Author: ests11

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Study Abroad and Do This

This week’s Washington Post Sunday magazine was an Education edition, and had several good pieces. One was a reflection on making the most of your semester studying abroad. It offered life lessons like learn the city, set goals, travel, keep a diary, live with a host family, learn the language.  All these are excellent suggestions.  But the author omits one more:  Work!  Yes, go to class and do your homework.  But more than that, find a job.  You may not have a visa that permits you to find paid employment.   And you may not speak the language.  No problem:  you find an internship.  You speak English, and so will many companies – American (or British) or not.  You can apply to intern in any of the U.S. government offices – embassy, consulate, etc.  NGOs, law firms, and many others will be interested as well.

Some universities’ study-abroad offices will help you with this – The Catholic University of America (Washington, D.C.), for example, has programs in the Ireland and UK parliaments, and with aid organizations in El Salvador.

Yes, by all means, learn the language, travel as much as you can, go to class, meet people from all over, enjoy the nightlife – and get some professional experience.  It’s a global world – show your future employers you know and you are ready.

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Tech and Ed: the Dark Side

Naturally: law grads who sat for the bar exam last week and experienced a “software glitch” – couldn’t upload their essays – have filed a class action suit.

In case you missed it,

“when takers attempted to upload their answers after the first day of the exam on July 29, many encountered a glitch that held up their answers for many hours. A number of jurisdictions extended their submission deadlines, but some test takers were left frustrated and rattled.”

If you don’t know the bar exam, imagine the SAT – except this exam after you finish law school determines whether after four years of college and three years of law school, you will be allowed to be a lawyer.  So any “distress” during the exam is not just inconvenient, it could influence how well you do on the rest of the exam.

Tech firms have to get some things right.  This is one.

Read more: http://www.nationallawjournal.com/id=1202665995950/Angry-Bar-Candidates-Sue-Over-Exam-Software-Problems#ixzz39e7KtraL

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Raymond Burse and his personal $90,000 transfer to low paid employees

The news is full of kudos for the decision by Raymond Burse, President of Kentucky State University, to authorize the transfer of $90,000 from his salary to the salary of a couple of dozen of the lowest-paid employees at his university.  I add mine here.

There is much to applaud.  But the move is already larger than the small but real increase for a few custodians, groundskeepers, and clerical workers.  By reaching the audiences of the Washington Post, CBS News, Huffington Post, and international Sydney Morning Herald, and surely more to come, it elevates the debate about the minumium wage and the wealth gap in America.

Burse likely can live without the money – much would have gone to taxes, the remaining $260,000 per year will go pretty far in Frankfort, Kentucky, and this position builds on a career that included being a VP and general counsel at GE.   And Burse is not new to university administration: he was president of KSU for much of the 1980s.  More, he resigned from the Alabama A&M board of trustees in 2011, critical of the way he and others on the board were treated.

In a time when universities are struggling to balance their budgets, where tenured faculty are untouchable and students are paying ever-higher tuitions with ever-larger accumulations of debt, it is often lower-paid positions (staff, adjunct faculty, etc.) that have been cut.  The least interesting critics will complain that there’s still a 12-to-1 pay imbalance.  But for $90,000, President Burse makes a large contribution to his employees and to the larger discussion.

(More from Lillian Cunningham at the Washington Post)

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More from Snowden…

On what British intelligence can do:  sure, listen to your phone calls, read your emails, etc.  But how about reshape the web you think you see?

From an IEEE Spectrum report:

Some of the most intriguing spy tools show the UK spy agency’s desire to control and manipulate both online and cellphone communication, including emails and popular social media networks such as Facebook. In the latter case, a tool named “Clean Sweep” can “masquerade Facebook wall posts for individuals or entire countries.” Another tool called “Burlesque” can send spoofed (faked) SMS text messages. And “Scrapheap Challenge” can send fake emails that appear to originate from a target Blackberry device.

Other tools can inflate page views, or drive you to particular YouTube videos, or change the outcome of online polls, or….

Sure, that makes sense, you go to the movies (uh, watch movies on Netflix), you know how it works.  Don’t you?  Aside from the privacy and policy-making questions for today, makes me wonder how we will consider all this a few decades from now: which parts will we find most interesting, most appalling, most bizarre, most ho-hum-in-retrospect….

 

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Al-Jazeera: Is the developing world MOOC’d out?

Hannah Gais offers insights on the shortcomings of MOOCs from the developing world’s perspective.  Chief among them, (1) lack of accessibility and (2) their anti-democratic nature.

On the one hand, the article notes that a large percentage of many MOOCs are from students in the developing world.  But, it clarifies, that access to MOOCs are still limited to people with broadband for video – still a difficulty in much of the world.

Additionally, MOOCs are criticized for being a high-tech sage-on-a-stage.  MOOCs present rather than engage, talk to rather than with, and elevate the already-elite schools rather than partner with the rest of the world.

MOOCs, some argue, are focused on only expanding access, not fostering cross-cultural understanding or improving local educational institutions.

“In an era when higher education is making significant advances in becoming global and helping to build educational capacity within developing nations, MOOC’s play the center against the periphery,” noted Jason Lane and Kevin Kinser in a 2012 paper. “They strengthen the ivory towers by enabling a few elite institutions to broadcast their star courses to the masses from the comfort of their protected perches.”

Progress in these includes new projects in China and Rwanda and elsewhere, the article notes, concluding with the now familiar caveat that MOOCs are still in the early stages of development with uncertain paths ahead.   Worth the read here:

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/7/mooc-education-developingworldivyleave.html 

 

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The Great Courses, Part II

I was intrigued by The Great Courses ad in the Economist last week, between articles on the impact of technology on changing education.   And then The New York Times offers us an updated view of the company.

The Great Courses has now produced 500 courses, and has sold over 15 million copies, usually a dozen or more 30-minute audio or video lectures each.  Students are motivated by personal or professional interests, or simply “expanding their minds.”  “We have binge watchers like Netflix does,” The Great Courses said.

Of particular interest is that the full production studios deal with an increasing number of professors who don’t usually sage-on-the-stage lecture.

In addition to professors who have to be purged of classroom habits that don’t work on screen, an increasing challenge for the Great Courses staff is professors who don’t know how to lecture at all. The “flipped classroom” model that is taking hold in academia — in-class time is devoted to hands-on activity rather than one-way instruction — means that some professors have little experience with organizing and delivering a traditional 30-minute talk.

“Now, fewer and fewer people lecture,” Ms. McDonald said. “That’s making it harder for us.”

Putting a course into a lecture-only format has difficulties, but the experience is also more than a paycheck or recognition:

“It had a transformative effect on me as a teacher,” said Jennifer Paxton, who teaches at the Catholic University of America and has recorded two history courses for the company and is working on a third. “One of the things they told me is that I should not hold back from really demonstrating the enthusiasm that I felt for the material. I think that, in a sense, I had drunk the academic Kool-Aid: You present something in a serious, sober manner.”

For instance, her Great Courses coaches encouraged her to demonstrate graphically what happened in a medieval battle.

“It was really like being unchained,” she said. “That experience was very profound. I came out and demonstrated the act of chopping the head off a horse. I had never done anything like that in lectures before.”

The article didn’t say whether it was a simulation or a real horse.  We’ll have to buy the DVDs for that.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/05/arts/television/the-great-courses-require-great-production.html

 

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Dragonfly

If you’re sleeping well at night, you’re not paying attention.

Sure, your credit card, social security number, and mother’s maiden name are being stolen right now, probably, and your passwords are all QWERTY, 1234, and letmein (maybe your are extra clever: LetMe1n).  But the “scary” stuff, well, the good people in Washington are taking care of that, right?

In class, we ask how long you could survive if the ATM and credit card system failed.  Most people don’t have emergency cash in any real amount.  But the nightmare isn’t just the ATMs, the credit cards, even the stock markets.  It’s the whole electrical grid, or even just decent-sized parts of it.

Symantec says you should be paying attention:

Dragonfly bears the hallmarks of a state-sponsored operation, displaying a high degree of technical capability. The group is able to mount attacks through multiple vectors and compromise numerous third party websites in the process. Dragonfly has targeted multiple organizations in the energy sector over a long period of time. Its current main motive appears to be cyberespionage, with potential for sabotage a definite secondary capability. [emphasis added]

The Dragonfly group is technically adept and able to think strategically. Given the size of some of its targets, the group found a “soft underbelly” by compromising their suppliers, which are invariably smaller, less protected companies.

So enjoy the soccer (eh, futbol) game today – unless your cable box/wifi router lose power…