https://shindig.com/login/event/100yearedtechlive

Link between the commentaries of the early middle ages and modern lectures

first referent "he" is George Orwell

Example of a time in which patriotism and nationalism may have been beneficial.

from World Brain, double check with source

Heather Stark in I've Been To Over 20 Homeschool Conferences. The Things I've Witnessed At Them Shocked Me.

https://www.opencampusmedia.org/2023/09/12/the-inspiration-for-californias-grand-experiment-at-community-colleges-wisconsin/

Via Nate Maertens

Gould, Jessica. “Teachers College, Columbia U. Dissolves Program behind Literacy Curriculum Used in NYC Public Schools.” Gothamist, September 8, 2023. https://gothamist.com/news/columbia-university-dissolves-program-behind-literacy-curriculum-used-in-nyc-public-schools.

The Teachers College of Columbia University has shut down the Lucy Calkins Units of Study literacy program.

Missing from the story is more emphasis on not only the social costs, which they touch on, but the tremendous financial (sunk) cost to the system by not only adopting it but enriching Calkins and the institution (in a position of trust) which benefitted from having sold it.

link to: https://hypothes.is/a/eicbpgSKEe6vc0fPdIm05w

https://www.theatlantic.com/author/james-l-mursell/

See: Mursell, James L. “The Defeat of the Schools.” The Atlantic, March 1939. https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/95dec/chilearn/murde.htm.

———. “The Reform of the Schools.” The Atlantic, December 1, 1939. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1939/12/the-reform-of-the-schools/654746/.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratio_Studiorum

Why do governments and some so-called education leaders ask about how to best help (academically) children from "poor circumstances" in such a way that improving their circumstances is never part of the equation despite it being the immediate root of their problem?

Ferguson, Niall. “I’m Helping to Start a New College Because Higher Ed Is Broken.” Bloomberg.Com, November 8, 2021, sec. Opinion. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-11-08/niall-ferguson-america-s-woke-universities-need-to-be-replaced.

Seems like a lot of cherry picking here... also don't see much evidence of progress in a year and change.

Only four jobs listed on their website today: https://jobs.lever.co/uaustin. Note all are for administration and none for teaching. Most have a heavy fundraising component.

In our minds, there can be no more urgent task for a society than to ensure the health of its system of higher education.

Really?! A conservative saying we should worry about the health of education as his fellows choke off funding to all levels of education in general?

"Why are you turning blue and gasping for breath?" the Republican asks as he stands on the throat of education.

Mitchell Langbert’s analysis of tenure-track, Ph.D.-holding professors from 51 of the 66 top-ranked liberal arts colleges in 2017 found that those with known political affiliations were overwhelmingly Democratic. Nearly two-fifths of the colleges in Langbert’s sample were Republican-free.

No acknowledgement here that 2017 was a Republican Presidential administration, which means that a reasonable number of academics left academia to staff the administration. It's a common occurrence that there are reasonable shifts back and forth between government and academia as administrations change. One should look at comparisons from a Democratic presidential administration for a better idea versus Ferguson's cherry picking here.

Also unmentioned is the general disbelief in logic and the underpinning of science on the right in general, a fact which may make conservatives less likely to figure in these sorts of career paths. Are conservatives more likely to take career paths in capitalism-based endeavors than go into academia in the first place given the decrease in regulatory climate in the last half century?

Additionally by only looking at liberal arts institutions, he's heavily biasing the sample from the start. Why not also include the wide variety of non-liberal arts institutions? Agriculture and Mechanical Schools, Engineering Schools, Religious Schools, etc.?

The presumption of liberal profesoriate from the start is also likely to discourage students from considering the profession regardless of their desires and career goals, particularly when the professoriate has significantly shrunk in the last thirty years due to decreased funding. One ought to worry that there are any educators in the business of higher education, much less conservative ones who may be more biased to leave for higher paying careers elsewhere.

There are so many missing pieces of analysis here...

https://www.getalongfilm.com/

What a fantastic documentary. Everyone in Pasadena should be forced to watch this.

We need better answers for these problems....

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/opinion/college-learning-students-success.html

What was the specific change in mathematical teaching instituted by Whewell, Peacock, and Herschel in An Elementary Treatise on Mechanics (1819)?

Is it possible that with the flowering of the storehouse of knowledge and the rise of information overload following Gutenberg's moveable type, we became overly enamored with Sayers' subject-based Quadrivium that we forgot to focus on the basics of the Trivium?

Hilarious that she sees "exceptionally docile parents" as a necessary condition for educational reform!

It seems broadly true in the new millennium and potentially much earlier that students are not taught broader reading strategies within academic settings. The history of note taking strategies and teaching would indicate that this wasn't always true.

In prior centuries there was more focus in earlier education on grounding in the trivium and quadrivium including rhetoric. These pieces and their fundamentals are now either glossed over or skipped altogether to focus more training on what might be considered more difficult and more important material. It would seem that educational reforms from the late 1500s shifted the focus on some of these prior norms to focus on other materials, and in particular reforms in the early 1900s (Charles William Eliot , et al) which focused on training a workforce for a more industrialized and capitalistic society weaned many of these methods out of earlier curricula. This results in students dramatically under-prepared for doctoral research, analysis, and writing.

They're drawing primarily from students with the following broad interests: - learning sciences / educational psychology - sociology of education (to influence policy/practice) - those with strong real-world experience (looking to apply it to a specific area)

tuition coverage & stipend<br /> must be based in Baltimore<br /> prefer one speaks to faculty members for alignment of research areas and mentorship prior to joining

The associative emblematic worldview prevalent prior to the seventeenth century began to disappear within Western culture as the rise of the early modern period and the beginning of the scientific revolution began to focus on more descriptive modes of thought and representation.

Have any researchers done specific work on this shift from emblematic to the descriptive? What examples do they show which support this shift? Any particular heavy influences?

This section cites:<br /> William B. Ashworth, Jr. “Natural History and the Emblematic World View,” in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westfall, eds #books/wanttoread<br /> which could be a place to start.

Note that this same shift from associative and emblematic to descriptive and pedantic coincides not only with the rise of the scientific revolution but also with the effects of rising information overload in a post-Gutenberg world as well as the education reforms of Ramus (late 1500s) et al. as well as the beginning of the move away from scholasticism.

Is there any evidence to support claims that this worldview stemmed from pagan traditions and cultures and not solely the art of memory traditions from ancient Greece? Could it have been pagan traditions which held onto these and they were supplemented and reinforced by ecclesiastical forces which used the Greek traditions?

Examples of emblematic worldview: - particular colors of flowers meant specific things (red = love, yellow = friendship, etc.) We still have these or remants - Saints had their associative animals and objects - anniversary gifts had associative meanings (paper, silver, gold, etc.) We still have remnants of these things, though most are associated with wealth (gold, silver, platinum anniversaries). When did this tradition actually start? - what were the associative meanings of rabbits, turtles, and other animals which appear frequently in manuscript marginalia? (We have the example of the bee (Latin: apes) which where frequently used this way as being associated with the idea of imitation.) - other broad categories?

Tools which allow for flexibility and creativity are better for knowledge workers than those which attempt to crystalize their tasks into ruts. This may tend to force the outputs in a programmatic way and thereby dramatically decrease the potential for innovative outputs. If the tools force the automation of thought without a concurrent increase in creativity then one may as well rely on manual labor for their thinking.

This may be one of the major flaws of tools for thought in the educational technology space. They often attempt to facilitate the delivery of education in an automated way which dramatically decreases the creativity of the students and the value of the overall outputs. While attempting to automate education may suit the needs of institutions which are delivering the education, particularly with respect to the overall cost of delivery, the automation itself is dramatically at odds with the desire to expand upon ideas and continue innovation for all participants involved. Students also require diverse modes of input (seen/heard) as well as internal processing followed by subsequent outputs (written/drawn/sculpted/painted, spoken/sung, movement/dance). Many teachers don't excel at providing all of these neurodiverse modes and most educational technology tools are even less flexible, thus requiring an even larger panoply of them (often not interoperable because of corporate siloing for competitive reasons) to provide reasonable replacements. Given their ultimate costs, providing a variety of these tools may only serve to increase the overall costs of delivering education or risk diminishing the overall quality. Educators and institutions not watching out for these traps will tend to serve only a small portion of their intended audiences, and even those may be served poorly as they only receive a limited variety of modalities of inputs and outputs. As an example Western cultures' overreliance on primary literacy modes is their Achilles' heel.

Tools for thought should actively attempt to increase the potential solution spaces available to their users, while later still allowing for focusing of attention. How can we better allow for the divergence of ideas and later convergence? Better, how might we allow for regular and repeated cycles of divergence and convergence? Advanced zettelkasten note taking techniques (which also allow for drawing, visual, auditory and other modalities beyond just basic literacy) seem to allow for this sort of practice over long periods of time, particularly when coupled with outputs which are then published for public consumption and divergence/convergence cycles by others.

This may also point out some of the stagnation allowed by social media whose primary modes is neither convergence nor divergence. While they allow for the transmission/communication portion, they primarily don't actively encourage their users to closely evaluate the transmitted ideas, internalize them, or ultimately expand upon them. Their primary mode is for maximizing on time of attention (including base emotions including excitement and fear) and the lowest levels of interaction and engagement (likes, retweets, short gut reaction commentary).

Simply the word abridgement here leads me to wonder:

Was the continual abridgement of texts and excerpting small pieces for later use the partial cause of the loss of the arts of memory? Ars excerpendi ad infinitum? It's possible that this, with the growth of note taking practices, continual information overload, and other pressures for educational reform swamped the prior practices.

For evidence, take a look at William Engel's work following the arts of memory in England and Europe to see if we can track the slow demise by attrition of the descriptions and practices. What would such a study show? How might we assign values to the various pressures at play? Which was the most responsible?

Could it have also been the slow, inexorable death of many of these classical means of taking notes as well? How did we loose the practices of excerpting for creating new ideas? Where did the commonplace books go? Where did the zettelkasten disappear to?

One author, with a carefully honed practice and the extant context of their life writes some brief notes which get passed along to their students or which are put into a new book that misses a lot of their existing context with respect to the new readers. These readers then don't know about the attrition happening and slowly, but surely the knowledge goes missing amidst a wash of information overload. Over time the ideas and practices slowly erode and are replaced with newer techniques which may not have been well tested or stood the test of time. One day the world wakes up and the common practices are no longer of use.

This is potentially all the more likely because of the extremely basic ideas underpinning some of memory and note taking. They seem like such basic knowledge we're also prone to take them for granted and not teach them as thoroughly as we ought.

How does one juxtapose this with the idea of humanist scholars excerpting, copying, and using classical texts with a specific eye toward preventing the loss of these very classical texts?

Is this potentially the idea of having one's eye on a particular target and losing sight of other creeping effects?

It's also difficult to remember what it was like when we ourselves didn't know something and once that is lost, it can be harder and harder to teach newcomers.

Jeremias Drexel became one of the earliest educators and reformers to recommend against the ars memoria and instead use the art of excerpting as a means external written memory.

Collective memory is our history.

Something interesting here tying collective memory to education. Dig into this and expand on it.

http://hackeducation.com/2022/01/30/bell

William Wirt, a student of John Dewey who became the superintendent of schools in Gary, Indiana in 1908, was one of the first educators to use a bell to signal the changes between classroom periods.

https://eleanorkonik.com/the-difficulties-of-teaching-notetaking/

A fascinating take on why we don't teach study skills and note taking the way they had traditionally been done in the past. What we're teaching and teaching toward has changed dramatically.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/20/whats-so-great-about-great-books-courses-roosevelt-montas-rescuing-socrates

much as prisoners escape from jails without guards.17 16 Drexel, Aurifodina, 258 17 Drexel, Aurifodina, 3–4.

Jeremias Drexel (1581 – 1638) recommended against the method of loci during the explosion of information in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

Add Drexel to the list of reformers against the ars memoria in the early 1600s.)

While dealing with the information overload, educators may have inadvertently thrown out the baby with the bath water. While information still tends to increase and have increased complexity, some areas also show compression and concatenation and new theories subsume old information into their models. This means that one might know and understand Einstein which means that memorizing Newton's work is no longer needed at some point. Where should one draw the line of memorization for subsuming the knowledge of their culture? Aren't both old and new methods for memory usable? Keep the ars memoria while also using written methods.

Notice the focus of turning education here toward servicing the industrial revolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realschule

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Yusufa</span> in Improving how universities teach science (<time class='dt-published'>11/04/2021 13:26:34</time>)</cite></small>

You might also appreciate Nobel laureate Carl Weiman's work on trying to transform STEM teaching in large research universities. Cautionary tale for how hard it is to change existing institutions IMO. Some notes I took on it here: https://yusufa.notion.site/Improving-how-universities-teach-science-a3b3df69e10b48829e96e9ec70b3fdca

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>ysf</span> in 📚-reading (<time class='dt-published'>11/01/2021 20:55:11</time>)</cite></small>

Religious and national divides were likely very important here as authority from above would have been even more important than in modern time. Related to this is the change in mnemonic traditions due to religious and political mores around the time of Peter Ramus.

https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_03_08.html

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>FARNAM STREET </span> in Why Math Class Is Boring—and What to Do About It (<time class='dt-published'>09/01/2021 09:22:50</time>)</cite></small>

@MMScotofGlasgow, Hopefully it's not too late...

Francis Yates discusses Petrus Ramus as an educational reformer in Chapter 10 and onward in The Art of Memory. There she outlines Ramus' crusade against images (based in part on the admonition from 4 Deuteronomy about graven images) and on their prurient use (sex, violence, etc.) which were meant to make things more memorable. Ramism caught on in the late 1500's and essentially removed memory by the root from the subject of rhetoric of which it had been an integral part. Ramus felt that structure and rote memorization would suffice in its stead. As a result the method of loci decreased in prominence in schools and disappeared from the scene based on educational reform which was primarily pushed by Huguenot/Protestants. I've not read anywhere that the practice was ever banned, it just fell out of fashion due to these reforms.

I'm sure it didn't help that printed books became ever cheaper during/after this time and so the prior need to memorize for those reasons wasn't helped either.

I'm sure another confounding factor was Erasmus' Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style (1512) which dramatically popularized the keeping and use of commonplace books by the learned and literate. These became a regular place in which people collected and kept their thoughts and ideas rather than memorizing them as they may have done in the past.

I really appreciate the respect given to indigenous knowledge here.

The researchers could have gone much further in depth in describing it and the aspects of what they mean by cultural "safety". They've done a disservice here by downplaying widespread adoption. Why not? Why couldn't we accord the proper respect of traditions to actively help make these techniques more widespread? Shouldn't we be willing to do the actual work to accord respect and passing on of these knowledges?

Given my reading in the area, there seems to be an inordinate amount of (Western) "mysticism" attributed to these techniques (here and in the broader anthropology literature) rather than approaching them head-on from a more indigenous perspective. Naturally the difficult part is being trusted enough by tribal elders to be taught these methods to be able to pass them on. (Link this idea to Tim Ingold's first chapter of Anthropology: Why It Matters.)

All this being said, the general methods known from the West, could still be modified to facilitate in widespread adoption of those techniques we do know. Further work and refinement of them could continue apace while still maintaining the proper respect of other cultures and methods, which should be the modern culture default.

If nothing else, the West could at least roll back the educational reforms which erased their own heritage to regain those pieces. The West showing a bit of respect for itself certainly wouldn't be out of line either.

This idea has been known historically for centuries. It's only with education "reforms" in the 1500's that things have become markedly worse in Western education.

Forget medical students and patients, this could broadly be applied to everyone everywhere! Why limit it to simply medical education?

However, I suspect that without prompting or repeated uses and examples, the percentage of students who actually do is likely abysmally poor.

U of Vermont faculty members pledge to fight planned cuts to liberal arts. (n.d.). Retrieved December 9, 2020, from https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/12/07/u-vermont-faculty-members-pledge-fight-planned-cuts-liberal-arts

Mance, H. (2020, September 18). The future of the university in the age of Covid. https://www.ft.com/content/9514643d-1433-408c-8464-cb4c0e09c822