This week's Carnival of Education is being hosted at The Education Wonks. There are a ton of good posts. Go check it out. Here are some I found very interesting:
At The Median Sib is a discussion of how the teacher is teaching sign language, and the children are excited about learning the basics.
I feel bad for students who are forced to sit through classes when they either don't have the foggiest idea what the lesson is about, or have already learned it three times and are bored out of their skull. Now after reading about a wasted evening I've learned to feel bad about teachers who are forced to sit through similar meetings.
Education In Texas shares a really cool feature of MicrosoftWord. I've turned it on, on my PC. After reading this, you will too.
Political Calculations writes about how the cost of universities are rising twice as fast as inflation. I think if distance learning ever takes off a whole lot of univversities may go out of business.
3 comments:
First, thank you for linking!
"I think if distance learning ever takes off a whole lot of univversities may go out of business."
They won't go out of business, so much as they'll have to adapt to operating in the new environment. Interesting tidbit: private, for-profit universities (think DeVry, University of Phoenix, etc.) make up 2% of the education "market" in the U.S. (as measured by number of students), but where distance learning is concerned, particularly online programs, they've established a market share of 30%.
Traditional brick and mortar universities are trying to enter the distance learning arena, but are still in the very early phases of doing so. Their programs to date appear to have been held back in large part by fears of cannibalizing their core campuses.
An excellent blog, and thank you so much for the link.
For years (decades, actually) I fought the idea of being an English Teacher, because I knew that the "bosses" and curriculum chiefs hadn't a clue. I finally took a job nobody wanted, which gave me the freedom to teach according to what I felt was right.
To Ironman:
Guy Kawasaki use to point out (when he was at Apple) that in major technology changes the old guard almost never survived to use the next technology. He would illustrate this by talking about the ice making business. Back in the 1800s the ice business would carved ice out of frozen lakes in the winter, store them in ice boxes and sold them in the summers. Then when the big ice making machines came along, none of the lake ice businesses make the transition. And again when ice making was pushed down into the homes via the freezer, all of the big ice making machines went out of business. Most people will hold on to what they know and are comfortable with instead of tossing the old aside and jumping into the new.
My guess is, if there are effective ways to provide distance learning at a reasonable cost, that some colleges may make the transition, but there will be many which hold on to the old, until it is too late.
To muse:
Thank you for your kind words.
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