Category: Education and Administration

Academic Amazon Machine Images (AMIs)

From Twitter I learned about James Smithies
Academic Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). These are images for setting up cloud services on Amazon. The two that he now provides are for Omeka and Open Journal Systems. They are not for the technically challenged, but they could be a way for a digital humanities center/project to be set up in the cloud for those who don’t have good university server support. The day may come when you don’t need university infrastructure, but can set up your own. For that matter, this blog is on my private site which gives me a bunch of tools (like WordPress and a wiki) for about $7 a month.

Humanities (dot) Net

As part of the CHCI annual conference at the Toronto Jackman Humanities Institute they scheduled a special day with centerNet titled “Humanities (dot) Net”. The program is on 2011 Annual Meeting « Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (scroll down). The event is a bringing together of these two associations of centres connected to the humanities, one digital and one “traditional.” Of course there is nothing traditional to the CHCI centers. Some of the things that link us include:

  • Interdisciplinarity. Of course, interdisciplinarity happens at all levels and in all sorts of organizations, including departments, but generally it is centers/institutes that develop structures for encouraging interdisciplinarity.
  • Collaboration. Both types of centres structure forms of collaboration. I think the CHCI centres tend to be more conservative, often also supporting “lone” scholars, but we both try to imagine ways of bringing the right people together for research and learning.
  • Legitimization and Leadership. Both types of centres can serve to legitimize activities that are not always recognized. They lead by recognizing new interdisciplinary configurations through fellowships, project support, workshops and so on.
  • Experimenting with Futures. Both types of centers can be sites of experimentation with new types of courses, new collaborations, and new research practices. Experiments emerge out of reflection which is why these centers are a site for thinking through where the humanities are going.

Humanities (dot) net as an event brings together leaders in both types of centres to learn about each other and to reflect together on the agenda of the humanities.

Inside Higher Ed: Major Decisions

Inside Higher Ed is reporting on another study looking at earning potential and choice of major. This one is from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce and comes to similar depressing conclusions about the earning potential of humanities and arts degrees.

Some of the results are to be expected. Science, engineering, and business majors tend to be better-off financially than majors in liberal arts and humanities, education, and counseling. In addition to a wide discrepancy among average salaries, the study finds that the most popular majors have not been the ones leading to high-paying jobs, that female and minority students have tended to cluster in low-paying fields, and that graduate degrees have been essentially required for some undergraduate majors if those students were to find good jobs.

One interesting point they make is that many arts/humanities degrees lead to careers where there isn’t a lot of mobility. If you get an engineering degree you often end up in management later in your career while those who become teachers don’t have the same opportunities. At the same time, the report mentions how the breadth and communication skills of the humanities are still valued:

Surveys routinely find that employers want their employees to have a deep knowledge of their topic but a broad range of skills, and some worry that undergraduate programs too chock-full of math and science courses are producing individuals who can’t handle managerial responsibilities.

I wonder if we will shift to a model where the arts and humanities become increasingly service disciplines that provide breadth to the majority of majors in business, science, and engineering.

Is College Worth It? Pew Social & Demographic Trends

I came across this chapter from a report from the Pew Research Centre on
Is College Worth It?. The report looks at the value of education over a lifetime of work and concludes that “The typical college graduate earns an estimated $650,000 more than the typical high school graduate over the course of a 40-year work life…”

This chapter is part of a larger report on The Value of College. The authors make a number of points:

  • “A majority of Americans (57%) say the higher education system in the United States fails to provide good value for the money students and their families spend, and about four-in-ten college presidents say the system is headed in the wrong direction”
  • “just 19% of the 1,055 college presidents surveyed say they believe that the U.S. system of higher education is the best in the world. And just 7% say they think it will be the best in the world 10 years from now.”
  • “most college presidents (52%) say college students today study less than their predecessors did a decade ago, while just 7% say they study more. And 58% say that public high schools are doing a worse job of preparing students for college now than they did a decade ago, while just 6% say they are doing a better job.”
  • “the Pew Research survey finds that college graduates, on average, are happier and more satisfied with their jobs, their financial situation and their education than are those who did not attend college.”
  • “When asked what it takes for a young person to succeed in the world, more people point to traits such as a good work ethic (61% say this is extremely important) and knowing how to get along with people (57%) than say the same about a college education (42%).”
  • “the cost of a college education—at both public and private institutions—has roughly tripled since 1980 in inflation-adjusted dollars”
  • “By a small but statistically significant margin, the public says that the main purpose of a college education should be to teach work-related skills and knowledge (47%) rather than to help an individual grow personally and intellectually (39%). … College graduates tend to place more emphasis on personal and intellectual growth (52%) over career preparation (35%), while those who are not college graduates lean the other way, emphasizing career preparation (51%) over personal growth (34%).”

All of these quotes are from the Overview of the full report.

People remember 10% of what they read…? – a knol by Rutger van de Sande

I heard a keynote at the GRAND 2011 conference who mentioned a “learning pyramid” which purports to show that lecturing is the worst way to teach.

I went looking for the research behind this and it seems that the pyramid is a hoax. People remember 10% of what they read…? – a knol by Rutger van de Sande is a short study that tried to figure out what were really the percentages. Van de Sande’s study came up with different numbers: Hearing: 36%, Reading: 51%, Seeing: 35%, Hearing and Seeing: 54%, Discussing: 50%, Experiencing: 70%, and Explaining: 58%.

Other blogs and essays on the subject include: Will Thalheimer‘s blog debunking the pyramid. There is an article in Education titled, The Learning Pyramid: Does It Point Teachers in the Right Direction? (that I haven’t read) that looks at the source for the numbers. Finally there is a long blog post on the subject by David Jones. He says that the “research is generally referenced back to the National Training Laboratories in Bethel Maine.” The NTL has apparently lost the original data.

This then raises the question of whether lecturing is really so bad.

Education: The PhD factory

Thanks to Slashdot I came across two articles in Nature about the excess of PhDs in the West. Education: The PhD factory (you need a licensed login) says that the “world is producing more PhDs than ever before. Is it time to stop?” This story is largely based on an OECD Working Paper titled Careers of doctorate holders: employment and mobility patterns (PDF).

The other Nature article is an opinion piece titled Reform the PhD system or close it down by Mark C. Taylor. He argues that the system should be changed drastically, at least in the US.

History of Project Management page

On the web I came across this page on the History of Project Management on the web site lessons-from-history.com. Most histories of project management are pathetic, this is more substantial. The page and associated pages come from a forthcoming book on The History of Project Management.

The Latin word projectum means, “to throw something forwards.” The word “project” originally meant “something that comes before anything else is done”. When the word was initially adopted, it referred to a plan of something, not to the act of actually carrying this plan out. Something performed in accordance with a project was called an object. This use of “project” changed in the 1950s when several techniques for project management were introduced: with this advent the word slightly changed meaning to cover both projects and objects. However in certain projects there may still exist so called objects and object leaders, reflecting the older use of the words.

As an alternative view, you might try What Monty Python Taught Me About the Software Industry which applies selected key gems of Python wisdom (like “I’m not dead”) to the software development process.

The Management Myth

Wandering through The Atlantic I came across an article I loved back when I first read it. The Management Myth by Matthew Stewart (June 2006) has a subtitle that says it all, “Most of Management Theory is Inane …” Stewart compares philosophy to business degrees and comes to the conclusion that philosophy should take over.

The recognition that management theory is a sadly neglected subdiscipline of philosophy began with an experience of déjà vu. As I plowed through my shelfload of bad management books, I beheld a discipline that consists mainly of unverifiable propositions and cryptic anecdotes, is rarely if ever held accountable, and produces an inordinate number of catastrophically bad writers. It was all too familiar. There are, however, at least two crucial differences between philosophers and their wayward cousins. The first and most important is that philosophers are much better at knowing what they don’t know. The second is money. In a sense, management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much.

Digging Into Data: Second Round Announced

The second round of the Digging Into Data has just been announced and they now have one more country (the Netherlands) and eight international funders. (You can see the SSHRC Announcement here.)

The Digging Into Data challenge is an international grant program that funds groups that have teams in at least two countries so it is good that they are expanding the countries participating. What is even more extraordinary is that they have one adjudication process across all the funders (rather than an adjudication process where each national team has to apply to their own country’s program – which never works.)

I was part of one of the groups that got funding in the first round with the Criminal Intent project. I’ve found the collaboration very fruitful so I’m glad they are supporting this for another round.

Home – Kule Institute for Advanced Studies – University of Alberta

Today I went to the inaugural meeting on the Culture, Media and Technology theme of the Kule Institute for Advanced Studies (KIAS). KIAS is a new interdisciplinary research institute at the University of Alberta set up with generous support from the Kules. The inaugural director Jerry Varsava took us through the background and activities of the institute. Some of the key features of the institute are:

  • It is led by the Faculty of Arts, but supports research generally in the SSH area
  • It organizes activities around themes of which there are now three including Culture, Media and Technology
  • The initial activities/programmes include funding for research clusters and interdisciplinary seminars
  • There is also support for external collaborations, doctoral dissertation completion fellowships and for post-doctoral fellows

The key is the cluster grants that are designed to support interdisciplinary teams.

I should mention that I am on the Administrative Board.