"Alas, the biggest thing you'll learn from official [course] evaluations is that you usually don't learn all that much."

Alas, the biggest thing you’ll learn from official evaluations is that you usually don’t learn all that much. First of all, the sample is seldom representative — it represents only the views of those who happened to be in class the day you handed out the evaluations. Inevitably, your best students will come down with debilitating senioritis that day, and some of the worst will have just recovered from it. (It’s amazing how the intellectually halt and lame enjoy health and attendance resurgences at the end of the semester!) Only colleges that require all students to fill out evaluations — some impose fines on those who don’t — can be said to be comprehensive.

Even if you get a 100 percent return, however, official evaluations are inherently flawed. Too much of what they purport to evaluate applies quantitative measures to qualitative experiences. I know that many colleagues disagree with me on this score, and some whom I admire greatly have labored hard on creating evaluative tools, but I simply don’t believe it’s possible to quantify how professors have nurtured things such as abstract thought, intellectual maturity, curiosity, elegance of expression, creativity, or zeal for learning.

Meta-post

I plan to keep my Blogger account open and active, but this Posterous space will be my primary blogging site for the foreseeable future. As always, I'm glad to have you along...

"Because songs are small chunks of information that many people want, music was the canary in the digital coal mine"

Because songs are small chunks of information that many people want, music was the canary in the digital coal mine, presaging what would happen to other art forms as Internet connections spread and sped up. For the old recording business everything went wrong. Sales of CDs have dropped by nearly half since 2000, while digital sales of individual songs haven’t come close to compensating. Movies and television (and journalism too) are now scrambling not to become the next victims of an omnivorous but tight-fisted Internet.

By now, in 2010, we’re all geeks, conversant with file formats and software players. Our cellphone/camera/music player/Web browser gadgets fit in a pocket, with their little LCD screens beckoning. Their tiny memory chips hold collections of music equivalent to backpacks full of CDs. The 2000s were the broadband decade, the disintermediation decade, the file-sharing decade, the digital recording (and image) decade, the iPod decade, the long-tail decade, the blog decade, the user-generated decade, the on-demand decade, the all-access decade. Inaugurating the new millennium, the Internet swallowed culture whole and delivered it back — cheaper, faster and smaller — to everyone who can get online.

Lean

To be effective today, education must take the Lean thinking approach, which is to adapt traditional educational methods to solve the learner's "problems" completely and give each exactly what they need and want in a cost-effective way, at an attractive price, and with minimal time wasted.

Relevancy

Dropping a classics or philosophy major might have been unthinkable a generation ago, when knowledge of the great thinkers was a cornerstone of a solid education. But with budgets tight, such programs have come to seem like a luxury— or maybe an expensive antique — in some quarters.