154 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2024
    1. Words like quality and excellence are misapplied sorelentlessly that they border on meaningless.

      Has education in the United States fallen prey to lip service about its importance. Have we substituted an idea of it's value for the actual value itself?

      Almost everyone says education is important and that we value it, but do we put our money where our mouth is?

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  2. Feb 2024
    1. scholastic learning would favour externaldemonstration over inner revelation, intellectual agility over endlessmeditation.
    2. the reading-out of commentaries (a format with a now-familiar name: the lecture)

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

    3. centralizing reforms of Pope Gregory VII calledfor a more professionalized clergy. Church officials should now betrained administrators, versed not only in the scriptures but also inthe principles of accounting and law. A papal decree of 1079 orderedthat cathedrals should establish schools for the training of priests,
  3. Jan 2024
    1. This dilemma was reflected in the furor over a second round of Chinese simplification in 1977, an effort that was rescinded in 1986.

      พอดิบพอดีกับช่วงสิ้นสุดของการปฏิวัติวัฒนธรรมและเข้าสู่ยุคสมัย 改革开放 ของ 邓小平

    1. In 1941, he published "Wells, Hitler and the World State," in which he argued that Germany hewed much closer to a well-run society in which everyone thinks similarly and along scientific lines than England ever has. But it was run by a "criminal lunatic," so that didn't work out quite as Wells thought it would. Orwell also noted that patriotism, which Wells thought of as civilization-destroying, was the primary force inducing Russians and Britons to fight against Hitler.

      first referent "he" is George Orwell

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

    2. "In transport, we have progressed from coaches and horses by way of trains to electric traction, motor-cars, and aeroplanes. In mental organization, we have simply multiplied our coaches and horses and livery stables."

      from World Brain, double check with source

  4. Nov 2023
    1. “The schools we go to are reflections of the society that created them. Nobody is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.” ― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography
    1. Eco was aware of this predicament. As a university profes-sor, he knew that the majority of students in Italian univer-sities seldom attended classes, that very few of them wouldcontinue to write and do research, and that the degree theyeventually earned would not necessarily improve their socialconditions. It would have been easy to call for the system tobe reformed so as not to require a thesis from students ill-equipped to write one, and for whom the benefit of spendingseveral months working on a thesis might be difficult to jus-tify in cold economic terms.

      Some of the missing piece here is knowing a method for extracting and subsequently building. Without the recipe in hand, it's difficult to bake a complex cake.

      Not mentioned here as something which may be missing, but which Adler & Van Doren identify as strength and ability to read at multiple levels including inspectionally, analytically, and ultimately syntopically.

      To some extent, the knowledge of the method for excerpting and arranging will ultimately allow the interested lifelong learner the ability to read syntopically even if it isn't the sort of targeted exercise it might be within creating a thesis.

  5. Oct 2023
    1. It's been burning in my mind all day: you're right that too often, for reasons likely hidden in the folds of of educational reform, some of our most powerful methods of working, researching, and writing are lost or seem like magic when they're rediscovered. Rarely are classes on the subject taught, thereby leaving the student to find their own way in the dark. Thank you for pulling back the curtain covering the proverbial proscenium arch on Act I of research methods.

      For those flailing in the dark, Keith Thomas's brief essay (2010) discusses some of the basic problem along with solutions, while Adler and Van Doren (1972) talk about the levels of reading which are now rarely taught or reached (and how to reach them), and finally, imminent scholars/researchers like Umberto Eco or Jacques Barzun & Henry Graff reveal alternate versions of what you're already doing. Others certainly exist, often in piecemeal form, but this short set in combination with your YouTube channel for examples provides one royal road to the destination many seek.

      • Thomas, Keith. “Diary: Working Methods.” London Review of Books, June 10, 2010.
      • Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book: The Classical Guide to Intelligent Reading. Revised and Updated edition. 1940. Reprint, Touchstone, 2011.
      • Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. 1977. Reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015.
      • Barzun, Jacques, and Henry F. Graff. The Modern Researcher. New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1957.
    1. But since their adoption, the results of the huge effort and expense of public schooling have been less and less satisfactory.

      their = multiple-choice tests


      Multiple-choice tests usually test for basic facts or simple answers, and aren't well designed for testing complex chains of reasoning, particularly at the lower levels.

    1. A Nation at Risk?,the Reagan administration’s analysis of what was supposedly going wrong inschools, which bemoaned the ‘rising tide of mediocrity’

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  6. Sep 2023
    1. 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

    1. 1939 when Professor James Mursell of Columbia University's Teachers College wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly entitled "The Failure of the Schools."

      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/.

  7. Aug 2023
  8. Jul 2023
    1. We see virtually no prospect that the Wall Street system will transform itself from within. Change depends on citizen’s working from outside the establishment to create from the bottom up a New Economy based on new values and institutions.
      • quote
        • "We see virtually no prospect that the Wall Street system will transform itself from within.
        • Change depends on citizen’s working from outside the establishment
          • to create from the bottom up a New Economy based on new values and institutions."
      • Author
        • David Korten
  9. Jun 2023
    1. how to helpmost effectively children from ‘poor circumstances’.

      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?

  10. Apr 2023
    1. 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.

    2. 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.

    3. 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...

    1. best reading, latest school start age—is sometimes called the‘Finnish paradox’

      The Finnish paradox stems from the fact that despite Finland having one of the latest school start ages in the world (at the age of 7), they also have one of the highest literacy achievements as well.

      The paradox is only perceived by those who may feel that hammering knowledge into children's heads from a young age is the best method of education.

    1. Why do we devalue education? Is it such a commodity now that its transmission value is worth pennies on the dollar?

      Is Government requirement and support for education part of what causes the devaluation of the "educational market"? If so, how would one decouple this process to increase the wages of educators? Is a capitalistic version the best way to go, or is it better to socialize it further and inject more money into it versus other choices?

      Major nationwide strike forming minimum wage with variances for local consumer indices and city/state costs of living? Something which would drive competition for child care and teaching spaces? Wages that would push up the social value of education? Create a market for competition for teachers at the local level as well as between areas?

  11. Mar 2023
  12. Feb 2023
    1. Today’s students carry access to boundlessinformation that Eco’s students could not have begun tofathom, but Eco’s students owned every word they carried.

      This is a key difference in knowledge mastery...

    2. He understood that the writing of a thesis forcedmany students outside of their cultural comfort zone, andthat if the shock was too sudden or strong, they would giveup.

      The writing of a thesis is a shock to many specifically because information overload has not only gotten worse, but because the underlying historical method of doing so has either been removed from the educational equation or so heavily watered down that students don't think to use it.

      When I think and write about "note taking" I'm doing it in a subtly different way and method than how it seems to be used in common parlance. Most seem to use it solely for information extraction and as a memory crutch which they may or may not revisit to memorize or use and then throw away. I do it for some of these reasons, but my practice goes far beyond this for generating new ideas, mixing up ideas creatively, and for writing. Note reuse seems to be the thing missing from the equation. It also coincidentally was the reason I quit taking notes in college.

    1. Whewell was prominent not only in scientific research and philosophy but also in university and college administration. His first work, An Elementary Treatise on Mechanics (1819), cooperated with those of George Peacock and John Herschel in reforming the Cambridge method of mathematical teaching.

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

  13. Jan 2023
    1. there's a landlord tax the the  one percent in their day were the landlords you   have to tax away the land rent and make that  the public uh tax base not income not taxes on   consumer goods not taxes on capital because you  want good capital investment you want fortunes to   00:45:07 be made in a good way that add to the economy's  productivity you don't want them to be made in   a predatory bad way uh the whole fight to tax  economic rent and to even recognize that most   income is unearned when you talk about the uh  income disparity almost all this disparity is   unearned income it's economic rent it's not  income that's made by increasing uh production   00:45:33 it's not income that's made by increasing living  standards it's just predatory rent seeking from   special privileges that the wealthy have gained  from government and today it's not the landlord   class anymore as it was in the 19th century it's  the financial class and the raw materials class   uh and uh without dealing uh with this uh  cl structure i don't uh the system is going   00:45:57 to shrink and shrink and we've seen this before  we saw it in rome the same kind of polarization   and concentration of wealth in the roman empire  well the last stage of that is feudalism so we're   back to what rosa luxemburg said the choice is  between socialism and barbarism basically and uh   there's no other way to do it you can't  solve the problems within the existing system   00:46:23 because it's controlled already by the one  percent

      Micheal Hudson : tax the rent seeking class or face barbarism like in Rome - The situation today is degrading in the same way Rome degraded into feudalism - rent seeking class today is not the landlord class, but the financial and raw materials class that are making large fortunes from rent seeking - that is the system level reform necessary today

  14. Nov 2022
  15. Oct 2022
    1. disport itself happily in its new and extended Quadrivium withoutpassing through the Trivium. But the scholastic tradition, though broken andmaimed, still lingered in the public schools and universities:

      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?

    2. We dole out lip-service to the importance of education—lip-service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone theschool leaving-age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachersslave conscientiously in and out of school-hours, till responsibility becomes aburden and a nightmare; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largelyfrustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absencecan only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.
    3. We will endow them with exceptionally docile parents;

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

  16. Sep 2022
    1. Unfortunately, many graduate and professional students rely onreading strategies taught in high school or college for their academicwork. One example is taking notes only during lectures andhighlighting passages of academic texts

      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.

  17. Jul 2022
    1. 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

    1. Perhaps the most widely recognized failing of peer review is its inability to ensure the identification of high-quality work.

      stakesinscience

    1. It draws together data scientists, experimental and statistical methodologists, and open science activists into a project with both intellectual and policy dimensions.

      open science activists

    2. detail the scientific ideology that is apparent in its articles, strategy statements, and research projects,

      ideology in science

    1. During the seventeenth century, this associative view vanished and was replaced by more literallydescriptive views simply of the thing as it exists in itself.

      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?

    1. Unfortunately, many corporate software programsaim to level or standardise the differences betweenindividual workers. In supporting knowledgeworkers, we should be careful to provide tools whichenable diversification of individuals’ outputs.Word-processors satisfi this criterion; tools whichembed a model of a knowledge worker’s task in thesoftware do not.

      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).

  18. Jun 2022
    1. The inequalities in the US arise from huge disparities in the resources at school, and a highly unequal society at large. I personally think that improving education is much more about support for students, resources, tutoring, teacher training, etc, than whether we teach logarithms using method X or method Y.
  19. Apr 2022
    1. One of his last works, the Aurifodina, “The Mine of All Arts and Sci-ences, or the Habit of Excerpting,” was printed in 1638 (in 2,000 copies) andin another fourteen editions down to 1695 and spawned abridgments in Latin(1658), German (1684), and English.

      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.

    1. Instead of imagination, Drexel recommended training the art of excerpting. Thus, he reversed the ancient rule, according to which knowledge should be entrusted to personal memory rather than to the library, and stored in the mind rather than in a closet upside down.

      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.

  20. Mar 2022
    1. Too many people who try to predict the future of education and education technology have not bothered to learn the alphabet — the grammar of schooling, to borrow a phrase from education historian Larry Cuban. That grammar includes the beliefs and practices and memory of schooling — our collective memory, not just our own personal experiences of school. That collective memory — that's history.

      Collective memory is our history.

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

    1. The ringing of the bell to signal the beginning and end of a class period, rather than just the beginning and end of the school day is often traced to William Wirt, who became superintendent of schools in Gary, Indiana in 1908.

      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.

  21. Jan 2022
  22. Dec 2021
    1. student advocates are pushing back in the court of public opinion. Inclusiveaccess.org is a new website that counters the publishers' disinformation campaign and advocates for a fair deal on textbooks. https://www.inclusiveaccess.org/
    1. the advantage of forgetting was recognized by scholars with increasing enthusiasm between the second half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries.
    2. Drexel, for instance, held those teach-ers ridiculous who taught students to build up houses and rooms by means of imagination and stock them with images of memorable subjects (imagines agentes).16 According to the German Jesuit, the effort was not only huge but students wasted their time because images escape from these artificial places

      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.

  23. Nov 2021
    1. Sixty years ago, in France, the first Napoleon made great changes, mostly useful ones, in methods of education. For more than a generation the government schools of arts and trades, arts and manufactures, bridges and highways, mines, agriculture, and commerce, have introduced hundreds of well-trained young men every year into the workshops, factories, mines, forges, public works, and counting-rooms of the empire. These young men begin as subalterns, but soon become the commissioned officers of the army of industry.

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

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

    1. I will use Drexel’s treatise asrepresentative of the basic principles of note taking that were widely sharedin sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe across national and religiousdivides.

      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.

  24. Sep 2021
    1. In “A Great Idea at the Time,” Alex Beam presents Hutchins and Adler as a double act

      Just the title "A Great Idea at the Time" makes me wonder if this project didn't help speed along the creation of the dullness of the humanities and thereby attempt to kill it?

      What might they have done differently to better highlight the joy and fun of these works to have better encouraged it.

      Too often reformers reform all the joy out of things.

  25. Aug 2021
    1. https://collect.readwriterespond.com/how-to-remember-more-of-what-you-read/

      Some useful looking links here. Thanks Aaron.

      I've been digging deeper and deeper into some of the topics and sub-topics.

      The biggest problem I've seen thus far is a lot of wanna-be experts and influencers (especially within the Roam Research space) touching on the very surface of problem. I've seen more interesting and serious people within the Obsidian community sharing their personal practices and finding pieces of that useful.

      The second issue may be that different things work somewhat differently for different people, none of whom are using the same tools or even general systems. Not all of them have the same end goals either. Part of the key is finding something useful that works for you or modifying something slowly over time to get it to work for you.

      At the end of the day your website holds the true answer: read, write, respond (along with the implied "repeat" at the end).

      One of the best and most thorough prescriptions I've seen is Sönke Ahrens' book which he's written after several years of using and researching a few particular systems.

      I've been finding some useful tidbits from my own experience and research into the history of note taking and commonplace book traditions. The memory portion intrigues me a lot as well as I've done quite a lot of research into historical methods of mnemonics and memory traditions. Naturally the ancient Greeks had most of this all down within the topic of rhetoric, but culturally we seem to have unbundled and lost a lot of our own traditions with changes in our educational system over time.

  26. Jul 2021
  27. May 2021
    1. MMScotofGlasgow

      @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.

    1. The foremost consideration with respect to teaching of the Australian Aboriginal memory technique is the cultural safety aspect and respect for the peoples who developed this approach. In our program, the teaching of this program was administered by an experienced Australian Aboriginal Educator, who was able to integrate the method into our teaching program, while simultaneously preventing several breaches of cultural etiquette and terminology which could easily have compromised the material had it been delivered by a non-Australian Aboriginal educator (TY), however well-intentioned. The need for a deep knowledge and understanding of the appropriate context for teaching and delivery of this material is probably the main factor which would preclude more widespread adoption of this technique.

      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.

    2. The qualitative data collected in this project clearly indicate that this learning approach is pleasurable and productive in itself, and may well have a role in decreasing the ‘drudgery’ often associated with modern higher education.

      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.

    3. It is thus argued that early exposure to the Australian Aboriginal approach to pedagogy in a respectful, culturally safe manner, has the potential to benefit medical students and their patients.

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

    4. Most (95%) students indicated that they found the technique effective, and over half (56%) indicated that they would definitely employ the method in their future studies.

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

    5. Incoming medical students overwhelmingly felt that training on specific memory techniques would be helpful, with 93% indicating ‘strongly agree’ (51/72; 71%) or ‘somewhat agree’ (17/72; 23%) in response to the question: “Specific memory training as a component of medical education would be worth my while”.

      How can something like this that so many people find worthwhile be so neglected by any school, much less a medical school?

      Our educational system is really failing our students.

      Damn you Peter Ramus!

    1. it makes a difference whether the argument made before Congress is “Facebook is bad, cannot reform itself, and is guided by people who know what they’re doing but are doing int anyway—and the company needs to be broken up immediately” or if the argument is “Facebook means well, but it sure would be nice if they could send out fewer notifications and maybe stop recommending so much conspiratorial content.”

      Note the dramatic difference between these spaces and the potential ability for things to get better.

  28. Apr 2021
  29. Mar 2021
  30. Feb 2021
    1. Nevermind, I use now reform-rails
    2. @adisos if reform-rails will not match, I suggest to use: https://github.com/orgsync/active_interaction I've switched to it after reform-rails as it was not fully detached from the activerecord, code is a bit hacky and complex to modify, and in overall reform not so flexible as active_interaction. It has multiple params as well: https://github.com/orgsync/active_interaction/blob/master/spec/active_interaction/modules/input_processor_spec.rb#L41

      I'm not sure what he meant by:

      fully detached from the activerecord I didn't think it was tied to ActiveRecord.

      But I definitely agree with:

      code is a bit hacky and complex to modify

  31. Jan 2021
  32. Dec 2020
    1. Police deemed the death suspicious, but did not label it a homicide despite the fact that someone had buried the body.

      An easy way to keep severe crime off of their books perhaps? Should police be the ones doing this sort of classification or should it go to an independent body unaffiliated with local law enforcement?

      Would it have been classified the same if it was a more identifiable affluent white woman? (Likely not...)

  33. Sep 2020
  34. Aug 2020
  35. Jun 2020
  36. May 2020
  37. Apr 2020
  38. Feb 2019
    1. Any election system that favors extremists would be considered unreasonable; the same rationale must be applied to moderates.

      Utter nonsense. To paraphrase:

      Any election system that favors unrepresentative candidates [like IRV] would be considered unreasonable; the same rationale must be applied to one that favors representative candidates.

      Uh, no. That doesn't follow.

      FairVote starts from the conclusion that IRV is the best voting method, and then works backwards to try to justify it, in this case arguing that a flaw of IRV is actually a feature, by making a false equivalent between a voting system that favors unrepresentative candidates and one that favors representative candidates.

      The whole point of an election is to find the most-representative candidate.

    2. Agreeing that the Condorcet criterion is desirable is equivalent to saying that moderate candidates should always win.

      Yes, candidates who are moderate relative to the voters should always win.

      The goal of an election is to find the candidate who best represents the electorate. If the electorate is left-wing on average, the winner should be too. If the electorate is "strong on both personal freedoms and economic freedoms", then the winner should be too.

      Anything else is undemocratic.

    3. Condorcet winners are centrist by nature, regardless of the preferences of the electorate.

      This isn't true. It's possible for a Condorcet candidate to be extremist relative to the other candidates or the electorate, since weak preferences are given equal weight to strong preferences. Simple example here: Condorcet winner is not utilitarian winner

    4. not necessarily liked more than other candidates

      This is true, but IRV doesn't choose the candidate who is most-liked (the "utilitarian winner"), either.

  39. Jan 2019
    1. With $50 million going to people who do not have contact with students, the data belies the district’s branding of “Students First” and “Team DPS.”

      The bias that has been cited by critics wishing to undermine the general argument of this article (and similar articles, blogs, social media claims, etc), is that figures being shared for expenditures on non-teaching staff are misleading because they include funding positions such as nurses who are in schools every day providing vital services directly to students. I believe this is critique is factual.

      On the other hand, there are claims that the total amount spent on administrative staff is dramatically under-reported as DPS classifies certain staff as school-based who in fact serve in roles that are central admin in nature. Whether this is intentional deception or aligned with standard accounting practices probably depends on who you ask. Either way, I believe this claim is also true. At the risk of offering annotations that qualify as "what aboutism" I include the point here because it is possible that the amounts that critics cite as being spent on staff that do not interact with students may actually be significantly less than what DPS is actually spending.

    2. in early 2008, there were only three people handling press relations for the district. There are now eleven–making $700,000 a year. The full communications shop numbers thirty-seven, with a payroll of nearly $2 million.

      In an age of shrinking News Room budgets, there is huge power to having a strong Communications department as reporters of local news can be reduced to writers who are expected to crank out an unrealistic amount of content and therefore rely on press releases for turnkey stories. I have first-hand knowledge of this dynamic: when I worked a marketing internship, I saw my exact language appear in the local paper under a reporter's byline multiple times.

      While there is clear benefit to the District's administration when it comes to exerting ownership of the public narrative, it is worth asking how this serves students and whether it is in fact in the public's best interest to use public funds in order to manipulate the news coverage the public relies on for learning about the district's efficacy in educating area youth.

  40. Nov 2018
    1. Under range/score, the best strategy to promote the election of a preferred candidate is always to give that candidate the maximum score and then give every other competitor the minimum score.

      Yeah, this is false.

      If you have perfect knowledge of how everyone else is voting (and you usually don't), then the best strategy is to give a maximum score to the frontrunner that you prefer, and also to everyone you like more than them, and to likewise give a minimum score to the other frontrunner, and to everyone you dislike more.

      This is not bullet voting; it's equivalent to Approval Voting, and leads to more moderate winners who are good representatives of the electorate.

      Real-world Score elections don't show this behavior, anyway, because polls are imprecise and the consequences of voting honestly under Score aren't as dire as they are under FPTP or IRV.

    2. Rebuttal to [the original version of] this page at https://www.equal.vote/fv

    3. unlike RCV, it would be subject to tactical voting

      This is nonsense. All voting systems are subject to tactical voting.

  41. Oct 2018
  42. Aug 2018
    1. Beginning with the famous third plenum of the Tenth Central Committee in 1978, the Chinese Communist party set about decollectivizing agriculture for the 800 million Chinese who still lived in the countryside. The role of the state in agriculture was reduced to that of a tax collector, while production of consumer goods was sharply increased in order to give peasants a taste of the universal homogenous state and thereby an incentive to work. The reform doubled Chinese grain output in only five years, and in the process created for Deng Xiaoping a solid political base from which he was able to extend the reform to other parts of the economy. Economic Statistics do not begin to describe the dynamism, initiative, and openness evident in China since the reform began.
  43. Apr 2018
    1. Some characters were given simplified glyphs, called shinjitai (新字体). Many variant forms of characters and obscure alternatives for common characters were officially discouraged.

      The simplification of Japanese kanji was done to a lesser extent than that of the Chinese hanzi.

  44. May 2017
  45. Apr 2017
    1. A curriculum without strong consensus makes no sense.”

      Radical change will be uncomfortable. If we don't push for change, we will spend another decade becoming less relevant.

  46. Nov 2015
    1. IV. The Benevolent Empire

      Week 14 Video Lecture

      Video Study Questions:

      What shift occurs in evangelical religion from the 1700s to the 1800s? How does this shift change the view of sin?

      What is significant about David Walker's Appeal? What is the response to it?

      What is immediatism? What shift does it reflect?

  47. Oct 2015
    1. The democratization of that right, and the construction of a broad social movement to enforce its will is imperative if the dispossessed are to take back the control which they have for so long been denied, and if they are to institute new modes of urbanization.

      Is this just becoming more of a competition between who ends up with control? I thought we were working towards beneficial social and urban reform here..

  48. Jul 2015
    1. I am really interested in the possibilities, the prospect of bipartisan legislation around the criminal justice system -- something that I think directly speaks to some of the themes I mentioned on Friday. And we’ve seen some really interesting leadership from some unlikely Republican legislators very sincerely concerned about making progress there.