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Breaker of Icons

Here a couple of paragraphs from Geoff Norman. Seven years old, but I fear thinking as Geoff does would be risky  (read deviant) for many of our young doctors or medical students. Competence, whether in surgery, medicine, or music, cannot be captured by checklists, which reward thoroughness, not expertise. The counter-argument is that a checklist [...] Read more – ‘Breaker of Icons’.

Grade inflation! Whatever next!

Even the Guardian gets it. As they say about money, just keep printing it…. and wait. Read more – ‘Grade inflation! Whatever next!’.

Clayton Christensen

John Naughton has an interesting  post on Clayton Christensen and disruptive innovation. It contains the following quote about HE: And the innovation story goes on. We’re seeing it currently in the Higher Education business. Traditional universities are expensive and inefficient as teaching institutions, but most of them persist in believing that their USPs are such [...] Read more – ‘Clayton Christensen’.

Student debt

Lots on this topic this all over the place at the moment. Another bubble, with much of the UK falling in behind. This quote is from the the NYT today. College marketing firms encourage school officials to focus on the value of the education rather than the cost. For example, an article on the cover of Enrollment Management, [...] Read more – ‘Student debt’.

Some new technology. Will never catch on.

From FtT In the fall I’ll be back from the FTC and teaching again. I want to draw on the wisdom of FtT readers to help me figure out what technology I should be using to present material to students in the classroom. It’s a lecture class, teaching security and privacy to a class of [...] Read more – ‘Some new technology. Will never catch on.’.

Bertrand Russell

Russell had a lot to say about education, and the following may not have been geared in this particular direction, but they would seem good starting points for any discussion of how we really should educate doctors. Via Brain Pickings. Perhaps the essence of the Liberal outlook could be summed up in a new decalogue, [...] Read more – ‘Bertrand Russell’.

French higher education

From the Monday letter by Frederik Filloux. He then goes on to discuss why the narrow French elitist schools don’t support innovation the the way the US schools do. The comments are worth reading too. Take higher education. The failure is unequivocal, regardless of political leanings. France might have about 80 universities, most of them second [...] Read more – ‘French higher education’.

Quote of the day

I believe that MIT flirts with providing the definition of the liberal education for the 21st century. Woodie Flowers Read more – ‘Quote of the day’.

Opencourseware: A contrarian view

Thoughtful article from  Woodie Flowers at MIT Why not OpenCourseWare? I argued that the program that became OpenCourseWare should have focused its original $100 million estimated budget on two topics. I suggested microbiology and electromechanical systems as examples. Had we done that, I believe we would have accelerated changing education. We decided, however, to assume that the world [...] Read more – ‘Opencourseware: A contrarian view’.

Academic talks: beyond reason.

From Three-toed sloth. Worth reading in its entirety. Few will listen. (And as for the written word, my favourite aphorism is from David Hubel : “Reading most papers today is like eating sawdust.”) It being the season for job-interview talks, student exam presentations, etc., the problems novices have with giving them are much on my [...] Read more – ‘Academic talks: beyond reason.’.

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