If one shining example of everything going right can redeem an awful couple of weeks, this is it. You have to read the whole story and watch the video. Just go do it and come back here (or not; what I have to say about it will be at best a few flowers strewn before [...]
Archive for the ‘Teaching’ Category
A colleague shared the following priceless reflections, a letter to Chris Edley from July 28: Dear Dean Edley: I’ve been following with interest what you’re saying in the press about UC online education. I teach Statistics N21, the first online course at Berkeley to be approved by COCI [the UCB faculty Committee on Courses of Instruction]. It [...]
My colleague Chris Edley is out in front of the push to get Berkeley in the on-line education business . Kevin Carey and Matt Yglesias discuss whether the new product should start upscale, like the Tesla sports car as a pilot product , or downmarket, like a knockoff LV bag that holds just as much [...]
California Teachers Association president David A. Sanchez makes the strongest case he can for Tom Torlakson in the race for Superintendent of Public Instruction. Draw your own conclusions.
For my sins, I guess, I’m a member of the Berkeley faculty Committee on Courses of Instruction. Things are looking up for this gig, though, because there’s growing interest on campus and at the university level in online instruction, and the committee is starting to seriously deliberate this very interesting issue. Not surprisingly, I guess, [...]
Kevin Carey says that college educators are failing to teach students much of anything and concealing the information that would prove it. He’s basically right. But he might be surprised to how supportive college professors might be of efforts to do somethign about it.
Pay cuts are better than layoffs.
In the situation faced by UC faculty, calling them “furloughs” is better than calling them pay cuts.
So I don’t see any moral imperative to act out the idea of a furlough by teaching less.
The Royal Society sacks its education adviser for talking sense about creationism in schools
Not the kind that treats all arguments, and therefore all conclusions, as equally plausible.



