Buzzwords Are Stifling Innovation In College Teaching 95
jyosim writes: Tech marketers brag about the world-changing impact of 'adaptive learning' and other products, but they all mean something different by the buzzword. On the other side of it, professors are notoriously skeptical of companies, and crave precise language. Richard Culatta, director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education, says the buzzwords have thus become a major obstacle to improving teaching on campuses, since these tribes (professor and ed-tech vendors) must work together.
Re:Don't buy in. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not something that just "capitalists" do; spinning and BS are part of every known organization. We saw it in the Soviet Union also. Humans, especially those who strive to move up in an organization or power structure, are overall aggressive and selfish, and playing games with language is part of this process.
Even if students don't want to play language games themselves, they should be exposed to spin and understand its usage and techniques in order to navigate the real world.
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Part of the trouble that I've observed in groups is that at least a slight majority of the group will go with the slickest, most optimistic presentation or performer and will be taken-in to agree even when they either have no understanding of what's going on. These same people will often accept buzzwords despite there already being generic terms for what's described. Worse, after drinking the ko
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The worst thing is that these people probably most often get to be influential managers later, because they speak the language.
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I don't buy the idea that imprecise buzzwords are the root of this problem. It seems an overall lack of understanding of new teaching methods is the problem.
The first half of the article talks about how people don't know what these buzzwords mean. But the second half doesn't even mention buzzwords again. It talks about a societal gap between current educators and education innovators. This is a problem I can agree is slowing adoption.
Re:Don't buy in. (Score:5, Insightful)
I might agree that most of the problem isn't buzzwords, but it's also not lack of understanding. It's skepticism. These "new teaching methods" are unproven, and lots of them are starting to show the cracks in their shiny. Just yesterday we had a story about Udacity not living up to expectations.
There's an interesting statistic that shows computer science professors are the least likely to use learning software like Blackboard. Why? It's not because they don't understand the technology. It's because they've already integrated web pages, email and other technology into their teaching, and are justifiably skeptical about the push-button "solutions" like Blackboard.
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I might agree that most of the problem isn't buzzwords, but it's also not lack of understanding. It's skepticism. These "new teaching methods" are unproven, and lots of them are starting to show the cracks in their shiny. Just yesterday we had a story about Udacity not living up to expectations.
I agree that skepticism is the root of the problem, but education can also help with that. For one, most people feel that if 90% of educational innovations provide no benefit, that is a failure of the industry. But in my opinion, if even 1% of these innovations are effective and scale-able, it will be revolutionary. As long as the other 99% at least don't hurt education.
The education industry could learn a lot from the angel / VC funding industry. You only need 1-10% successes to make the 90-99% failures wo
Risk Tolerance not that High (Score:5, Insightful)
The education industry could learn a lot from the angel / VC funding industry. You only need 1-10% successes to make the 90-99% failures worth it as long as the success are sufficiently scale-able.
Try telling that to the students who have had an appalling low standard of education because of the 90-99% failure rate of all the new things they had tried on them. Education involves humans and so experimenting with it is somewhere in between the venture capital model you mention and medical science. Nobody would accept a 90-99% failure rate for medical innovations which get as far as being tried on patients!
Clearly education is not life-critical as medicine can be but, unlike medicine, there is really no way to determine whether a new technique is effective other than to try it on students. So while education is more risk tolerant than medicine it is nowhere near as risk tolerant as VC industry funding.
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Try telling that to the students who have had an appalling low standard of education because of the 90-99% failure rate of all the new things they had tried on them.
I have not read any studies which claim a significant number of these new techniques are creating an appallingly lower standard of education than the students would have gotten otherwise. In contrast the most damning criticism is usually that they techniques had no effect. In my opinion, this isn't because the new techniques are that good. It is because it is really hard to do worse than the status quo.
Nobody would accept a 90-99% failure rate for medical innovations which get as far as being tried on patients!
Depends on the possible side effects and depends on the most likely outcome using conventional medicine. I
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Try telling that to the students who have had an appalling low standard of education because of the 90-99% failure rate of all the new things they had tried on them.
I have not read any studies which claim a significant number of these new techniques are creating an appallingly lower standard of education than the students would have gotten otherwise.
Then you haven't read any studies on the subject at all.
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If these results are as common as you state, do you have sources to back them up? And I don't mean a source complaining about a few instances; it would need to be something similar to a survey paper looking at a large representative sample size of approaches. Considering the amount of funding the unions would provide to someone trying to prove that, if there is such evidence it should be very easy to find.
And I do mean evidence against innovative techniques coming from private industry. Abominations like th
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Depends on the possible side effects and depends on the most likely outcome using conventional medicine.
Well since we already have an educational model that works (or at least used to) to some degree and we are looking at ways to improve it the medical equivalent would be having a condition which medical science can already manage to a varying degree of success and then replacing that with a new treatment which has never been tried on anyone before (so nobody knows the side effects) but which the doctors think will work better than the old treatment and they can give you a glitzy presentation from the compan
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Well since we already have an educational model that works (or at least used to) to some degree and we are looking at ways to improve it the medical equivalent would be having a condition which medical science can already manage to a varying degree of success and then replacing that with a new treatment
I would equate changing our school systems with replacing the use of leeches to treat medical conditions. You know, a method used for a very long time that we now realize is very archaic. It just seems the educational industry is about 100 years behind the medical industry in finding ways of improving on methods used near the beginning of the industrial revolution.
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There are lots of people who claim that the current education methods are 'archaic' and 'old fashioned' but I never heard any one of them claim why that is so. I have the impression that much of the drive to change education is just for the sake of change (and for the sake of money in the pockets of the producers of the books etc that go with it).
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There are lots of people who claim that the current education methods are 'archaic' and 'old fashioned' but I never heard any one of them claim why that is so.
That is surprising since claims regarding the failings of our schools are so prevalent in media and society as a whole. Our students hardly even compete with other developed countries on almost any metric anyone has thought up yet. Special needs children rarely get enough resources, and gifted children rarely have an educational experience that rises to their level. Your average adult can barely calculate tip, or locate foreign countries on a map. The symptoms of the problem are seemingly infinite.
I would a
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I live in the Netherlands, and while some of the things you describe happen here too, education is improving here. Not because of improved teaching methods, although there have been some innovations like interactive schoolboards and the use of the internet for finding information, but mostly because we set minimal levels of the skills teachers need to have. And still there is always a call for better, faster and radically different education. But nobody ever seems to care about why this is necessary and wha
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That is surprising since claims regarding the failings of our schools are so prevalent in media and society as a whole.
I agree - it's the same here in Canada - but I would attribute that to attempts to improve the system using new techniques which have never been proven to work better than the system they replaced. Worse the reason given for using the new system is that the previous system is "old and archaic". You do not replace something simply because it is old, you replace it when you have something better.
Many of the new teaching techniques I have seen work not because of their brilliance - indeed many are half-ba
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There's an interesting statistic that shows computer science professors are the least likely to use learning software like Blackboard. Why? It's not because they don't understand the technology. It's because they've already integrated web pages, email and other technology into their teaching, and are justifiably skeptical about the push-button "solutions" like Blackboard.
This explanation for why they don't use push-button solutions like Blackboard is what gives me hope for finding new education innovations. Because they are still integrating technology, they are just doing it on a more personal and customize-able level. Current innovations mostly go for low hanging fruit, which usually involve simplistic and push-button solutions. But as adoption grows and skepticism subsides, innovations will become far more specific. That takes more funding and a higher chance of failure,
Classic problem of tech culture (Score:1)
The fascination (bordering on obsession) with abstraction has extended to language use in tech. Euphemisms, abbreviations, and jargon are rife.
In education, there is no room for buzzwords. They want to know exactly what the meaning of your buzzword is so they can use that, the meaning, instead of your buzzword. Think of it as refusing to use contractions in proper speech.
Re:Classic problem of tech culture (Score:5, Funny)
How can you maximize the advantages of outcome-based education, without standardized linguistics targeted to areas of core competencies? Hiring managers have expressed interest in consensus oriented, business ready, net native, grey hats, who speak in code and collaborate in dynamic non-traditional employment. To breed a culture of millenial code beasts, we must reach into their social sphere, and peer coach them with best practices.
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BINGO!
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Looking forward to paying you a ridiculous salary,
- Silicon Valley HR Department
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How can you maximize the advantages of outcome-based education, without standardized linguistics targeted to areas of core competencies? Hiring managers have expressed interest in consensus oriented, business ready, net native, grey hats, who speak in code and collaborate in dynamic non-traditional employment. To breed a culture of millenial code beasts, we must reach into their social sphere, and peer coach them with best practices.
Your theory is obviously complete bullshit. You don't even have any synergy.
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How can you maximize the advantages of outcome-based education, without standardized linguistics targeted to areas of core competencies? Hiring managers have expressed interest in consensus oriented, business ready, net native, grey hats, who speak in code and collaborate in dynamic non-traditional employment. To breed a culture of millenial code beasts, we must reach into their social sphere, and peer coach them with best practices.
Your theory is obviously complete bullshit. You don't even have any synergy.
Worse still, I see no mention of The Cloud.
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*collapses to hands and knees in despair*
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Fine then, let's *party*
How can you *become* *happy campers* in *pleasant combinations*, without a *picnic* *together*? *silly cows* want *sauce* in *Pretty Space* from *sisters*, who *spread the wax*, are *squishy*, *surprising toys*, *take* *together* in *slippery places*. To *pull* *people energy* of *happy campers*, we must *slide* to *slow time* and *spit* *special things*.
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The enabling of the area-specific urges compels me to explore tissues in unexpectedly pleasant ways while pondering the grammatical nuance and specific detail implied in your ramblings, and gives pause to ask if one might inquire about the availability of a news letter.
I shall subsequently be found to be relocated to my bunk for an unspecified duration.
(You should totally post one of these in every thread from now on.)
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I think we just need to change the paradigm here. Ultimately, we need to build synergy with some adaptive learning mechanisms, using a community focused approach. Maybe we could come up with some ideas for an iterative development of some new models that are more learning oriented.
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Well, we'll just have to be pro-active and leverage our synergies.
"Online" classes (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a buzzword with no common meaning: Online classes.
Does it mean:
The class meets in a traditional classroom, but assignments are submitted electronically?
There is no class meeting? Only assignments are posted online. There is no lecture and students work independently?
The class meets online in realtime?
Only a recording of the classroom lecture is available online?
FWIW, I am a community college prof and have seen ALL of the above describe "online" learning.
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The term 'online class' used in at least two Ontario schools (a college and a university) have been fairly consistent. It is a class where all material is online - no specific meeting times. Material is also submitted through a website.
The only point of difference is the exam - the university I attend has exams in person for online classes.
I believe given the list you have, if the class meets in a traditional manner - it is not an online class in the way most would understand it.
Re:"Online" classes (Score:5, Informative)
Here in Florida, the term "online class" has a specific legal meaning - 80% or more of the class and class work takes place online.
Note that it may be synchronous - ie, using Big Blue Button for a lecture session, or old IRC style chat. Or it may be asynchronous - 3am or 3pm doesn't matter.
There are also definitions of "reduced seat time" or "hybrid" - where about 50% of the class and class work take place online or some other non-classroom environment. So the traditional Tuesday Thursday class, only meets Tuesdays and rest is done online.
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I TA'ed an online class this summer in Florida at one of the universities. By "TA," I mean I taught the class, while the professor whose name was on the course but who can't actually work a computer didn't do jack.
We used Canvas; the students never met in person (and were scattered on several continents). The students had readings and recorded video lectures, both with the professor and with guest experts in various aspects of the course. The students had writing assignments that they submitted electroni
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You said the professor didn't do jack, but then you say the students had recorded lectures with the professor. Who set the lesson plan?
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Far, far too many online courses have roughly the same format as a Slashdot FP - Post the day's reading material, then require students to "discuss" it. Except, just like with Slas
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My online classes have occasionally included a few points for "participation". Some profs simply stated "thou shalt post thrice weekly to thy Blackboard forum", and that gets them off the hook for having to think about how to get online students to participate. They can show a metric to the department chair and say "see, 80% of my students are participating. Therefore your decision to mandate classroom participation online was a good and wise decision, o chair of my department." </brownNose>
The bet
Bingo (Score:5, Interesting)
This faculty comment pretty much sums it up:
"Curiosity, imagination and critical understanding are reduced to rodent responses in an academic Skinner-box."
Sadly, this might acually be better than sitting in a 300-student lecture taught by an adjunct.
Re:Bingo (Score:5, Interesting)
Or, to be more realistic, that the college student due to the money being spent will be inherently more motivated. This ignores the fact that some students go to college just for health insurance.
I see the situation with using technology to be more complicated. An underlying assumption that the computer will be more motivational that a 'boring' professor. I have not seen this to be the case. The long term motivation of the student still depends on human intervention. Gamification is not going to work for every student, and while there is nothing wrong with a college that uses it, such a college would not inherently be better than a more traditional college
There is also an assumption that the making the buzzwords more precise will help, i.e. Competency, Adaptive, Individualized,Differentiated. In fact it comes back to motivation. Most of these are not expecting an equal level of achievement by the end of the course, i.e. not every student is expected have read and analyzed the Odyssey by the end of the course, and maybe that is ok. Some will see it as unfair that they were expected to comprehend Ulysses while others were given an A for reading the Devil Wears Prada, but that is an issue with equity and equality being different things.
No, the problem is that an intelligent student can game the system. I have seen it will well respected adaptive courses. Student purposefully keep their level low so they are able to get credit with minimal effort. If the system still requires equal outcomes, then they are not adaptive or whatever buzzword one wants to use.
I see the problem as it always has been, valuing a degree over learning. There is no technology that is going to educate a student that is simply in school to buy a sheet of paper. For a student that is there to learn, the old technology of a book, a professor who has time to talk, and equally motivated classmates, cannot be beat.
Educational technology is therefore a critical part of universities who simply exist to funnel student loans to executives of the university. It a symbiosis between institutions who care nothing for education, and students who do not care to be educated.
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Gamification existed long before "online". People have always played the angles to get a better grade, and some even mistake the effort of "begging for points" for "doing actual work and learning from it". They've learned only how to game the system, so to them every future task becomes a game in which they only have to demonstrate a positive outcome.
We generally call them "executives."
Re: Buzzwords are stifling at work too (Score:1)
You're being too literal. Big data doesn't actually refer to data volume. It's a category of technologies. If you have huge amounts of data in a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database and called it "big data" you would be laughed at.
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Not defending it. But we traded about 20% of North America's and over 10% of Europe's electric power with Access.
Big money doesn't imply big data.
So aside from being laughably wrong, you have a point.
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Big data is a broad term for data sets so large or complex that traditional data processing applications are inadequate
Precision (Score:5, Insightful)
The problems occur when you use those specific terms with NON-insiders.
A doctor should simply say arm bone, or at least "ulna - a bone in your arm", when talking to a patient.
Similarly, a competent businessman will strip out the specialized terms when talking to specific people. If you are selling software to a business, do NOT say 'enterprise', say business.
The only reason insiders use insider terms with outsiders are:
To hide something - a lie, incompetence, overcharges, etc.
Because they themselves don't understand the term and are reading from a script.
They are REALLY BAD AT COMMUNICATING.
For example, When I talk to my father, I don't talk about object oriented programming, I talk about re-useable software parts.
Re:Precision (Score:5, Insightful)
And I would say the obfuscation begins with the words innovation and stifling, because it starts out with the premise it's an actual improvement.
What we have is companies selling products, or trying to co-opt the conversation about education.
The problem is these aren't entities who have any demonstrate-able skills in this field. They're taking stuff they've made up which they claim improves education, but have no evidence for.
So when we see "stifling innovation" in the headline, the headline is already bullshit, because it pre-supposes that "not buying into the bullshit of corporations" is stifling, and that "untested and proven methods" is innovation. The headline is a lie from the beginning.
What it's really doing is shedding light on the fact that university professors are calling bullshit around some vague terms which lack standardization or substantiation.
Most of this article could have been generated by a bullshit mission-statement generator, and would be about as meaningful.
In other words, we have a tech columnist who is already biased towards to claim this stuff is "better".
The entire article sounds like bullshit to me.
Re:Precision (Score:5, Informative)
You're referring to jargon. Jargon is a set of specialized terms that people familiar with a field use to talk about it. Jargon terms have more specific meanings than regular terms. Using them with outsiders is bad.
The article is talking about buzzwords. Buzzwords are terms that have less specific meaning than plain language. They're designed to be general, nonspecific and impressive sounding. You use them to mislead, obscure, or impress.
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That is, sometimes you are trying to be more specific in order to avoid confusion, but sometimes you are trying to be specific to impress. Similarly, sometimes you are trying to be general - so as to be sure to include rare cases.
My second example - the use of the word "Enterprise" is a great case whe
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Those are great examples of buzzwords. Nonspecific to the point of meaningless.
Now give examples of the rest of your point. Someone else used "wavelet", "Hadoop" and "Scala" as CS/EE jargon-buzzwords. Except those are all specific, well defined things. Two of them are even proper nouns, and the other is a common abbreviation of a proper noun.
Jargon is used to speak more precisely to colleagues. Buzzwords are used to obscure meaning. Sure, both can be used to try and impress people. One of them has onl
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They are REALLY BAD AT COMMUNICATING.
I was thinking back in the bad ol' days of TQM (1990s) one of the terms kicked around was "empowerment" but that was subject to interpretation. Does that mean a raise? Delegating? A bankrupt term used in TQM meetings by companies that had enough excess to send employees to useless seminars before they are "downsized" (ugh, another terrible buzzword).
And another term is "high tech" which I think is bankrupt because it is mostly a circular definition (a high tech product is designed and made for high tech u
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I use NONE of these tools as a web developer.
Unless your education was complete crap, you still learned what you were supposed to learn which was a skill with certain KINDS of tools, allowing you to move on and use better tools than what they used in your classes. At worst you learned what not to do and what tools not to use, which is still very valuable knowledge.
In other ways as well (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead, we should be teaching students how they can more effectively process information provided to them even when it's not in their preferred style. Otherwise they'll eventually end up in the real world and be unequipped to handle things as they find themselves in an environment that doesn't really give a damn about what they prefer and isn't going to waste time coddling them.
I'm more worried about stifling the students and throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars at various learning environments or other projects that don't actually improve education when they money could be spent on hiring more instructors or tutors so that they can have more one-on-one time with students or provide additional instruction as necessary.
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Great comment.
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Instead, we should teach students how to effectively process information even when it's not in their preferred style.
(Trimmed for grammar.)
This is part of why the modern flurry of political attention to education disturbs me greatly. I champion teaching people to use their brains: the brain is a tool, and any person can learn executive functions, mental mathematics, and mnemonics techniques. Learning these tools and techniques gives any individual strong grounds for academic and real-world performance: there are no super-brain geniuses, but only those of us who have learned techniques, or who have obsessions which
Re:In other ways as well (Score:5, Insightful)
"The other part of my dismay is free and otherwise government-supported independent access to college education is the greatest tool to institute broad serfdom I can think of."
And yet, places where free or heavily subsidized higher education has been the norm for decades look a lot less like serfdoms than places where it hasn't.
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places where free or heavily subsidized higher education has been the norm for decades look a lot less like serfdoms than places where it hasn't.
I'm sorry, but could you elaborate? I've been hearing things like, "People out of college can't find jobs," or, "Salaries are being pushed down." What about, "Employers are cutting benefits"?
In a world where 74% of STEM degree owners don't work in STEM fields, and where 50% of engineers aren't employed as engineers (mostly, services (retail, McDonalds), social services (garbage man), and so forth), people still believe being a viable piece of labor means getting a job. They don't understand that jobs de
Buzzwords are stifling (Score:2)
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Should be progressive vs interlaced. It means that the display either draws every line in one shot, or half the lines at a time.
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Let's be clear here ... (Score:3)
Marketing terms, not substantiated by evidence, used by corporations and entities advancing their own agenda (profits), trying to control the conversation about education (again, without evidence).
This is self serving corporations either selling a product, or trying to control the direction of education for their own ends.
This has nothing to do with "teaching" or "education" or anything which is founded in evidence.
Which means you should treat this for what it actually is: marketing puffery by people who stand to gain something.
This is about as nuanced and insightful as when HR wants a checkbox of tech terms they don't understand, and it gets used to say "anybody with this checkbox can do this job". It's to allow incompetent people to manage task-based workers with no understanding of the task.
Which is great if what you really want is cheap, outsourced labor instead of an actual educated workforce.
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Buzzwords stifle everything (Score:3)
word systems (Score:2)
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I bet the actual instructors at those universities throw up in their mouths a little bit whenever they read the marketing speak on the uni web site.
You've mistaken university PR for higher education. Somebody had the brilliant idea a while ago to run universities like businesses, so now they have all the managers, marketers and associated fluff that corporations do. The people doing the actual educating are rightfully suspicious of both the external AND internal marketing bullspeak.
The fundamental misconception here (Score:2)
No buzzwords in Academia? Please... (Score:2)
Anyone who has spent any time at all in a Graduate program knows that academics is rife with buzzwords as well. This is particularly true in liberal arts and the so-called `soft sciences', but you can find plenty of examples in engineering & CS as well. What are words like `Hadoop', `Scala' and `Wavelets' if not buzzwords? No you say? They refer to specific technologies and processes you say? Guess what, that is what the marketer says about phrases they use as well.
Every professor dreams of when the
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That's silly. You can download Hadoop. Scala is a programming language; it has to be precisely specified otherwise it couldn't be compiled. The wavelet transform is an equation (with lots of related proofs) that you can write down. These things are all proper nouns.
Can you direct me to the technical specification or provide the equation for "actualization of a tribe's core concepts?"
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I thought it was the Union of Concerned Scientists!
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My Head Just Aches (Score:2)
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Don't use Buzzwords (Score:2)
Bullshit (Score:2)
Bullshiters need to stop bullshitting and people with genuine experts at hand needs to use their expertice to tell if new buzzwords are bullshit or not (they usually are, most buzz it created by bullshiting).