A couple of critiques about modern American education
Excellent Sheep (book)
Bloggingheads.tv interview - Glenn Loury (Brown University) and William Deresiewicz (Excellent Sheep)
At around the 18:00 minute mark there is a discussion of the Econ Major (which at Ivy League schools that don't have a Business School is about the Business Major as well).
The Overprotected Kid - Hanna Rosin
A couple of my posts (one is a guest post on another blog) about what I hope students will develop as mental habits
Encouraging The Mind to Putter
Making connections via mental puttering: Lessons from teaching with blogs (The picture of me, which from about 10 years ago, shows I didn't always have as much gray in my beard.)
Some Business News Web sites that might be used to write a blog post on other than the prompt
NPR site - search on profit sharing
New York Times site - search on the invisible handshake (this illustrates that not all searches will hit a home run for you).
PBS NewsHour - Economy page
Google Search - Transfer pricing
Showing posts with label 04. Learning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 04. Learning. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 17, 2017
Sunday, October 15, 2017
Reactions to the most recent blog posts
One of the challenges for me in reading your posts is to determine whether you are saying things in a genuine way or if instead you are writing about what you think I want to hear. The former is what I hope for. The latter is a kind of opportunism, one I'm afraid too many students learn as their default behavior from all the classes they take. Instructors have power over students that results from the ability to assign grades. I really wish I didn't have that power, yet that we were nonetheless engaged in this blogging activity. This is impossible to pull off, given the realities of the system. So here I will content myself with describing the ideal.
Earlier in the semester I mentioned an important work skill that you all need to acquire - the ability to write a cogent memo to some higher ups in the company where you work. Here I want to mention a different life skill that you need to to master as well, one that I have yet to talk about in class. You need to self-direct your own learning based on following your interests, your opportunities, and your current skill set. You might think of this as coming up with your own prompts and then writing to them. Sometimes you can do this in your head without typing anything out. Other times you have to process the ideas in a variety of ways to internalize them. In doing this you need to please yourself, which is what all self-directed learners do. What that means might be vague now, but over time you develop a sense of taste of what is pleasing. Developing that sense of taste is an important part of the the learning.
For a specific subject matter, of course, there is benefit to acquire insight from someone with expertise, who can get you deeper into the subject than you might with your own explorations and/or who can get you up to speed in a much shorter period of time than you would otherwise be able to do on your own. But this is a two-way street. There is the matter of why the expert will talk with you. What do you bring to the table? How will you use the information after the conversation occurs? Being self-directed in your own learning will help answer those questions.
* * * * *
The two most common terms from our course that students brought into these posts were opportunism and transaction costs. Nobody mentioned gift exchange and collegiality, what we talked about during the very first week of the class. (If you added the class after that there is some reason why you may have not mentioned it, but do note there is presentation material you could have reviewed on this.) Likewise, nobody mentioned complexity, the use of buffers to manage uncertainty, and that in general we come up with rules of thumb for making decisions (we satisfice) rather than optimize. In other words, you connected what you said in the blog posts, but you didn't connect with other things we talked about in class.
The reality is I can't write a prompt on everything we consider. So even if you are writing on my prompt rather than on your own, the more connections you can make with class themes - including from the Excel homework or from class discussion - the richer will be your take away from the course.
Finally, I want to mention a paper I stumbled upon a few years ago while I was researching something else. It is by Kenneth Bruffee and is called Learning and the "Conversation of Mankind" and which might be a bit much for you to read through. It definitely isn't about economics, so I will give you a very condensed version here. Thinking, writing the blog posts, and class discussion are all conversation in some form. That class discussion is conversation shouldn't be surprising. That thinking is conversation might be a new thought for you. Bruffee calls it internalized conversation. Then, writing is also an imagined conversation, with the hypothetical reader (who is in your head). You always have the reader in mind when you write.
I try to teach this way, even though we are an Econ class, not an English class. I wonder if you had this sort of course as a first-year student (perhaps it would take several classes like this) whether the lessons I mentioned about learning self-direction would have taken hold with you earlier. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts about that.
Earlier in the semester I mentioned an important work skill that you all need to acquire - the ability to write a cogent memo to some higher ups in the company where you work. Here I want to mention a different life skill that you need to to master as well, one that I have yet to talk about in class. You need to self-direct your own learning based on following your interests, your opportunities, and your current skill set. You might think of this as coming up with your own prompts and then writing to them. Sometimes you can do this in your head without typing anything out. Other times you have to process the ideas in a variety of ways to internalize them. In doing this you need to please yourself, which is what all self-directed learners do. What that means might be vague now, but over time you develop a sense of taste of what is pleasing. Developing that sense of taste is an important part of the the learning.
For a specific subject matter, of course, there is benefit to acquire insight from someone with expertise, who can get you deeper into the subject than you might with your own explorations and/or who can get you up to speed in a much shorter period of time than you would otherwise be able to do on your own. But this is a two-way street. There is the matter of why the expert will talk with you. What do you bring to the table? How will you use the information after the conversation occurs? Being self-directed in your own learning will help answer those questions.
* * * * *
The two most common terms from our course that students brought into these posts were opportunism and transaction costs. Nobody mentioned gift exchange and collegiality, what we talked about during the very first week of the class. (If you added the class after that there is some reason why you may have not mentioned it, but do note there is presentation material you could have reviewed on this.) Likewise, nobody mentioned complexity, the use of buffers to manage uncertainty, and that in general we come up with rules of thumb for making decisions (we satisfice) rather than optimize. In other words, you connected what you said in the blog posts, but you didn't connect with other things we talked about in class.
The reality is I can't write a prompt on everything we consider. So even if you are writing on my prompt rather than on your own, the more connections you can make with class themes - including from the Excel homework or from class discussion - the richer will be your take away from the course.
Finally, I want to mention a paper I stumbled upon a few years ago while I was researching something else. It is by Kenneth Bruffee and is called Learning and the "Conversation of Mankind" and which might be a bit much for you to read through. It definitely isn't about economics, so I will give you a very condensed version here. Thinking, writing the blog posts, and class discussion are all conversation in some form. That class discussion is conversation shouldn't be surprising. That thinking is conversation might be a new thought for you. Bruffee calls it internalized conversation. Then, writing is also an imagined conversation, with the hypothetical reader (who is in your head). You always have the reader in mind when you write.
I try to teach this way, even though we are an Econ class, not an English class. I wonder if you had this sort of course as a first-year student (perhaps it would take several classes like this) whether the lessons I mentioned about learning self-direction would have taken hold with you earlier. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts about that.
Friday, September 29, 2017
From a Talk I Attended at the Educause Learning Initiative
Below is one slide from a PowerPoint presentation given back in 2008. The talk was done by Thomas Reeves. Many of the ideas in the presentation resonated with me. You can click through the entire PowerPoint and get a sense of the ideas and issues. It might also help you to understand the methods we are using in our class. They derive from the considerations discussed in this talk.
Here is one other point. While I think much of your education should be ethical, I am somewhat uncomfortable being put in the role of provider of that education. I am trying to contain my role to getting you to consider the issues. How to resolve the issues is for you to determine on your own or in consultation with friends, family, and your spiritual advisors.
Regarding the discussion we had in class yesterday about tipping, where I jokingly said that members of the class are too nice, you should be aware of some more current research that shows many people are very nice in certain contexts and then not nice at all in other contexts. The current research tries to reconcile this inconsistency.
Here is one other point. While I think much of your education should be ethical, I am somewhat uncomfortable being put in the role of provider of that education. I am trying to contain my role to getting you to consider the issues. How to resolve the issues is for you to determine on your own or in consultation with friends, family, and your spiritual advisors.
Regarding the discussion we had in class yesterday about tipping, where I jokingly said that members of the class are too nice, you should be aware of some more current research that shows many people are very nice in certain contexts and then not nice at all in other contexts. The current research tries to reconcile this inconsistency.
Discovery as Learning
I liked this quote.
Quote Details: Albert Szent-Gyorgyi: Discovery consists of seeing... - The Quotations Page via kwout
If you find connections between your experience and the topics of the course as you compose your blog posts or during discussion in class, that would fit in with the quote and make you a budding social scientist!
Thursday, September 7, 2017
Connecting Bits of Information
The image below can be found in the PowerPoint for the First Class Session. It is meant to illustrate that knowledge is about connections between different pieces of information. In our class I want to make explicit that building connections is one of the main goals. Both class discussion and the blogging that you will be doing are meant to produce connections.
Wednesday, August 23, 2017
America's Battle with Creativity - Is School Killing It? What else might explain this?
The issues about learning that will be raised during the class session are not just for members of the class but really are for society overall. To show the concern that has been expressed on the matter of creativity (and that we're not doing as well as we should) consider the following two pieces from a few years ago. I wonder if in reading them you find yourself surprised. I was when I read them.
If you buy the results in the piece linked above, the question is why this is happening. One argument that has been advanced is that kids get too much supervision these days so don't develop a sense of autonomy and that they can function well by making their own independent judgments. A piece called The Overprotected Kid makes this argument quite forcefully.
The linked piece contrasts conformity with creativity and argues that most people want to conform. They don't want to buck the system. On this one, rather than ask why, I'd like to ask simply whether this agrees with your own experience. On campus, are most students conformists in your experience?
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