last blogs for Spring

I've just finished going through the last blogs for Spring. Following are some good entries:

Lighten up
Behind that smiley face
Spring '07 coming to an end
Last class of LLD 100WB
Global warming
Oil profits

Overall, I think the blogging experiment has been successful. The quality and effort have varied a lot, but I could see that some students did get into it. I got some feedback that some students didn't see the point, so it's my responsibility to make the point clear to them.

universal library

Whenever I read Annalee Newitz's column, I usually come away annoyed at the self-satisfied tone, but her last column entitled "The Myth of the Universal Digital Library" was excellent. I was most appreciative of this statement:

[C]omputer networks...cost money and require massive amounts of power. They take up real-world space. And they break.

This fact is somehow lost on most people, which is surprising since anyone with a computer knows the problems associated with data management, including data loss. I was instantly reminded of Being Digital, by MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte. I'm not going to link to it because I don't recommend reading it. His basic thesis is that in the Internet era (which had just begun at the time he wrote it), it is "bits not atoms" that are important--that is, information not matter. He probably had a nice staff of underpaid student sysadmins to keep all his lab's machines running, then when they became obsolete, shipped the atoms over to China where they were burned so that some could be reused, and others inhaled to cause cancer. So it's all well and good to say that the atoms don't matter when you have other people taking care of them. As Newitz rightly shows, digital archives are created and maintained by people, so they have all the problems and limitations that come from that.

improving presentations

I just came across this article, "5 Powerful Hacks to Immediately Improve Your Presentations." I would call them "tips"; "hacks" sounds like a desperate attempt to make them sound cooler and more technological than they actually are. But anyway, I think they are pretty sound tips. I especially like #4--don't apologize to soften criticism. Such apologies focus attention where it is most damaging. #5 is good too; though I'm not at all opposed to PowerPoint, it is often used terribly. (As grandpa used to say, "A fool with a tool is still a fool.")

But unfortunately the writer's credibility takes a dive in #2: "When you are nervous, everything get’s magnified." The common it's for its error is actually very understandable (since apostrophes are commonly used in possessives), but I can't understand why someone would use an apostrophe with a verb.

the purpose of a college degree

There is so much talk about the importance of a college education that it was interesting to see an article critical of college education, "Higher Education Conformity" by Barbara Ehrenreich. She uses as her starting point the case of Marilee Jones, who by all accounts was an outstanding administrator at MIT. But it came to light that she lied about holding three degrees, so MIT terminated her. Ehrenreich concludes that the real purpose of higher education is to teach conformity and saddle students with debt so they will be complacent workers.

I'm not really in agreement with Ehrenreich here, though she does bring up some good points. I did especially enjoy this statement: "Whatever else you learn in college, you learn to sit still for long periods while appearing to be awake. And whatever else you do in a white collar job, most of the time you'll be sitting and feigning attention."

There is, I believe, a fundamental contradiction at the heart of American higher education. One force is the dedication to education, which primarily means liberal education in the classical sense. That is, learning about the world in a way that is appropriate for free citizens, which in past eras was not the majority of the population. The other opposing force is training for technical and professional employment; these are more limited in their scope. Another way to look at the tension is between abstract and specific knowledge--liberal education is abstract, and professional education is specific.

In the US, we have basically one mechanism for delivering post-secondary education, and that is the 4-year college or university. (Community colleges are largely seen as a stepping-stone to a 4-year degree, not as an end in themselves.) The professional education is in greater demand, so it tends to swallow up the liberal education aspect. At the same time, professional students are forced to suffer through general (liberal) education classes.

This contradiction--or overloading of the university system--is, I believe, responsible for the related unsavory trends of managing universities like corporations and treating students as consumers. But back to Ehrenreich: when thinkers first began to suggest universal education, during the Industrial Revolution in Europe, the explicit goal was to prepare students to be cogs in a machine. This influence remains with us today and further complicates discussions of the purposes and problems of education.

Even so, I feel that making education available to everyone is the proper thing to do, but Ehrenreich is correct that not every job requires a 4-year degree.