TED Education — Video Lessons For Students 88
New submitter EuNao writes "TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), the organization based on 'ideas worth sharing,' launched a new initiative this past week. It is called TED-Ed, and it aims to engage students with unforgettable lessons. There are many places in the world where a wonderful teacher or mentor is teaching something mind-blowing, but as it stands now not many people have access to that powerful experience. Ted-Ed aims to bring that engaging experience to everyone who has an internet connection. Here are summaries and links to the nine videos that were initially released."
3 edu-sites already. (Score:5, Interesting)
Three education related sites released this year:
In addition to the programming initiatives at Khan academy and MIT OCW [mit.edu] that existed already.
We have dropouts/people who never went to college holding high positions (work with a bunch of such guys on open source projects) Why would people even go to college once this becomes mainstream?
Academic worry (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone who's likely to end up as a university professor of math in a decade or so, online learning like this makes me wonder about my long-term job security. Why should I get paid to put together and give a lecture on material that an excellent lecturer and support staff have already thoroughly covered online? Sure, there's more to classroom learning than mutely listening to a lecture, but is there enough to justify the extraordinarily high cost of the alternative? Will it be tempting in a few years for a budget-conscious administrator to have undergraduates watch free online lectures with grad students doing all the support work (grading, office hours, recitations, etc.)?
I take some comfort in the fact that people are willing to pay through the nose for a prestigious education and that online education is currently a second-class citizen. Academic institutions are also very slow to change as a rule. My theoretical job is probably safe, but I don't know what the long term future holds. Residential undergraduate institutions stocked with professors giving lectures may become extremely rare as high quality, highly reproducible, efficient online learning improves and perhaps becomes mainstream.
Re:3 edu-sites already. (Score:4, Interesting)
We have dropouts/people who never went to college holding high positions (work with a bunch of such guys on open source projects) Why would people even go to college once this becomes mainstream?
People will go to college because for the next generation or two because the majority of them will be interview and/or hired by people who went to college. Many college graduates feel there was value to their college experience, even beyond the education they received, and they will favor others who might have had that experience.
For many, their college or university affiliation is like belonging to a special club. Even more so if they belonged to a fraternity or sorority. It will take time for that to wane.
Re:3 edu-sites already. (Score:2, Interesting)
I find Ted talks a very frustrating experience. So many of them are just psuedo-intellectual waffle - with some gems buried in there. I watch quite a few... and I can pretty much sum up how interesting the talk will be in the first few seconds.
Young woman speaker = 99% chance of being shit.
Young man speaker = 30% chance of being shit.
Middle aged woman= 70% chance of being shit
Middle aged man=20% chance of being shit.
Elderly woman=50% chance of being shit
Elderly man="10% chance of being shit"
First words "I'm a storyteller"=shit.
Anything art related=shit.
Ecological speech=shit
Anyone media trained=75% chance of being shit
The only "reliably good" Ted talks come from middle aged/elderly professor types with no media training talking knowledgably about their geeky subject.
Is this anyone else's experience of TED?
Re:Give it up. (Score:1, Interesting)
It's the difference between learning what all the memory addresses do on a Commodore 64 (POKE xxxxx, 254) and learning what the correct command in VBA is when you're working Excel.
Where's the difference? Both are useless artefacts of bad interfaces that clog our minds.
college discrimination aginst peopel with disabili (Score:4, Interesting)
I think that the Traditional College system is not the best fit for lot’s of jobs and there are better ways to learn and to show that you have skills.
Harvard Study: Too Much Emphasis On College Education?
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2011/0202/Does-everyone-need-a-college-degree-Maybe-not-says-Harvard-study [csmonitor.com] [csmonitor.com] [CC] [MD] [GC]
http://hotair.com/archives/2011/02/02/harvard-study-hey-maybe-were-placing-too-much-emphasis-on-a-college-education/ [hotair.com] [hotair.com] [CC] [MD] [GC]
“It would be fine if we had an alternative system [for students who don’t get college degrees], but we’re virtually unique among industrialized countries in terms of not having another system and relying so heavily on higher education,” says Robert Schwartz, who heads the Pathways to Prosperity project at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.
Emphasizing college as the only path may actually cause some students – who are bored in class but could enjoy learning that’s more entwined with the workplace – to drop out, he adds. “If the image [of college] is more years of just sitting in classrooms, that’s not very persuasive.”
The United States can learn from other countries, particularly in northern Europe, Professor Schwartz says. In Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland, for instance, between 40 and 70 percent of high-schoolers opt for programs that combine classroom and workplace learning, many of them involving apprenticeships. These pathways result in a “qualification” that has real currency in the labor market”
“It would be fine if we had an alternative system [for students who don’t get college degrees], but we’re virtually unique among industrialized countries in terms of not having another system and relying so heavily on higher education,” says Robert Schwartz, who heads the Pathways to Prosperity project at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.
Emphasizing college as the only path may actually cause some students – who are bored in class but could enjoy learning that’s more entwined with the workplace – to drop out, he adds. “If the image [of college] is more years of just sitting in classrooms, that’s not very persuasive.”
The United States can learn from other countries, particularly in northern Europe, Professor Schwartz says. In Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland, for instance, between 40 and 70 percent of high-schoolers opt for programs that combine classroom and workplace learning, many of them involving apprenticeships. These pathways result in a “qualification” that has real currency in the labor market”
http://ketchumgroup.net/blog/skills-needed-skills-defined/ [ketchumgroup.net]
“This determination could have long-range impact in the use of diplomas as blanket screening tools. Unlike industry-based certification, diplomas and degrees from schools seldom define demonstrated and assessed skills. This EEOC guidance could speed the adoption of skill-based, industry driven, skill certification. Currently, the US Department of Labor lists over 4,400 industry-based certifications on the Certification Finder at the CareerOneStop.com website. These certifications will rise in importance to employers while education-based credentials may fade. Effective skill development on the job requires a structured approach based on the defined skills used in the workplace. In such a structured OJT workplace, meeting this EEOC guidance will be readily accomplished, and new employees quickly trained in the need skills.”
Re:Academic worry (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to be a professor (of American Literature). I am unusual in that I have a wide background which includes mathematics, programming, and skill with computer systems/networks. I love literature, languages, poetry, art, and postmodernity. I also love computers, GREP, web development, and cosmogony (this last strictly as a spectator).
Increasingly, I found academia stultifying, especially because it meant laboring in obscurity for students who were on their way somewhere else. The best students--the graduate students I mentored in their quests to find professorships--were far and few between and headed to either to the dead-end of no-humanities-jobs or the undead-end of low pay and crippling student loans. My colleagues in the math department did not (over)produce as many Ph.D.s as we in English, but their also wallowed in the budget-cut gutter. As academics, we all were getting defunded and lines for new hires were either cancelled or endlessly deferred.
All that aside, when you find yourself saying something like your livelihood depends upon a captive audience "willing to pay through the nose" while the upstart competitor is presently perceived (and sometimes is, but not always) as a "second-class citizen" you've seriously got to wonder what your future holds.
I left academia in 2010 to become an entry-level front-end developer in the Bay Area (mostly to come back to California where I grew up. I'd had enough of living in the Midwest at an R2 university). Right off the bat I made 20% more than I did as a faculty of 7 years. My salary, my environment, my autonomy--all these things have only improved in the last two years. Every day it gets better.
I do miss some aspects of academia, the colleagues and motivated students especially. I also miss unfettered access to a research library. But I don't miss grading, overwork, low pay, and obscurity. There are also things about tech employment I dislike: petty politics, office culture (presentism), boyzone, sexism, homophobia (even in SF), and 50+ hours/week cycle of declining productivity.
Anyhow, this is a long anecdote to warn people like you that academia wears thin for many academics, but academics are so specialized they often have no choice but to stay the course they set many years ago in graduate school. Others of us who have fungible skills (technology) go elsewhere when the romanticized ideal of the university is replaced by the day-to-day of academic life. As someone who fell in love with information technology with his first Apple //e ('e' for education, remember), I saw the writing on the digital wall.
You think your job at some (more likely than not obscure) university will keep-on-keeping-on now that disruptive technology (such as Ted Education, tablet devices, and Stanford's free courses) have ruptured the pristine edifice of the ivory tower?
Think hard and think again because as sure as it will rain, academic jobs are going to be even more severely constrained.
Re:Give it up. (Score:4, Interesting)
No mod points at the moment, alas, or I would have awarded either "insightful" or "funny" to parent post.
It needs to be noted, though, that while learning the details of commands in archaic interfaces is a mind clogging pursuit, learning how to learn that kind of detail, when you need to do it, is a critical skill in a changing world. And then of course there is the matter of acquiring the wisdom to know when it would be a good thing to study out the language, or when it makes more sense to just script out your profound new ideas in Perl or Python and get some dull minded C or C++ code monkey to do the scuttwork.