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Treppin’ on Education
Education is a hotbed of entrepreneurship and innovation…said no one ever. Well, until recently. Over the past year, MOOCs have promised a revolution in how we learn; and yet they fail to deliver. As broad and intriguing as Coursera’s catalog is, as sleek and sexy as edX’s user interface looks, it seems these MOOC providers have only extended the capacity of colleges without reforming them. Furthermore, all efforts in this field have been fairly restricted to higher education, which is arguably our strongest educational institution. Where’s the love for primary and secondary school?
Our priorities seem to be inverted: we need stronger primary and secondary schools so more kids can get to college, and be better prepared when they get there — not stronger colleges for the kids who are probably gonna be alright.
The question is, what are the problems we can sustainably solve here? In higher education your market is simple: the people you’re selling to are the people using your product so the chicken and egg problem is minimized, and there’s a societal norm that college costs money, so charging for your services isn’t something that phases your customers — you just gotta get the price right. For primary and secondary school though, you wanna help parents, teachers, and students, but you’re gonna be hard-pressed to sell something to the kids, and if you’re trying to proliferate real institutional change then your customers will most likely be administrators, rather than your actual users. Administrators are notorious for being too far removed from the problem to give any real fucks, so if this is territory you want to tackle, you’ve got your work cut out for you.
Have I mentioned today that I am in love with Caravan Palace? Do yourself a favor and check them out: nobody does electro-swing better than these guys. Maybe an unfair assessment since I haven’t exhaustively pored over every artist fitting that genre — but I’m working on it!
In (somewhat) related news, my obsession with Caravan Palace has been paralleled with Bioshock 2 and Fallout 3, and what do they all have in common? A modernized, sorta steampunk 40’s feel. And something about that just feels fun to me, I don’t know quite what it is yet, but it’s irresistible to me at the moment.
Definitely a style I’m watching out for. Maybe I’ll start wearing zoot suits, bring that back.
(via silkandmarble)
(via oursongtitles)
Larry White, in his 70’s, has spent 32 years of his life behind bars. He discusses how difficult it was for him to transition back into society after being in prison for so long. While he was incarcerated, he had organized a small social network within prison to advocate for better treatment of inmates. Once released, he decided to continue his advocacy, especially for older inmates living behind bars: “My whole life now is geared to go back in and help those I left behind.”
Al Jazeera English hosts an award-winning documentary series, Fault Lines, and this episode examines life sentences and the elderly within the prison population in the United States. [x]
(via randomactsofchaos)
His hunger strike is approaching its seventieth day. He is beyond the point where experts say “irreversible cognitive impairment and psychological damage” can result yet British prisoner Shaker Aamer, who has been detained without charge or trial in the Guantanamo Bay prison camps for eleven years, remains committed to resistance.
The Observer in the United Kingdom has published an op-ed he wrote from prison. He writes, “I’ve never been charged with any crime. I’ve never been allowed to see the evidence that the US once pretended they had against me. It’s all secret, even the statements they tortured out of me.”
He describes:
Every day in Guantánamo is torture – as was the time they held me before that, in Bagram and Kandahar air force bases, in Afghanistan. It’s not really the individual acts of abuse (the strappado – that’s the process refined by the Spanish Inquisition where they hang you from your wrists so your shoulders begin to dislocate, the sleep deprivation, and the kicks and punches); it’s the combined experience. My favourite book here (I’ve read it over and over) has been Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell: torture is for torture, and the system is for the system.
His political consciousness, however, prevents him from being willing to beg for mercy, end his hunger strike and accept what the system is doing to him.
“More than a decade of my life has been stolen from me, for no good reason,” Aamer declares. “I resent that; of course I do. I have missed the birth of my youngest son, and some of the most wonderful years with all my four children. I love being a father, and I always worked to do it as best I can.”
He wants to go home to London, but states, “I am never going to beg. If I have to die here, I want my children to know that I died for a principle, without bowing to my abusers.”
Clive Stafford Smith, lawyer and executive director for the UK-based legal charity, Reprieve, shares that Aamer, who is “widely regarded as a robust and resourceful character, has started to raise the possibility that he might die inside Guantánamo Bay.” He has asked Smith to “brief” his wife “that he might not make it out alive after all.” [READ]
(via randomactsofchaos)
(via randomactsofchaos)
(via berserkfuck)
This is a summary of college only using two pictures; expensive as hell.
That’s my Sociology “book”. In fact what it is is a piece of paper with codes written on it to allow me to access an electronic version of a book. I was told by my professor that I could not buy any other paperback version, or use another code, so I was left with no option other than buying a piece of paper for over $200. Best part about all this is my professor wrote the books; there’s something hilariously sadistic about that. So I pretty much doled out $200 for a current edition of an online textbook that is no different than an older, paperback edition of the same book for $5; yeah, I checked. My mistake for listening to my professor.
This is why we download.
Alternatives to buying overpriced textbooks
BookFinderSpreading this shit like nutella because goddamn textbooks are so expensive.
not necessarily art related but as someone who couldn’t afford their textbooks this semester this is a godsend
(via twooctavesapart)
(via randomactsofchaos)
You will be one day exactly what you are.
I took a break from school two quarters ago, with the idea that I would be freed of the oppressive institution’s shackles. Instead I found what I was warned about: a 30 hour workweek to pay for food and rent, an increasingly difficult time socializing with and relating to my peers, and an overwhelmingly depressing boredom.
I’m going back to school. I’m ready now. In my time off I have accomplished the most important part of what I set out to do: I have gained perspective on life outside of school, and on the opportunities I have access to when I’m enrolled, or when I have a degree.
I reread God’s Debris recently, and in it the old man says that stress is a sort of cognitive dissonance you get when your actions contradict what the odds would have you do. A university education, from UCSB no less, is a tremendous opportunity I’ve stumbled into, and it would be foolish of me to squander it for any lofty, idyllic reason.
But it might be as simple as what my mom told me: You figured out you don’t know everything, huh?
What a smartass. I knew I got it somewhere…
