Universities - Education or training

Our beloved government wants to change the rules for universities again; see http://tinyurl.com/47kyez

There seem to me to be several problems with what they are proposing.

They have just got rid of funding for "equivalent or lower degrees" ie second degrees for people who already have a qualification - however out of date or irrelevant to their change of career their original degree was. So that excludes many of the older people who might want to go to university.

Then, even if there are six million people who have "A" levels who have not been to university, many of them will have no desire to - they will be working and not want to take time out to go to university. Even if they do want to go to university, if they have not done serious study for a number of years then they will need to go to some form of pre-university course to get back into the habit of studying - but there is no mention of that, who might provide it, or how it might be funded.

Even if we get over all of that, is there a queue of businesses wanting to fund these courses? There has been only limited take up by industry of foundation degrees, and they don't have to pay for these. It looks very like the city academy idea in schools, where to drum up support they have widened the definition of who can do it and waived the funding requirements with the result that there are some very dubious (ie religious fundamentalist) people running some of our state funded schools.

And finally, we come to the change in the academic year so that we have short intense courses running alongside the more relaxed (well long holidays at least) three year courses. He appears to forget that many of the people who would be doing these degrees actually use the long holidays to earn some money to carry them through the rest of the year. However, maybe there will be decent grants / loans. Though that seems unlikely.

When though will academics have a chance to have a decent go at their research - there are very few these days who take long holidays, most use the summer as a time when they can do some research with fewer admin and teaching interruptions.

This looks like an attempt to firstly divide universities between teaching and research universities - bringing back the binary divide by the back door perhaps? and secondly to move universities further away from education to training.

After all, what the government appears to want is a submissive productive (trained) workforce that doesn't think too much (educated).

Perhaps we need to campaign on this.

Flowers are loosing their smell so bees loose their way

Apparently pollution means that the scent of flowers doesn't travel as far as it used to - but surely there is less pollution than there used to be with the reduction of coal burning? or is it all from cars now?

Anyhow, apparently this is affecting bee numbers. See http://www.livescience.com/environment/080411-pollution-flowers.html

Big Brother wants to watch even more

According to Slashdot MI5 wants access to all the Oyster Card travel records.  http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/16/1612203&from=rss For those who dont know it is cheaper to travel on London Transport using an Oyster Card (about 50% cheaper), but it records everywhere you join or leave the tube and everywhere you get on a bus.

MI5 want access to 17 million people's travel data - they must think terrorists are very stupid.  If you dont want to leave a record you can get Oyster Cards which have no personal information and they can be topped up with cash.  Equally, one can just pay cash.

So, what are they really looking for?

I find this very worrying.

Video tours of houses

Here is an idea I had when working for TSB in the 1980s, that to sell houses you could put the information on computers, and allow people to search by various attributes (size, price, location etc) and then see videos of the house as an aid to finding the one they wanted.

I then went on to suggest one could use virtual reality to re-decorate the house, plan a new kitchen etc. All this could then be sold to the customer along with the house and mortgage.

The world is only now catching up with me.

http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2007/08/craigslist-and-.html

Shocking news

The Internet is good for education! A new study has just found this, and appears to have surveyed my son as well (the only person to have met someone they encountered on the internet without telling their parents first). http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2007/08/07/schoolboards-net-dangers-over-rated-bring-social-networks-to-school/

The counterblast begins (I hope)

At last there seems to be the beginnings of a counterblast to this test, test, test of children that started under Major and expanded enormously under Blair.

While testing (in the sense of formative and diagnostic testing in class) is (and always has been) an essential part of education (though these days usually under the name assessment). Summative testing is stressful for all parties, and as the article suggests damaging to education.

Unfortunately, I don't think that this will move anything like fast enough, and many more children will have their education damaged through over (summative) testing. Damaging because it narrows the curriculum to focus on the tests, damaging because it ensures that focus is primarily on those who can be bumbed up a grade (the borderline cases) to the detriment of those who are mid grade, excelling or doing poorly. Damaging because it makes education boring. Damaging because the focus moves from learning to testing. Damaging because it is stressful for all involved.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2099635,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront

Thinking and how education can harm it

A nice post here http://wanderingink.wordpress.com/2007/05/23/how-to-prevent-another-leonardo-da-vinci/ on how to turn people off learning.

Visualising the web

I have just come across Walk2Web, a tool for visualising web sites. I haven't yet worked out exactly what it does, but I think that the way that it offers a view of surrounding sites (that link back), and a history of ones exploration are very interesting. http://walk2web.com/