California Takes a Big Step Forward: Free, Digital, Open-Source Textbooks - Megan Garber A Golden State experiment with nationwide impact California governor Jerry Brown meets with university students while signing legislation aimed to offer them financial help. (gov.ca.gov) This week, California took a big step forward in the march toward online education. The new legislation encompasses two bills: One, a proposal for the state to fund 50 open-source digital textbooks, targeted to lower-division courses, which will be produced by California's universities. On the textbook side, California will ask the California Open Education Resources Council, comprised of school faculty, to create and oversee a book approval process -- which will include the development of a list of targeted courses "for which high-quality, affordable, digital open source textbooks and related materials would be developed or acquired" by the University of California, California State University, or California Community College systems.
Faux Friendship - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education By William Deresiewicz William Deresiewicz discusses the shaky future of friendship on New Hampshire Public Radio's Word of Mouth Wednesday, December 16 at 12:40 p.m. Listen to the episode here. "…[a] numberless multitude of people, of whom no one was close, no one was distant. "Families are gone, and friends are going the same way." We live at a time when friendship has become both all and nothing at all. Yet what, in our brave new mediated world, is friendship becoming? How did we come to this pass? The rise of Christianity put the classical ideal in eclipse. The classical notion of friendship was revived, along with other ancient modes of feeling, by the Renaissance. Classical friendship, now called romantic friendship, persisted through the 18th and 19th centuries, giving us the great friendships of Goethe and Schiller, Byron and Shelley, Emerson and Thoreau. Add to this the growth of democracy, an ideology of universal equality and inter-involvement. And so we return to Facebook.
MOOCs, Large Courses Open to All, Topple Campus Walls But this course, Building a Search Engine, is taught by two prominent computer scientists, Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford research professor and Google fellow, and David Evans, a professor on leave from the University of Virginia. The big names have been a big draw. Since Udacity, the for-profit startup running the course, opened registration on Jan. 23, more than 90,000 students have enrolled in the search-engine course and another taught by Mr. Thrun, who led the development of Google’s self-driving car. Welcome to the brave new world of Massive Open Online Courses — known as MOOCs — a tool for democratizing higher education. While the vast potential of free online courses has excited theoretical interest for decades, in the past few months hundreds of thousands of motivated students around the world who lack access to elite universities have been embracing them as a path toward sophisticated skills and high-paying jobs, without paying tuition or collecting a college degree. Mr. Mr.
The Disadvantages of an Elite Education Exhortation - Summer 2008 Print Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers By William Deresiewicz June 1, 2008 It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. I’m not talking about curricula or the culture wars, the closing or opening of the American mind, political correctness, canon formation, or what have you. The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. But it isn’t just a matter of class. I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t “smart.” What about people who aren’t bright in any sense? There is nothing wrong with taking pride in one’s intellect or knowledge.
Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at UMass Medical School -- Home Page We offer a number of pathways for people to cultivate a sense of well-being, confidence, and creativity: THE STRESS REDUCTION PROGRAM – Since 1979 more than 20,000 people have completed our eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program, an intensive training that asks participants to draw on their inner resources and natural capacity to actively engage in caring for themselves and finding greater balance, ease, and peace of mind. OASIS INSTITUTE – Our institute for mindfulness-based professional education and training is a school for a new generation of professionals intent on learning, from the inside out, how to integrate mindfulness into their disciplines and endeavors. Training teachers of MBSR is at the core of the Oasis Institute mission. evolve... - is a comprehensive pathway for you, your colleagues, communities and organizations to explore the power and potential of mindfulness practices in your life – at work and at home.
What Are You Going to Do With That? - The Chronicle Review By William Deresiewicz The essay below is adapted from a talk delivered to a freshman class at Stanford University in May. The question my title poses, of course, is the one that is classically aimed at humanities majors. What practical value could there possibly be in studying literature or art or philosophy? So you must be wondering why I'm bothering to raise it here, at Stanford, this renowned citadel of science and technology. What doubt can there be that the world will offer you many opportunities to use your degree? But that's not the question I'm asking. We should start by talking about how you did, in fact, get here. Now there's nothing wrong with mastering skills, with wanting to do your best and to be the best. The problem with specialization is that it makes you into a specialist. Again, there's nothing wrong with being those things. And there's another problem. Or maybe you did always want to be a cardiac surgeon. It means not just going with the flow.
Pavel Somov, Ph.D.: Next Economy, Buddhist Economy November 6 2012, the day we were expected to vote on the economy, is behind us. And so is the year of apocalyptic partisanship. The year of promises of new economy is still ahead. I usually don't mess with economics. The last time I spoke on the topic was when I re-phrased the all-too-familiar "It's the economy, stupid!" meme into "It's psychology, stupid!" My question is this: What kind of economy are we trying to build? These are all very different questions and the answers to these questions range from industrial age pragmatism to utopian fantasies. But I am looking for something in the middle, for an economy of the Middle Way for the middle class... Is there such a beast? Turns out there is and it's called Buddhist Economics as described (in the 1970s) by E. A couple of excerpts and a few points. Schumacher explains: There is universal agreement that a fundamental source of wealth is human labor. So, that's the American way -- the American economics. Schumacher continues: 1. 2.
Generational Conflict Article Print By William Deresiewicz I really stepped in it the other month. I had published an essay called “Generation Sell” that argued that the culture of today’s youth (the so-called “Millennials”) revolves around the idea of entrepreneurship, and that, unlike previous youth cultures, it is devoid of rebellion or dissent. Well, a lot of people didn’t like it, and I don’t blame them. I’ll address the last objection in a later post. Still, that doesn’t quite settle the matter. But there’s a more important issue. More next week. William Deresiewicz is an essayist and critic.
Positive Procrastination, Not an Oxymoron Well, Jan. 15 is close enough, especially if you still haven’t gotten around to dealing with this year’s resolutions. And you can stop feeling guilty for procrastinating. Science has come up with a defense of your condition. Researchers have independently identified the phenomenon of positive procrastination, although there’s some disagreement on what to call it. “Structured procrastination” is the preferred term of John Perry, a philosopher at Stanford who published a book about it last year. Dr. A modest insight, perhaps, but it eased his conscience and disabused him of the old idea that procrastinators should limit commitments. At the top of your to-do list, put a couple of daunting, if not impossible, tasks that are vaguely important-sounding (but really aren’t) and seem to have deadlines (but really don’t). “Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list,” Dr. Dr. “For most of us, procrastination can be beaten down, but not entirely beaten,” Dr. Dr.