Education – Page 4

Campus consistency is difficult to find

Apr 192016

The re-naming craze on campuses caught the eye of professor and commentator Walter Williams in a pair of articles, College Campus Lunacy and its sequel Campus Lunacy, Part II. Having noted some few examples of campus officials pulling back a bit from the left, he observes “Nothing opens the closed minds of administrators better than the sounds of pocketbooks snapping shut.”

This is not something we see at College Park, where left-tilted policy and practices are rewarded with funding. Granted, it is mostly paid for with the inexhaustible supply of free tax money that officials send from Annapolis, but it is reward for right-thinking (well, left-thinking) practices nonetheless. Any who might want different outcomes should look to changing the representation Annapolis first.

Computational thinking at College Park

Education No Responses »

Mar 272016

Why College Park Doesn’t Lead in Computer Science Education … The article recounts some of the history of an effort to offer a Computer Science Education degree on this campus, and suggests sufficient reasons why we don’t yet have such a thing.

Computational thinking – ten years later

Education, Quality No Responses »

Mar 242016

The term Computational Thinking was coined by Jeanette Wing in a 2006 issue of CACM, to call out the importance of computation in all fields. She reprises the piece today in a follow up piece that talks about how far computational thinking has come in the last ten years.

And indeed it has come a long way since then! Except perhaps at University of Maryland, where there is little we can say is true of all graduates with regard to computation.

Code for all means less for all

Education, Technology No Responses »

Mar 202016

At least that is the message suggested in a Cornell study and brought to the media by a NYT article about it. The article mentions a few theories about why pay drops as more women join the field but really … law of supply and demand probably has something to do with it too, right?

Assembly for Power and Liberation

Education No Responses »

Mar 072016

Finally we discover a campus that (at least for the moment) is more progressive than College Park: Western Washington University which has quite the engaged student body, according to the linked article. No, that’s not a piece from the Onion. They really do want new faculty hired to be placed under their direction for social justice.

Of course, here in Maryland we’re doing our best to thin out the herd of professors entirely, so in all likelihood we are going to the same place as WWU – just not as fast.

Some scholars might not want “safe spaces” at College Park

Education No Responses »

Feb 032016

In a New York Post article, writer Brooke Rogers pretty clearly calls out the problems with campuses that promise ‘safe spaces’ for education, and it would be fair to take away from her piece that there isn’t much learning going on in such places.

There are still young adults who want nothing to do with being kept safe from differing ideas or new experiences; we don’t expect to be protected from harsh words and angry voices, and we’re hoping there’s still a place for us at American universities.

What a shame we have constructed such a ‘safe space’ here in College Park.

Students file lawsuit against Google for illegal email scanning

Commerce, Education, Privacy, Security No Responses »

Feb 022016

Students and alumni at UC Berkeley have filed a lawsuit against Google for its practices of data mining and profiling their email traffic through Google’s “Apps for Education” services which it promotes widely – including on this campus. The suit claims this is a violation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

Google appears to confirm the practice but asserts that while profiles are created for everyone who uses these tools, it does not target individuals for advertising based directly on the user’s information. However the company has so far been silent on how it uses these data for its other purposes, and presumably at some point will need to argue that those uses, while profitable and exploitative, are technically not a violation.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, so for users who obtain services at no direct charge from Google, it is not clear what they think is the business value to Google if not to train fairly elaborate models to recognize someone having exactly the individual’s features, and then sell use of that model to companies or government officials who want people identified. Those uses are surely good for Google, corporations and officials, but for consumers, not so much.

Google’s practices have been the open elephant in a room that few involved have an interest in acknowledging. School officials in particular have strong motivation to pay for their digital infrastructure out of their students’ liberty and pockets, and interests of those students be damned. (At UM, the message is also employee interests be damned, as we convert faculty and staff services to Google over the course of this year.)

What brings the present case forward is an assertion by the students that an earlier Google representation (that they would stop direct advertising based on the student data) was an admission that the were violating the Act in contrast to promises made at the time. Those promises are not unlike those made to students on this campus when we directed all traffic through Google servers.

Big Brother at UK universities

Education, Privacy No Responses »

Jan 212016

The extent to which big data can both help and intrude on lives becomes greater all the time, and we see the next concrete examples of this in a Guardian article about fine grain tracking of university students. A Higher Education Commission report From Bricks to Clicks: The Potential of Data and Analytics in Higher Education tells of “personalized” offerings to students, but not just on courses but for lifestyle behaviors and more. All the social media data which are available can factor in to analysis of outcomes, so the recipients of this governmental largesse might get digital nagging about time spent in bars, sleep habits, eating and, well, the sky is the limit here.

Double standards in college admission: A perspective from Thomas Sowell

Education No Responses »

Dec 222015

The Fisher case (on which we have written in the past) involves what some describe as ‘affirmative action’ in admissions policy at the University of Texas at Austin, but by everyone’s description is the application of differing standards depending on one’s skin color. The topic made a stir again in social media after Supreme Court Justice Scalia spoke plainly about this when the case was heard recently.

Dr. Thomas Sowell elaborates on Scalia’s point, with one article on college admissions practices being challenged and a second article on the deleterious effects of these admissions practices, showing they do not in fact give us ‘equal protection under the laws’.

Higher education is a house divided

Education No Responses »

Dec 202015

Or so asserts George Will in his latest column. In it he makes note of the intellectual desert that many campuses have become, but flags a few places where at least the speech codes have been loosened. As to the title of his linked article:

Higher education is increasingly a house divided. In the sciences and even the humanities, actual scholars maintain the high standards of their noble calling. But in the humanities, especially, and elsewhere, faux scholars representing specious disciplines exploit academia as a jobs program for otherwise unemployable propagandists hostile to freedom of expression.

A pity he did not have the space to unpack an important difference between the speech codes (which govern, or not, what people can say on campus) and the courses (which are the approved conduits of delivering liberal enlightenment.)

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