 students in his freshmen physics course.

Given the professor's extreme actions and the university's equally extreme response, one would have thought the two parties would have tried to find some middle ground. But no, they took the case to an arbitrator, whose decision upheld the university's extreme punishment.

That story is worth reading just for the kinds of arguments each side brought to the arbitrator.

War on Course Packs

ToI has an AFP story on the war course packs unleashed by the Cambridge University Press, the Oxford University Press, and Taylor & Francis:

A cramped, one-room shop tucked away in Delhi University seems an unlikely battleground for a publishing war that, academics warn, threatens quality of and access to education in the world's second most populous nation.

The busy shop, where photocopiers churn out papers for a steady stream of students for a small fee, is at the centre of a court battle brought by three venerable academic presses over the interpretation of India's copyright law.

The lawsuit, filed by Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Taylor & Francis against Delhi University and the shop threatens production of "course packs" -- de facto "textbooks" made of photocopied portions of various books.

Course packs are common throughout much of the developing world -- where most university students cannot afford to purchase new or even second-hand textbooks -- and are seen as key to the spread of education there.

Many leading academics, including Prof. Amartya Sen, have taken a stand against the lawsuit by the publishing companies. On his Google+ stream, Prof. Tim Gowers of Cambridge posted a petition against the lawsuit, and offered this comment:

... It doesn't sound like a straightforward case to me -- probably CUP and OUP are technically in the right but not necessarily right to enforce that right so vigorously. In any case, I'm happy to give it more publicity, since it raises interesting and important issues.

From the comments on Gowers' post, I got a link to Prof. Shamnad Basheer's op-ed in The Hindu that lays out the arguments against the publishers' moves. The op-ed ends with this call:

In the end, this lawsuit must be seen for what it is: a highly pernicious attempt to fill the coffers of publishers at the expense of students! It must be resisted with all the moral and legal force we have.

Links

1. Conversation with a Field Biologist in India -- Vijaysree Venkatraman interviews IISc alumna Swati Diwakar who is now a faculty member in the Department of Environmental Studies, Delhi University.

2. Harvard Business School Case Study: Gender Equity. An in-dept report on HBS's sustained, persistent and on-going experiment in which "Harvard Business School gave itself a gender makeover, changing its curriculum, rules and social rituals to foster female success."

3. Are Tenure Track Professors Better Teachers? -- an NBER working paper by David N. Figlio, Morton O. Schapiro, Kevin B. Soter. Their answer to the question: No!

Now Online: Volume 1 of Feynman Lectures in Physics

A gorgeous new website now hosts this classic! Enjoy.

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The other two volumes will also presumably go online -- but I haven't seen any info on such plans.

MOOC Fail?

In the middle of breathless hype about MOOCs' disruptive potential, Udacity and San Jose State University offered a set of online courses earlier this year. The results are in, and they don't look good: [San Jose State University] Suspends Online Classes After More Than Half the Students Fail. Will Oremus adds:

Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun ... told the AP that the failure rates in the five classes ranged from 56 to 76 percent. Nor was the course material exactly rocket science—the five classes were in elementary statistics, college algebra, entry-level math, introduction to programming, and introduction to psychology.

Thrun did note that 83 percent of students had completed the classes, a far higher rate than is typical for the free, open courses that have come to be known as MOOCs. Why so many failed is not fully clear, though the AP cites “officials” saying that a lot of the students who signed up had little college experience or were working full-time while taking the classes.

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Update: See also: Udacity Project on 'Pause' at Inside Higher Ed.

Bad at Math

Ben Orlin, who is now a math teacher, has a fabulous personal essay on What It Feels Like to Be Bad at Math. An excerpt:

As the day [of my presentation in the seminar class on topology] approached, I began to panic. I called my dad, a warm and gentle soul. It didn’t help. I called my sister, a math educator who always lifts my spirits. It didn’t help. Backed into a corner, I scheduled a meeting with the professor to throw myself at his mercy.

I was sweating in the elevator up to his office. The worst thing was that I admired him. Most world-class mathematicians view teaching undergraduates as a burdensome act of charity, like ladling soup for unbathed children. He was different: perceptive, hardworking, sincere. And here I was, knocking on his office door, striding in to tell him that I had come up short. An unbathed child asking for soup.

Teachers have such power. He could have crushed me if he wanted.

He didn’t, of course. [...] [Bold emphasis added]

Bonus: Fistfuls of Sand: (or, Why It Pays to Be a Stubborn Teacher) from Orlin's blog.

Links

1. Kazim Ali in the Oberlin Alumni Magazine (Spring 2012): Poetry is Dangerous:

   Because of my recycling, the bomb squad came, the state police came. Because of my recycling, buildings were evacuated, classes were canceled, campus was closed. No. Not because of my recycling. Because of my dark body. No. Not because of my dark body. Because of his fear.

   See also: On Being Brown in America by Amitava Kumar, written after the recent bomb blasts in Boston.

2. Faculty members of San Jose State University's philosophy department have penned an an open letter to Prof. Michael Sandel explaining why they "[refused] to be involved with [his] course

   on "Justice"
. His response to this letter is here.

3. Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution: Online Education Trumps the Cost Disease.

4. Two NPR stories on women in computer science: Blazing The Trail For Female Programmers and How One College Is Closing The Computer Science Gender Gap.

Wringing water out of a washcloth

In space!

Hat tip: Fuck Yeah Fluid Dynamics.

Links

1. Hari Pulakkat in The Economic Times: IITs undergoing silent revolution to create robust technical research ecosystem and governance.

2. Jordan Weissmann in The Atlantic: The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists—in 7 Charts.

3. Gillian Tett in The Financial Times: How bankers believed their own hype.

   The results [reported in a paper by Princeton economists] were striking. Before conducting the research, the economists had expected that securitisation experts would be good at judging when to sell properties and how to avoid housing market losses; after all, they were close to the front line of the mortgage industry and supposed to know all about real estate. But in reality, the number-crunching showed “little evidence of securitisation agents’ awareness of a housing bubble and impending crash in their own home transactions”, as the paper says. The supposed experts “neither managed to time the market nor exhibited cautiousness in their home transactions”. Furthermore, they actually suffered bigger losses on housing than the random “control” group of lawyers who were not “experts” on housing at all.

4. Edward Jay Epstein in NYRB: An 'A' from Nabokov

   [Nabokov] then described his requisites for reading the assigned books [in his course on European Literature of the Nineteenth Century]. He said we did not need to know anything about their historical context, and that we should under no circumstance identify with any of the characters in them, since novels are works of pure invention. The authors, he continued, had one and only one purpose: to enchant the reader. So all we needed to appreciate them, aside from a pocket dictionary and a good memory, was our own spines. He assured us that the authors he had selected -— Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, and Robert Louis Stevenson —- would produce tingling we could detect in our spines.

Links

1. Cathy Davidson at HASTAC: If We Profs Don't Reform Higher Ed, We'll Be Re-Formed (and we won't like it).

   If we profs can be replaced by a computer screen, we should be.

2. Joseph Grcar in The American Scientist: Comments and Corrigenda in Scientific Literature -- How self-correcting is the written record of scientific and engineering endeavors?

3. Eduardo Porter in NYTimes: When Public Outperforms Private in Services. A feature story on a recent book The Org: The Underlying Logic of the Office by Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan:

   "The more we reward those things that we can measure, and not reward the things we care about but don’t measure, the more we will distort behavior,” observed Burton Weisbrod, a professor of economics at Northwestern University ... As Professor Fisman and Mr. Sullivan put it: “If what gets measured is what gets managed, then what gets managed is what gets done.”

   Here's an NPR interview of the authors.

Fab Four from Our University Laundry List

...according to Krishna Kumar, Professor of Education at Delhi University and a former Director of NCERT.

He discusses the four major differences between Universities, ours and theirs (i.e. the West), in a lead opinion piece in The Hindu.

Providing samples is difficult when the rant is as wholesomely scathing as this one. First in his list is 'faculty selection'; here is how, according to him, we do it:

We start discouraging talent early, but a few bright youngsters manage to come up despite our best efforts. They are the ones who face the greatest resistance from our institutions at the time of selection for vacancies.[...] If there is someone with an unusual background or achievement, you can depend on the selection committee to find a technical ground to reject him or her. [...] Democratic procedures and correctness have become incompatible with respect for quality. [...] Selection committees debate over the finest of technicalities to justify the selection of the average, allowing anyone with sheen to get stuck and lost in the maze of criteria.

Read the entire article on how we compare in other issues like teaching, research, libraries.

Links

1. Vinod Joseph at Winnowed: How I Ran The Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon With My (Almost) Flat Feet And A Bad Back.

2. Pamposh Raina and Heather Timmons at India Ink have a gripping story on how the Aakash tablet computer project became derailed. Full of intrigue. Part I. The Tangled Tale of Aakash, the World’s Cheapest Laptop and Part II. The Aakash Project’s Bitter Finish.

3. Marc Parry in The Chronicle of Higher Education: 'Supersizing' the College Classroom: How One Instructor Teaches 2,670 Students. A nice profile of Prof. John Boyer of Virginia Tech.

James Lang on Metacognition and Student Learning

In the latest in his series of articles on what psychological research can tell us about student learning, he writes about metacognition with the help of Stephen Chew, a psychologist at Samford University. Along the way, we get links to videos on How to Get the Most out of Studying by Prof. Chew, and to more resources.

Sidebar
See also: Dear Student: I Don't Lie Awake At Night Thinking of Ways to Ruin Your Life by Art Carden.
* * *

An excerpt from Lang's piece:

I asked Chew to give readers a basic definition of metacognition, with some illustrations of the concept both from education and everyday life. "Metacognition," he explained in an e-mail, "is a person's awareness of his or her own level of knowledge and thought processes. In education, it has to do with students' awareness of their actual level of understanding of a topic. Weaker students typically have poor metacognition; they are grossly overconfident in their level of understanding. They think they have a good understanding when they really have a shallow, fragmented understanding that is composed of both accurate information and misconceptions."

That leads weak students, he said, to make poor study decisions: "Once students feel they have mastered material, they will stop studying, usually before they have the depth and breadth of understanding they need to do well. On exams, they will often believe their answers are absolutely correct, only to be shocked when they make a bad grade."

As for examples outside of education, Chew had no trouble pointing them out in a variety of areas, including reality television shows.

"Poor metacognition is a big part of incompetence," he explained. "People who are incompetent typically do not realize how incompetent they are. People who aren't funny at all think they are hilarious. People who are bad drivers think they are especially good. You don't want to fly on a plane with a pilot who has poor metacognition. A lot of reality shows like American Idol highlight people with poor metacognition for entertainment. Everyone knows people who are seldom in doubt but often wrong."

MIT's Experiment in Online Higher Ed

It's called MITx, and it'll be launched soon by MIT.

MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform that will:

• organize and present course material to enable students to learn at their own pace
• feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication
• allow for the individual assessment of any student’s work and allow students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate of completion awarded by MITx
• operate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational institutions.

It's the third bullet point that makes this really interesting for students. While MIT has stated clearly that it's not getting into the business of offering course towards an MIT degree [see the FAQs], a certificate of completion awarded by MITx will still be attractive to many, many students worldwide.

Interestingly, this is precisely the idea that I first heard from Prof. M.S. Ananth over three years ago in a meeting to discuss the second phase of NPTEL. According to his grand vision, students all over India could use NPTEL course material, register for exams conducted by IITs, receive grades and certificates from the IITs. However, the idea appears to have gone nowhere.

Video Links

1. A neat video on the Montessori method: Superwoman was already here! [via Christopher Shea]

2. Errol Morris: The Umbrella Man: "On the 48th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Errol Morris explores the story behind the one man seen standing under an open black umbrella at the site."

3. A TEDx talk by Jay Smooth: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Discussing Race [see also this shorter video How to tell people they sound racist].

4. Oh, what the heck. Here's Kolaveri. It has traveled as far as Salman Rushdie and Mark Liberman.

Links

1. A Silicon Valley School That Doesn't Compute:

   Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. But the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and schools don’t mix.

   This is the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, one of around 160 Waldorf schools in the country that subscribe to a teaching philosophy focused on physical activity and learning through creative, hands-on tasks. Those who endorse this approach say computers inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans.

2. James Fallows: Hacked! Fallows recounts the scary tale of the hacking of his wife's GMail account, and its aftermath. The second part has some solid advice about how to protect your online life.

   What about the rest of us, who are not security professionals? I asked that of every person I interviewed. Many of their recommendations boiled down to the hope that people would think more about their life online. “We’d like people to view their information life the way they view other parts of their life,” Andrew Kovacs of Google said. “It’s a good practice to review your financial situation every so often, and it’s a good practice to review your passwords and online-account information too.” Another official compared “cloud hygiene” to personal hygiene: you feel bad if you don’t brush your teeth or take a shower, and you should learn to feel bad if you’re taking risks online.

3. India Today profiles Prof. Dan Shechtman, winner of this year's Chemistry Nobel. [Copy-paste operation is broken on that site -- so, no excerpts!]

Let's round it all out with this cartoon from SMBC: