Rasmussen College has an infographic about the worth of a bachelor’s degree. What do you think about its insights? We originally had the infographic showing here, but they didn’t like that, so go there and take a look at it.
http://www.rasmussen.edu/student-life/blogs/main/is-a-bachelors-degree-really-worth-the-cost/
As I write this, I’m at the Innovative Professor Conference at Austin Peay State University, getting ready to do a presentation about a method of publishing student work for Flipboard, one of the most popular apps available on the iPad.
I have this theory that “out loud” is best for big picture information–establishing context, talking about meaning, etc.–while detail is best communicated via writing. In keeping with this, in the session I’m mostly trying to show what’s possible and point to resources, while developing the details on the “how to” via a public Google doc. I’m also pointing to this post for people to be able to find these resources:
My wife, who is in Florida dealing with her mother’s estate, asked me to research how to glue styrofoam without melting it. It took only seconds to come up with the answer, but in the process I stumbled across a site that specializes in telling you how to glue specific materials to other specific materials. How handy! It’s not exactly about communication, but on the other hand it tells me something about how the Internet has made a difference in our lives–it’s a unique way to communicate very specific information that likely would not have been done effectively under old media. Even the site name is memorable for its application: ThisToThat.com.
In response to the question, “If you could go back in time and have a heart-to-heart conversation with your sweet younger self, what would you say to her?” Karen Maezen Miller said, “There’s nothing I could tell her that she hasn’t always known. It’s just that sometimes I forget. We all forget what we have always known and who we have always been. That’s when we become confused. I wouldn’t want to disturb her in the least! She’s doing the best she can, and always will.”
I like that. I don’t spend a lot of time with regrets, but those few times I do, something like this helps remind me to stop it. If I get still enough, sometimes it seems like I can remember who I really am.
You can read the whole interview at Painted Path.
As I was reading that over, I detected a potential contradiction I want to address briefly. I said I like this because it reminds me when I forget. Karen seems to be saying that she wouldn’t remind her earlier self–if you happen to have forgotten for the moment, then so be it, you’re doing the best you can.
Contradictions occur just in the way you look at it, of course. For one thing, the original question is entirely hypothetical. You can’t go back and have a conversation like that. You can just do your best in this moment. My “earlier self,” (as if there is such a thing) did the best he could then, and I’m doing the best I can now. If the best I can do at the moment happens to involve forgetting, well, it’s the best I can do. Anything else is just mental gymnastics.
But I still do mental gymnastics. So in that spirit: The only reason I know what I know now is that I experienced what I experienced then. Even if I could go back and tell myself something (hypothetical again), I would only have information, not knowing. I guess I could possibly warn myself away from experiencing something, in which case I wouldn’t come to actually know it, in which case I wouldn’t be able to warn my earlier self away from it, so I’d be back to square one. That’s what makes writing science fiction a challenge.
Better to just focus on what’s happening right now. Excuse me, I have some dishes to wash.
I have an opinion about opinions. Being human, I have an opinion about almost everything.
The old saying, “I’m entitled to my opinions,” 
misses the mark. It makes as much sense as, “I’m entitled to my thoughts.” Got a brain? You’re going to have thoughts. I can’t remember where I read this to give proper credit, but someone once pointed out that your brain secretes thoughts the way your pancreas secretes insulin. It’s just what it does.
Wisdom comes in not believing everything you think. Examine your thoughts. Recognize that you have thoughts, but you are not your thoughts.
For the sake of discussion, though, let’s leave the original expression in place, and look at corollaries.
Students hear this from me: “You’re entitled to your opinion, but you’re not entitled to have it taken seriously.” Just because you express it doesn’t mean it’s worth anything. Want someone else to take it seriously? Offer the underlying evidence that supports that opinion. The mere fact that you have an opinion will not sway anyone but the weak-minded. The underpinning for that opinion may make a difference to someone who incorporates it into their own mental structure and make it his/her own.
But go beyond that. “You’re entitled to your opinion. Whether it’s wise to hold onto it and cultivate it is a different matter.” In “I Wanted to Like It,” Karen Maezen Miller points out that opinions and their expressions have consequences. I know an opinion is just a thought, not a fact–but it often doesn’t feel that way. Everyone is entitled to his/her opinion, entitled to express it–endlessly, it seems. And because we don’t recognize the difference between thought and reality, we take our own opinion and the expressed opinions of others to heart, where it can set up shop and kill us.
We equate having an opinion with caring. It’s not the same thing.
Furthermore, we tend to be happier when we understand an opinion is a preference, not a need.
Here is something that goes beyond opinion to the level of experience (still not the same as fact): I am happier when I hold my opinions lightly, and there’s seldom a time when I am happier expressing my opinion than just keeping it to myself. Maybe that’s why blog posts have tended to taper off. 🙂 In any case, an unexpressed opinion held lightly seldom damages anyone or anything; an expressed opinion held strongly often does.
As I was reading an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about plagiarism from an administrative perspective. It includes suggestions about heading off plagiarism, and pointed out the need to define plagiarism and teach proper citation practices.
The author said faculty protest that they shouldn’t have to teach those basic things, because students should have learned that already. The response not only explained why students may not have learned those basic things but also shed some light on at least one of the reasons students come to college unprepared to do college work.
First, many students do get out of high school never having written an essay that involves research or working with sources. This is happening more and more because of the state-mandated tests students have to take to earn a high school diploma. These tests usually do not require that students cite anything, so teachers who have their salaries or continued employment tied to the test scores of their students do often focus on teaching for the test.
Among other things, high school should prepare a student to reason and to work independently. College work requires that–it’s not just about shoveling more information into their heads, but giving them the tools to think critically.
Unfortunately, misguided efforts at accountability scuttle that very important function of high school, and similar efforts currently aimed at higher education will likely make the situation worse. At a time we bemoan the fact that students aren’t learning much in college (Student Tracking Finds Limited Learning in College), we certainly don’t need to discourage the development of independent, critical thinking skills at any level of education. But this is what happens when we treat schools like factories, and when we force all schools to hue to the same standardized tests, they become factories.
The teachers are as frustrated with this as anyone, based on conversations I’ve had. So let’s not blame them, or even the administrators who simply struggle to comply with mandates forced on them by politicians. Even the politicians are (ineffectively) trying to address public concerns.
We, as a society, need to take a step back–for the time being, don’t just do something, sit there–and examine what we really want an education to do. It’s not just about jobs. Education, properly done, will lead to jobs, but it will do that because education will lead to a higher level of functioning as a human being in a complex society. That is difficult to standardize on a test, but it’s the only thing worth pursuing.
This report by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press might lead to a “well, duh!” response. Nevertheless, it is good to see solid evidence bearing this out. “Citizens who believe their community’s information systems, government, media and such are performing well are more likely to be engaged in their community and are more satisfied with the quality of their community as a whole.”
The report further says that people in such communities are more likely to believe they can make a difference. Again, not rocket science. It occurs to me that there is a segment of the power structure that might benefit from these insights, though. Some in power (in my cynical view, perhaps most?) are interested mainly in power. There is a sizable segment that seeks truly to serve, however, and at least some of them believe they must serve the public by protecting it from knowing too much.
Thus, the power-hungry and the well-meaning elite may join forces to further the nanny state.
The power-hungry will not care, of course. In fact, this may encourage them to close government as much as possible, since the last they want is citizen involvement. The Romans were not the last empire to understand the usefulness of bread and circuses. But for those who really want to serve, the lesson is supported: openness and communication is always better.
A little earlier I posted an article about the creativity crisis covered by Newsweek. They also posted a good practical article on fostering creativity called Forget Brainstorming. Here’s a summary of their points:
What’s the hardest thing on there for you to do?
Read between the lines of Newsweek’s report The Creativity Crisis, and you are likely to pick up the idea that America’s declining educational effectiveness stems, at least in part, from misguided federally-imposed standards.
The average person thinks “art” in its various forms when you say “creativity,” but as this article points out, creativity is much, much broader than that and fostered by disparate activities. Creativity involves bringing together divergent and convergent thinking–generating possibilities, then combining those possibilities and evaluating them for usefulness.
The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.
I’m impressed that the scholarship that has tracked a group of “Torrance kids” who were tested and then followed for 50 years to see how well the tests predicted creativity recorded more than the stereotypical accomplishments, recognizing the creativity required in a variety of life activities.
[S]cholars—first led by Torrance, now his colleague, Garnet Millar—have been tracking the children, recording every patent earned, every business founded, every research paper published, and every grant awarded. They tallied the books, dances, radio shows, art exhibitions, software programs, advertising campaigns, hardware innovations, music compositions, public policies (written or implemented), leadership positions, invited lectures, and buildings designed.
Only recently in looking at shifting patterns have those scholars been able to pinpoint 1990 as a year in which, for the first time, creativity scores among young people began to drop. Whatever the cause (and several possible are posited in the article) I find this paragraph to be one of the saddest observations of the situation:
Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day. Why, why, why—sometimes parents just wish it’d stop. Tragically, it does stop. By middle school they’ve pretty much stopped asking. It’s no coincidence that this same time is when student motivation and engagement plummet. They didn’t stop asking questions because they lost interest: it’s the other way around. They lost interest because they stopped asking questions. [Emphasis mine: DK]
It’s not just the asking of questions but also the encouragement to ask them and then to seek the answers that seems to foster creativity. In many ways, colleges are now tasked with countering this trend toward decreasing creativity at the very time political and societal forces are pressuring them (us) to standardize curricula and move students through as quickly as possible into jobs. People need jobs, but I fear that we are completely misunderstanding the preparation required in order to be able to do them.
Creativity is hard to measure, and if we are to serve the needs of our nation and our world, colleges must resist the temptation and the pressure to engage in that which is easy to measure, simply because it is easy to measure.
