From Laptop U - Has the future of college moved online? [New Yorker],
When colleges appear in movies, they are verdant, tree-draped quadrangles set amid Georgian or Gothic (or Georgian-Gothic) buildings. When brochures from these schools arrive in the mail, they often look the same. Chances are, you’ll find a Byronic young man reading “Cartesian Meditations” on a bench beneath an elm tree, or perhaps his romantic cousin, the New England boy of fall, a tousle-haired chap with a knapsack slung back on one shoulder. He is walking with a lovely, earnest young woman who apparently likes scarves, and probably Shelley. They are smiling. Everyone is smiling. The professors, who are wearing friendly, Rick Moranis-style glasses, smile, though they’re hard at work at a large table with an eager student, sharing a splayed book and gesturing as if weighing two big, wholesome orbs of fruit. Universities are special places, we believe: gardens where chosen people escape their normal lives to cultivate the Life of the Mind.
But that is not the kind of higher education most Americans know.
John von Neumann, Collected Works, VI, p.489 (
By way of themathkid.
David W. Wills, a professor of religious history at Amherst, on MOOCs.
Wills started out being open to MOOCs, he said. But the more he heard the more his concerns grew, and none of edX’s representatives seemed able to address them.
[…]
The language he heard from edX, he said, was the rhetoric of tech innovation—seemingly to the exclusion of anything else—and he worried about academia falling under hierarchical thrall to a few star professors.
From Laptop U - Has the future of college moved online? [New Yorker]
By way of ucresearch:
Jane Austen, Game Theorist
Although whiffs of game theory have been discerned in writings as old as Plato, its conventional history begins with the 1944 publication of von Neumann’s seminal “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.” The techniques gained prominence as a means of anticipating attacks and counterattacks among superpowers during the Cold War, and they played a role in determining the quantity and positioning of U.S. nuclear warheads.
“Austen’s novels are game theory textbooks. She’s trying to get readers to use their higher thinking skills and to think strategically.”
In many cases, by making tough choices and predicting how others will respond, Austen’s young (often financially deprived) heroines triumph over seemingly stronger forces, including well-to-do men and older women of higher status, he argues. In so doing, they find happiness and — just as importantly in an era with limited employment and inheritance possibilities for women — financial security.
“They build a theory of strategic thinking, not to better chase a Soviet submarine, but to survive.”
From “Animal Penises Are Super Weird, You Guy” [VICE]
Why hasn’t VICE written a biology textbook yet?
In other news, I’m apparently a seahorse.
With deference to the genius of David Bowie, here’s Space Oddity, recorded on Station. A last glimpse of the World.
Huge thanks in the making of the video to the talented trio of Emm Gryner, Joe Corcoran and Andrew Tidby, plus Evan Hadfield and all at the CSA.
Col. Chris Hadfield is living the dream, his dream.
Letter from California: Jumpers : The New Yorker (via brooklynmutt)
Another quote from a different person,
“I was like, ‘Fuck this, nobody cares,’ ” he told me. “So I jumped.” But after he crossed the chord, he recalls, “My first thought was What the hell did I just do? I don’t want to die.”
