Archive for the ‘education’ Category

Evolution of the MBA

Side of Effects of the PhD

PhD students are the labor pool from which teaching assistants are drawn. It is these teaching assistants that do most of the grunt work required to take undergrads through their education — holding office hours, designing assignments, and most importantly, grading assignments and papers. The professor gives lectures and sets the curriculum, and the teaching assistants are left with everything else. And they do it for dirt cheap rates. The typical teaching assistant, handling one class with anywhere between 50 to 100 students, makes approximately $20,000 a year. There is absolutely zero chance of professors supporting a reduction in doctoral program enrollment, because it would directly translate into more work for them, and that too of the kind they despise — dealing with undergrads, and grading their papers.

The second side effect: it is these doctoral programs that attract the brightest foreign students from all over the world into the US, who in turn feed the demand for technical talent in the US (even if many "drop out" after a masters’ degree). In this sense, these programs are the best immigration filters the industry could wish for. In Silicon Valley, most immigrants have a prototypical story: came to the US as a graduate student, then started working here.

.:blog.vivekhaldar.com->

How Much Time Do Scientists Spend on Obtaining Grants?

Computer scientist Matt Welsh said that one reason he left Harvard for Google was that he was spending 40% of his time chasing grants. (Source)

The High Heel Bubble?

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I sincerely hope education is a bubble. If it is a bubble, it will eventually pop, and we will find our way to a global maxima. But I don’t see much reason for optimism. I expect that rather than popping, the education industry will level off at a high level and the world will be stuck in a Nash Equilibrium which is less optimal than where we are now. Our children will all waste 4 years of their life and $100k of our money and educators will become wealthier. It would be great if this could be prevented, but I see little mechanism by which that would occur. (Source)

My Ninja, Please! 4.22.11 : Open Source Hardware

Starting off as a Wiki, Marcin Jakubowski is transforming maker culture….for the better! My NINJA, Please! Oh, and happy Earth Day 2011!

Communicating on Perils

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Prof. Baruch Fischhoff offers some advice for senior management:

The earthquake and tsunami in Japan have forced an international spotlight on nuclear energy and its risks to society.

Conflicting reports and leadership responses about what exactly is going on with Japan’s nuclear reactors have cast a cloud of uncertainty over the situation.

Baruch Fischhoff, a world-renowned risk communication expert at Carnegie Mellon University, has worked on nuclear power issues intermittently since the 1970s.

"I have met many dedicated, talented, hard-working individuals in the nuclear energy industry," he said.

"However, as an entity, the industry does a terrible job of communicating with the general public — both in hearing its concerns and conveying credible responses."

To some extent, he says, it reflects a feeling that the industry can proceed without public consent — or the belief that the public is too irrational to sustain a dialogue.

.:cmu.edu->

Education 2.0 Fail

Is the American education system broken? What happened to the bright minds that once brought upon new technology and innovation? We’re living in a education bubble of debt, that forces students to work in areas that they may not be suited for in order to repay their loans. The disaggregation of college:

One of the best parts of a Personal Learning Network is occasionally you find out about people doing things you had only thought about in theory. I watched a great video from David Wiley and he mentioned something called Western Governors University. This school offers no classes. Instead they offer degrees in an interesting way. They don’t care where you got the information from, they will just assess what you know in a very rigorous way. If you pass, you get the degree. Basically they are just the credentialing function of a university. (Source)

The Forrest Gump of the internet explains the need for the interaction between computer science and journalism:

Last year at NYU, a small group of programmers who called themselves Diaspora sparked the imaginations of thousands of people and journalists. Here was a band of smart young people who would build something just for the joy of it. Programming in the cause of freedom. A hugely optimistic act. It’s the motivation for what I’m talking about. But, what was missing was the contribution of a university — of experience informing, guiding, and teaching the young people how to do what they set out to do. People who had been down roads much like the one they’re traveling, and can guide them past the potholes, pirates and vigilantes, carpetbaggers and cliffs. There’s a Mr Potter or Mr Burns lurking around every corner, it seems.

In other arts, there’s a healthy respect for the knowledge accumulated by previous generations. These days, however, in programming — that respect seems to be fading. I think, if we can learn to communicate across generations, we can combine our strengths, your youth, vigor, optimism for the future — with my generation’s lessons from the trenches. And if we can remember the feeling that many of us had when we were young, that the sky is the limit, that we can be great if we just will ourselves to be great. We can have it all.

Implementing a DML initiative for the entire school is necessary:

And, here’s the thing about working with kids in schools: not all of them are going to be that excited about new approaches to learning. Even if they are excited about what you are trying to do in their classes, a bunch of kids are going to still tell you that what you are doing is "boring" and generally go out of their way to signal that they aren’t interested. Why will they do this? Because they are kids.

My Ninja, Please! 4.13.11 : Coffee Shrooms

A couple of students learn about social entrepreneurship and mushroom farming on coffee grounds and share at TEDxPresidio:

The Way We’ll Live Next

.:asb.tv->