I don’t think there is a technological fix to the income gap in life expectancy.
There are plenty of non-technological changes, ranging from air pollution controls to lead remediation that would help with the gap.
I don’t think there is a technological fix to the income gap in life expectancy. There are plenty of non-technological changes, ranging from air pollution controls to lead remediation that would help with the gap.
I don’t think we understand the gap, and that’s a scientific issue right there. If people care at all about inequality, then they should be anxious to find out why poorer people live shorter and sicker lives. You can have all sorts of theories, of course, like air pollution and lead contamination… but short of having hard science, these are not actionable facts.
It may very well be that you do not need new devices or pills to bridge the gap. But that you can bridge the gap is, I think, undeniable.
Alansays:
There is already a technology there to see who sets fire to your garbage can. It’s called security cameras : )
Security cameras by the roadside, far from your house, are inconvenient to setup. I’d probably have to put up a pole of some kind, draw power… And I’d have to have several poles if I am to cover everything.
Plus the drone that wakes up and goes out to see who is there could actually act as a deterrent.
Andrew Dalkesays:
Quoting Greenspan: If learning maritime history is mostly reading books that are available in libraries or are no longer within copyright, why couldn’t a degree in the subject be earned by downloading a reading list and writing some papers?
I agree with you that “public universities are not in the business of educating at a reasonable cost”. However, while that answers the question, I disagree with the premise. Reading a list of old books and writing papers is not what it means to learn maritime history, any more than programming is learning to type on a keyboard.
To start, there are many ways to think about history. A practitioner in a field might be interested in the history of ideas in the field, the town’s amateur historian society might be interested in preserving artifacts or identifying people in old photographs, a social historian might be interested in the role of organizational structures, and so on. A popular theme these days is the history of maintainers rather than inventors (eg, http://themaintainers.org/ ).
Some of these topics are appropriate for a BA in history. Others are not. For example, a historical maritime project might be to collate a list of all of the ships and cargo that went through a town’s harbor in the 1800s. This is a lot of work and may take years to do. However, on its own it isn’t the type of history that will earn someone a B.A. because it doesn’t really consider any ‘patterns of cause and effect’, to quote Wikipedia, which is part of the academic discipline of history. How then does the student determine what sort of paper to write?
There are also problems with the proposed method of giving a reading list and ask someone to write some papers. Part of writing about a topic is to address what others have written about the same topic. Those books or papers won’t be on the list, and may not be out of copyright.
As an extreme example, to illustrate my point, suppose the reading list is of books from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the student decides to write about the influence of sea power on history. Alfred Thayer Mahan’s classic book on the topic won’t be on the list because it was written nearly 100 years later. But no one should get a B.A. in history for writing a paper on that topic without citing Alfred Thayer Mahan.
While a few students can do all of these on their own, most get some guidance from their professors and classmates, and find the interactive feedback cycle of face-to-face discussions, including overhearing other discussions, more helpful than self-guided research on a computer. (I can attest to that as someone trying to learn some of the academic disciple of history on my own.) Professors might also help identify methodological weaknesses in the student’s approach, like a bias towards Whiggish history.
My other objection is that Greenspun’s question really has little to do with computers. Essentially he’s asking why correspondence courses aren’t more popular, except he used ‘computer’ when previous generations would have used ‘VHS tapes’, ‘phonographs’, and ‘letters’.
While a few students can do all of these on their own, most get some guidance from their professors and classmates, and find the interactive feedback cycle of face-to-face discussions, including overhearing other discussions, more helpful than self-guided research on a computer.
This is slightly optimistic. I have been on campus, in one way or another, all my life, and interactions between professors and students are typically scarce, beyond the administrative stuff (“is this on the test?”, “why did I only get a B?”, “where do I hand in assignment 2?”). And let us set aside the one-sided lectures which could be prerecorded event. As an undergraduate, I learned to either figure things out on my own or to work with other students. Very rarely did an interaction with a professor provide anything like an important insight. I am not denying that these things happen, but I think that they certainly do not always happen.
Andrew Dalkesays:
I wrote “professors *and classmates*”. I could have written “classmates and professors” to be less optimistic, but I don’t think it would have been right to exclude professors altogether. (I should also have included “teaching assistants” and “other staff”; I worked at the math help center for a couple of years while an undergraduate, and not everyone there was a student or professor.)
I certainly did learn from being able to ask questions during class, and from other students asking questions. That’s part of the face-to-face interaction between teachers and students, yes? A prerecorded event of course assumes there will be no questions, but I don’t remember any courses where students weren’t permitted to ask questions during class.
My experience is not universal. When I taught in South Africa, my students told me that many of their teachers there regard questions as a sign that the student is dumb. The students learned to not ask questions.
I certainly did learn from being able to ask questions during class, and from other students asking questions. That’s part of the face-to-face interaction between teachers and students, yes?
It is great if you can follow a 3-hour quantum mechanics, computational complexity or real analytics lecture and be able to ask interesting and relevant questions in real time. I did not see much of that happening. And as a professor myself, I rarely get questions on the material itself. The bulk of the questions are of an administrative nature.
It is not entirely a matter of subjective experience today. We can actually watch pre-recorded lectures online for free. Watch them not for the content but for what is happening in the classroom. See how much interaction there is on the material itself.
Andrew Dalkesays:
I think you are exaggerating? My quantum mechanics courses never had lectures more than 90 minutes long, much less 3 hours. The same for my two semesters of real analysis. In both courses the students did ask questions in real time. I didn’t realize that was unusual.
At this point I don’t understand your objection. You think that students *never* interact with the teachers outside of administrative questions? I don’t deny that some courses are more participatory than others. But my own experience, and yes, that includes listening to recorded lectures, is that students do ask questions.
This is not true of all recorded lectures. It seems like most of the lectures which make the “best” lists, like the TVO Best Lecturer series, seem to have few to no questions.
On the other hand, some of my lectures were even structured around teacher-guided in-class discussion, like the computer ethics course I took, and a seminar course in creativity in the arts and sciences. I also took physics lab courses, where the lab instructor was there to help out and answer questions.
Here’s another example of possible cultural differences in your experience than mine, from Richard Feynman. Quoting from http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education: “One other thing I could never get [my Brazilian students] to do was to ask questions. Finally, a student explained it to me: “If I ask you a question during the lecture, afterwards everybody will be telling me, ‘What are you wasting our time for in the class? We’re trying to learn something. And you’re stopping him by asking a question’.—
At the very least it shows that that my experience in expecting students to ask questions is not unique. Perhaps your experience is also due to different cultural expectations than mine?
I should qualify my statements. I do not think, in the least, that professors are useless. My point, rather, is that most students, when they do learn through active social interactions, mostly learn through interactions with their peers.
So when you go to a concert… how much interaction do you have with the lead singer on stage? Probably close to none. Is the lead singer useless? Can it be replaced with a MP3? Clearly not.
I would have loved to attend a lecture by Feynman. Being who I am, I am sure I would have asked him at least one question. But I don’t think that my question would have made a significant difference in my learning or that of my peers. And I am quite sure that most of my peers would not have prepared a meaningful question for Feynman.
You think that students *never* interact with the teachers outside of administrative questions?
Take any random student in a class of say 40 students. How many questions will the random student ask during the 15 weeks or so that last the course? Please remove all administrative questions about what is on the test and so forth. Then take into account the fact that attendance rates are often below 50%. Take into account that the distribution of meaningful questions is almost certainly a power law.
I submit to you that the median number of material-related question per student is 0.
Note: I did not write that attending classes was useless, or that instructors were useless.
At the very least it shows that that my experience in expecting students to ask questions is not unique. Perhaps your experience is also due to different cultural expectations than mine?
A school nearby, I won’t name it, tried to introduce compulsory class attendance. To get it to work, they had to have students sign in and to penalize students who do not show up to 90% of their class. The scheme was ultimately unworkable, but I know that attendance never exceeded 80%, despite all the effort invested. (80% is very high in my experience.)
It is an anonymous anecdote that you can easily dismiss, but I think that if you look into the research, you will have a hard time showing that it is atypical.
If the overwhelming majority of students won’t show up to all their classes, what fraction of them actually ask relevant, on-topic, material-related questions?
Let turns this around. If the goal is to spur interactions between the professors and the students, then I submit to you that the ubiquitous lecture is clearly the wrong tool. I think you will find ample evidence to this effect but you don’t need a fancy study… common sense should tell you that a lecture is not designed to spur discussions. Even the layout of the rooms is bad for this purpose.
Andrew Dalkesays:
“If the goal is to spur interactions between the professors and the students, then I submit to you that the ubiquitous lecture is clearly the wrong tool.”
I fully agree. For that matter, if the goal were “to educate the public at a reasonable cost”, then why aren’t college lecturers required to have some education background or training in pedagogy, like what Software/Data Carpentry teaches?
This thread branch started with my statement “most get some guidance from their professors and classmates, and find the interactive feedback cycle of face-to-face discussions, including overhearing other discussions, more helpful than self-guided research on a computer.” I wasn’t trying to make the argument that ‘the ubiquitous lecture’ was the right tool, nor that direct personal interaction with professors was the primary source of that feedback cycle, but rather was one possible sources.
I meant by that text to include study groups, where different people might contribute pieces which lead to a more complete understanding. I meant to include less structured learning where, say, I learn a bit about the Russian folklore from my roommate taking a class in it. And yes, I meant to include comments by the T.A. or professor on my homework assignments, even if I didn’t talk to them. These in addition to the Q&A which might be part of a lecture.
The only way I could interpret your response was as an objection to the idea that professors could be part of that cycle. I remain confused about why you highlighted that quote.
I fully agree. For that matter, if the goal were “to educate the public at a reasonable costâ€, then why aren’t college lecturers required to have some education background or training in pedagogy, like what Software/Data Carpentry teaches?
Some schools have this requirement. It creates jobs for education professors.
The only way I could interpret your response was as an objection to the idea that professors could be part of that cycle. I remain confused about why you highlighted that quote.
If you had to design a way to make higher education affordable, what would be the role of the professors?
My friend Stephen Downes has answered this question somewhat by inventing MOOCs.
It comes down to affordability. The theater, as practiced in the last few centuries, will never be as affordable as Netflix. There is simply no way to square this circle.
The same is true with higher education.
That does not mean you have to fire all professors.
But if affordability is your goal, you don’t give everyone access to Richard Feynman live. It is really that simple.
I don’t think there is a technological fix to the income gap in life expectancy.
There are plenty of non-technological changes, ranging from air pollution controls to lead remediation that would help with the gap.
@Robert
I don’t think there is a technological fix to the income gap in life expectancy. There are plenty of non-technological changes, ranging from air pollution controls to lead remediation that would help with the gap.
I don’t think we understand the gap, and that’s a scientific issue right there. If people care at all about inequality, then they should be anxious to find out why poorer people live shorter and sicker lives. You can have all sorts of theories, of course, like air pollution and lead contamination… but short of having hard science, these are not actionable facts.
It may very well be that you do not need new devices or pills to bridge the gap. But that you can bridge the gap is, I think, undeniable.
There is already a technology there to see who sets fire to your garbage can. It’s called security cameras : )
Security cameras by the roadside, far from your house, are inconvenient to setup. I’d probably have to put up a pole of some kind, draw power… And I’d have to have several poles if I am to cover everything.
Plus the drone that wakes up and goes out to see who is there could actually act as a deterrent.
Quoting Greenspan: If learning maritime history is mostly reading books that are available in libraries or are no longer within copyright, why couldn’t a degree in the subject be earned by downloading a reading list and writing some papers?
I agree with you that “public universities are not in the business of educating at a reasonable cost”. However, while that answers the question, I disagree with the premise. Reading a list of old books and writing papers is not what it means to learn maritime history, any more than programming is learning to type on a keyboard.
To start, there are many ways to think about history. A practitioner in a field might be interested in the history of ideas in the field, the town’s amateur historian society might be interested in preserving artifacts or identifying people in old photographs, a social historian might be interested in the role of organizational structures, and so on. A popular theme these days is the history of maintainers rather than inventors (eg, http://themaintainers.org/ ).
Some of these topics are appropriate for a BA in history. Others are not. For example, a historical maritime project might be to collate a list of all of the ships and cargo that went through a town’s harbor in the 1800s. This is a lot of work and may take years to do. However, on its own it isn’t the type of history that will earn someone a B.A. because it doesn’t really consider any ‘patterns of cause and effect’, to quote Wikipedia, which is part of the academic discipline of history. How then does the student determine what sort of paper to write?
There are also problems with the proposed method of giving a reading list and ask someone to write some papers. Part of writing about a topic is to address what others have written about the same topic. Those books or papers won’t be on the list, and may not be out of copyright.
As an extreme example, to illustrate my point, suppose the reading list is of books from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the student decides to write about the influence of sea power on history. Alfred Thayer Mahan’s classic book on the topic won’t be on the list because it was written nearly 100 years later. But no one should get a B.A. in history for writing a paper on that topic without citing Alfred Thayer Mahan.
While a few students can do all of these on their own, most get some guidance from their professors and classmates, and find the interactive feedback cycle of face-to-face discussions, including overhearing other discussions, more helpful than self-guided research on a computer. (I can attest to that as someone trying to learn some of the academic disciple of history on my own.) Professors might also help identify methodological weaknesses in the student’s approach, like a bias towards Whiggish history.
My other objection is that Greenspun’s question really has little to do with computers. Essentially he’s asking why correspondence courses aren’t more popular, except he used ‘computer’ when previous generations would have used ‘VHS tapes’, ‘phonographs’, and ‘letters’.
BTW, it’s possible to get a M.A. in naval history through a distance course http://www.port.ac.uk/courses/history-politics-and-social-studies/ma-naval-history/ . I haven’t found one at the B.A. level, but I didn’t look that hard.
While a few students can do all of these on their own, most get some guidance from their professors and classmates, and find the interactive feedback cycle of face-to-face discussions, including overhearing other discussions, more helpful than self-guided research on a computer.
This is slightly optimistic. I have been on campus, in one way or another, all my life, and interactions between professors and students are typically scarce, beyond the administrative stuff (“is this on the test?”, “why did I only get a B?”, “where do I hand in assignment 2?”). And let us set aside the one-sided lectures which could be prerecorded event. As an undergraduate, I learned to either figure things out on my own or to work with other students. Very rarely did an interaction with a professor provide anything like an important insight. I am not denying that these things happen, but I think that they certainly do not always happen.
I wrote “professors *and classmates*”. I could have written “classmates and professors” to be less optimistic, but I don’t think it would have been right to exclude professors altogether. (I should also have included “teaching assistants” and “other staff”; I worked at the math help center for a couple of years while an undergraduate, and not everyone there was a student or professor.)
I certainly did learn from being able to ask questions during class, and from other students asking questions. That’s part of the face-to-face interaction between teachers and students, yes? A prerecorded event of course assumes there will be no questions, but I don’t remember any courses where students weren’t permitted to ask questions during class.
My experience is not universal. When I taught in South Africa, my students told me that many of their teachers there regard questions as a sign that the student is dumb. The students learned to not ask questions.
I certainly did learn from being able to ask questions during class, and from other students asking questions. That’s part of the face-to-face interaction between teachers and students, yes?
It is great if you can follow a 3-hour quantum mechanics, computational complexity or real analytics lecture and be able to ask interesting and relevant questions in real time. I did not see much of that happening. And as a professor myself, I rarely get questions on the material itself. The bulk of the questions are of an administrative nature.
It is not entirely a matter of subjective experience today. We can actually watch pre-recorded lectures online for free. Watch them not for the content but for what is happening in the classroom. See how much interaction there is on the material itself.
I think you are exaggerating? My quantum mechanics courses never had lectures more than 90 minutes long, much less 3 hours. The same for my two semesters of real analysis. In both courses the students did ask questions in real time. I didn’t realize that was unusual.
At this point I don’t understand your objection. You think that students *never* interact with the teachers outside of administrative questions? I don’t deny that some courses are more participatory than others. But my own experience, and yes, that includes listening to recorded lectures, is that students do ask questions.
This is not true of all recorded lectures. It seems like most of the lectures which make the “best” lists, like the TVO Best Lecturer series, seem to have few to no questions.
On the other hand, some of my lectures were even structured around teacher-guided in-class discussion, like the computer ethics course I took, and a seminar course in creativity in the arts and sciences. I also took physics lab courses, where the lab instructor was there to help out and answer questions.
Here’s another example of possible cultural differences in your experience than mine, from Richard Feynman. Quoting from http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education: “One other thing I could never get [my Brazilian students] to do was to ask questions. Finally, a student explained it to me: “If I ask you a question during the lecture, afterwards everybody will be telling me, ‘What are you wasting our time for in the class? We’re trying to learn something. And you’re stopping him by asking a question’.—
At the very least it shows that that my experience in expecting students to ask questions is not unique. Perhaps your experience is also due to different cultural expectations than mine?
I should qualify my statements. I do not think, in the least, that professors are useless. My point, rather, is that most students, when they do learn through active social interactions, mostly learn through interactions with their peers.
So when you go to a concert… how much interaction do you have with the lead singer on stage? Probably close to none. Is the lead singer useless? Can it be replaced with a MP3? Clearly not.
I would have loved to attend a lecture by Feynman. Being who I am, I am sure I would have asked him at least one question. But I don’t think that my question would have made a significant difference in my learning or that of my peers. And I am quite sure that most of my peers would not have prepared a meaningful question for Feynman.
You think that students *never* interact with the teachers outside of administrative questions?
Take any random student in a class of say 40 students. How many questions will the random student ask during the 15 weeks or so that last the course? Please remove all administrative questions about what is on the test and so forth. Then take into account the fact that attendance rates are often below 50%. Take into account that the distribution of meaningful questions is almost certainly a power law.
I submit to you that the median number of material-related question per student is 0.
Note: I did not write that attending classes was useless, or that instructors were useless.
At the very least it shows that that my experience in expecting students to ask questions is not unique. Perhaps your experience is also due to different cultural expectations than mine?
A school nearby, I won’t name it, tried to introduce compulsory class attendance. To get it to work, they had to have students sign in and to penalize students who do not show up to 90% of their class. The scheme was ultimately unworkable, but I know that attendance never exceeded 80%, despite all the effort invested. (80% is very high in my experience.)
It is an anonymous anecdote that you can easily dismiss, but I think that if you look into the research, you will have a hard time showing that it is atypical.
If the overwhelming majority of students won’t show up to all their classes, what fraction of them actually ask relevant, on-topic, material-related questions?
Let turns this around. If the goal is to spur interactions between the professors and the students, then I submit to you that the ubiquitous lecture is clearly the wrong tool. I think you will find ample evidence to this effect but you don’t need a fancy study… common sense should tell you that a lecture is not designed to spur discussions. Even the layout of the rooms is bad for this purpose.
“If the goal is to spur interactions between the professors and the students, then I submit to you that the ubiquitous lecture is clearly the wrong tool.”
I fully agree. For that matter, if the goal were “to educate the public at a reasonable cost”, then why aren’t college lecturers required to have some education background or training in pedagogy, like what Software/Data Carpentry teaches?
This thread branch started with my statement “most get some guidance from their professors and classmates, and find the interactive feedback cycle of face-to-face discussions, including overhearing other discussions, more helpful than self-guided research on a computer.” I wasn’t trying to make the argument that ‘the ubiquitous lecture’ was the right tool, nor that direct personal interaction with professors was the primary source of that feedback cycle, but rather was one possible sources.
I meant by that text to include study groups, where different people might contribute pieces which lead to a more complete understanding. I meant to include less structured learning where, say, I learn a bit about the Russian folklore from my roommate taking a class in it. And yes, I meant to include comments by the T.A. or professor on my homework assignments, even if I didn’t talk to them. These in addition to the Q&A which might be part of a lecture.
The only way I could interpret your response was as an objection to the idea that professors could be part of that cycle. I remain confused about why you highlighted that quote.
I fully agree. For that matter, if the goal were “to educate the public at a reasonable costâ€, then why aren’t college lecturers required to have some education background or training in pedagogy, like what Software/Data Carpentry teaches?
Some schools have this requirement. It creates jobs for education professors.
The only way I could interpret your response was as an objection to the idea that professors could be part of that cycle. I remain confused about why you highlighted that quote.
If you had to design a way to make higher education affordable, what would be the role of the professors?
My friend Stephen Downes has answered this question somewhat by inventing MOOCs.
It comes down to affordability. The theater, as practiced in the last few centuries, will never be as affordable as Netflix. There is simply no way to square this circle.
The same is true with higher education.
That does not mean you have to fire all professors.
But if affordability is your goal, you don’t give everyone access to Richard Feynman live. It is really that simple.