You're precisely correct in that the baccalaureate degree has long since become the secondary diploma of just a few decades ago. The zeitgeist is not that everyone should have the opportunity to go to college, but more or less explicitly that everyone deserves a college degree. And, of course, that cheapens the value of the degree, and every subsequent degree one might or does earn.
I've been on both sides of the lectern in universities and colleges in recent years, and the sense of lazy entitlement is just astonishing. And the schools are responding in the way they can: MBAs are handed out like candy; at the (private, ostensibly not-for-profit) university where my wife taught, faculty were expected to recruit from their communities. Students, oddly, rarely failed anything, irrespective of their performance. Pretty disgusting. The answer? People need to stop going to graduate school, but more importantly, graduate schools need to stop accepting so many of their applicants.* The degree is being, as Alaren said above, utterly washed out and sapped of its real "buying power", if you will.
(* This is much less true in the technical fields, somewhat less in the sciences, though they're catching up, but very very true in the social sciences and especially the liberal arts.)
If research/rhetoric classes were only about getting all the grammar right and adequate use of a thesaurus, it'd be a killer app for the lazy and uninspired student. I honestly can't see myself or other writing teachers actually using it, except maybe as a research tool.
There are a number of problems with the model here that point very clearly to the fact that it has the same shortcomings as other machine translation models.
For example, so long as we're working with cognates or 1:1 equivalencies (tall, man, etc.) it's fine. If we go to words for which there is no 1:1 lexical item, what's it do then? Consider especially words that signify complex concepts that are culture-bound. There would be, by definition, no reason for language #2 to have such a concept, if the culture isn't similar. The other problem arises from statistical sampling. Lexical items that are used exceedingly rarely and have no 1:1 or cognate would be unlikely to make the reference database.
Another similar problem arises with novel coinages and idioms. The example of "The spirit is willing..." is rightly cited. Consider the Russian saying, "He nyxa, He nepa," which translates as "Neither down nor feathers" but doesn't mean anything of the sort.
Real machine translation has been the golden fleece of computational linguistics for a long time. I'll believe it when I see it.
Snort and snore. It's a shame you children can't make a point without name-calling.
While you're looking into growing out of that, you ought to actually read some history, rather than just prating on about whatever second-hand notions you picked up from mummy and daddy. Better still, try to change the laws you take exception to, rather than whining about them and attacking anyone who cites an example of infantile slippery-slope logic as though they give a rusty crow's arse whether you ride with or without a helmet or even pants, come to that.
If you dislike so intensely the notion that the state can tell you what to do, change that. Don't sit around on your thumb swearing up and down about how persecuted you are by safety regulations.
So if I get a mail through your mailserver, I score. Meanwhile, you tweak procmail/qmail to bounce it. Likewise, I'm doing the same while you try to get a mail through my server. Standard rules.
Otherwise...play an actual (fantasy) sport via email? Gah. I'd be less bored by remote-control hamster ball races.
FWIW, I don't agree with the point I was making either...strictly devil's advocate. I teach at a college, and there's very little of more value to me than education.
No, it's not a zero-sum game. It's just played that way. Not buying the "forcing people to wear helmets is stupid," however. Is it that you object to being told what to do (no argument with that) or that you're making the typical leap from "helmet law" to "creeping socialist state" which is demonstrably a paranoid, revanchist-McCarthyite crock?
...everybody should be forced to attend college, since they're otherwise robbing society of about $2 Mil in potential productive capacity over a lifetime.
Bullfeathers. If everyone has a college degree, the competitive advantage of having one is, by definition, nil. Even in a hypothetical society like the one you propose, this is a dungbeetle-bait proposition. Requiring one of everyone is the same as outlawing going to college for everyone.
And how long would Snapster hold copyright? Same as the RIAA/MPAA? The bigger issue, for me, is to see these things released to the public domain after a reasonable time (here, death+70 is not reasonable). Sure, it'd be great to have legal access to these under whatever conditions--no argument there. I'm thinking long term, though.
Nothing about this proposal would change the SOP: the Disneys of the world snarfing up and then essentially blackholing characters, songs, lyrics and the like. That's the biggest problem that exists now, imo, and while this proposal is interesting, it does nothing to address the problem.
Agreed. Senior faculty go for the buy-out, junior faculty get the wage freeze. Adjuncts continue to get the royal shaft, staff is expected to do more with less. The entire UM system paid tens of millions of dollars to buy an utterly idiotic HR platform (People$oft), but we've gotta raise tuition and cut services.
Oh, and don't forget the Touhill Mausoleum. Because we need a 1600-seat performing arts space more than, say, enough computers for 10% of the campus. I'm teaching my last class right now. I'll not be back in the Fall. Time to get the flock out of Dodge.
There are competing issues here, and you've hit on a couple.
One of them is that the ed tech is designed, developed, and tested by companies who have only half a clue about higher education. The tech is then selected and implemented (at mind-boggling cost to the institution) by desk-jockey administrators who have no real contact with students or the instructors/profs in the trenches. So they make WebCT, Blackboard, or Banner (just three examples of closed-source coporate-edu-computing) the flavor of the month on campus.
These systems (in my experience) really shoot to be idiot proof, which is fine, but that also makes them as nimble and flexible as a hippo in molasses. They're bloated, stupid, and have too many unnecessary wingdings for the tech-savvy; they just end up being intimidating for the less tech-savvy. Because of IP issues (if you publish your notes/study guides/etc. on the site, it becomes the university's, typically), many of the profs who are able to deploy their own material on their own sites do so. Of course, they have to be fairly savvy and their students, at least initially, need to adjust to a new course materials CMS. That's the exception. Most of the time, profs don't put jack on the official CMS, even though they could if they wanted to fight with the counterintuitive GUI and lose any rights to their own intellectual property.
So I guess what you're seeing (I've certainly seen it plenty) is that administrators jump on every new tech wingding that comes down the pike, they spend good money on it (instead of crazy stuff like, say, a real library or paying their adjunct faculty a living wage) and it sits, cluttering up classrooms. They feature their sleek new all-wired classrooms in their alumni magazine, but don't say that they're used 2 hours out of the day. They pay oodles of money for proprietary, university-wide CMSs and nobody even cares, because they don't offer any real advantages over paper and chalkboard. I don't use the Blackboard deployment for my classes because it makes more work for me to do so, rather than less. When that changes, maybe I'll use it. Right now, screw it. I'm not going to bust my hump to use Blackboard when my students (middle-sized campus of a state university system) can't reliably attach files to an email, and don't really care much about it until I require it.
I'd just like to point folks to this in hopes that we can collectively steer this topic where it ought to be with our elected officials. Alternately, we could take Lessig up on his bet.
Slashdot Mirror
You're precisely correct in that the baccalaureate degree has long since become the secondary diploma of just a few decades ago. The zeitgeist is not that everyone should have the opportunity to go to college, but more or less explicitly that everyone deserves a college degree. And, of course, that cheapens the value of the degree, and every subsequent degree one might or does earn. I've been on both sides of the lectern in universities and colleges in recent years, and the sense of lazy entitlement is just astonishing. And the schools are responding in the way they can: MBAs are handed out like candy; at the (private, ostensibly not-for-profit) university where my wife taught, faculty were expected to recruit from their communities. Students, oddly, rarely failed anything, irrespective of their performance. Pretty disgusting. The answer? People need to stop going to graduate school, but more importantly, graduate schools need to stop accepting so many of their applicants.* The degree is being, as Alaren said above, utterly washed out and sapped of its real "buying power", if you will. (* This is much less true in the technical fields, somewhat less in the sciences, though they're catching up, but very very true in the social sciences and especially the liberal arts.)
At what point does "Informative" become "Too Much Information"?
Right about the time I see someone in a speedo, typically.
I was going to go with the:
I for one welcome our large, invisible, gas-filled overlords...um...version 2.0.
Redmond will sue the bejeezus out of them because the last three letters of Lindos are DOS.
I recommend they call it "Artie" or perhaps "Biff" and hopscotch over MS's nonsense entirely.
Significant achievements in this area will revolutionize the lazy plagiarist field.
Crap. No fair. I haven't had enough coffee yet this morning. Damn anchor tags. Damn missed the preview button.
If research/rhetoric classes were only about getting all the grammar right and adequate use of a thesaurus, it'd be a killer app for the lazy and uninspired student. I honestly can't see myself or other writing teachers actually using it, except maybe as a research tool.
Konigsberg University...Hmmm...that must be in Kaliningrad, which is what the city was renamed 50-odd years ago. What a load of malarkey.
There are a number of problems with the model here that point very clearly to the fact that it has the same shortcomings as other machine translation models.
For example, so long as we're working with cognates or 1:1 equivalencies (tall, man, etc.) it's fine. If we go to words for which there is no 1:1 lexical item, what's it do then? Consider especially words that signify complex concepts that are culture-bound. There would be, by definition, no reason for language #2 to have such a concept, if the culture isn't similar. The other problem arises from statistical sampling. Lexical items that are used exceedingly rarely and have no 1:1 or cognate would be unlikely to make the reference database.
Another similar problem arises with novel coinages and idioms. The example of "The spirit is willing..." is rightly cited. Consider the Russian saying, "He nyxa, He nepa," which translates as "Neither down nor feathers" but doesn't mean anything of the sort.
Real machine translation has been the golden fleece of computational linguistics for a long time. I'll believe it when I see it.
Snort and snore. It's a shame you children can't make a point without name-calling.
While you're looking into growing out of that, you ought to actually read some history, rather than just prating on about whatever second-hand notions you picked up from mummy and daddy. Better still, try to change the laws you take exception to, rather than whining about them and attacking anyone who cites an example of infantile slippery-slope logic as though they give a rusty crow's arse whether you ride with or without a helmet or even pants, come to that.
If you dislike so intensely the notion that the state can tell you what to do, change that. Don't sit around on your thumb swearing up and down about how persecuted you are by safety regulations.
So if I get a mail through your mailserver, I score. Meanwhile, you tweak procmail/qmail to bounce it. Likewise, I'm doing the same while you try to get a mail through my server. Standard rules.
Otherwise...play an actual (fantasy) sport via email? Gah. I'd be less bored by remote-control hamster ball races.
Thanks.
FWIW, I don't agree with the point I was making either...strictly devil's advocate. I teach at a college, and there's very little of more value to me than education.
Nice flame. Meanwhile, I'll continue teaching at university, and you can continue to fail to recognize advocatus diaboli rhetoric.
No, it's not a zero-sum game. It's just played that way. Not buying the "forcing people to wear helmets is stupid," however. Is it that you object to being told what to do (no argument with that) or that you're making the typical leap from "helmet law" to "creeping socialist state" which is demonstrably a paranoid, revanchist-McCarthyite crock?
Bullfeathers. If everyone has a college degree, the competitive advantage of having one is, by definition, nil. Even in a hypothetical society like the one you propose, this is a dungbeetle-bait proposition. Requiring one of everyone is the same as outlawing going to college for everyone.
And how long would Snapster hold copyright? Same as the RIAA/MPAA? The bigger issue, for me, is to see these things released to the public domain after a reasonable time (here, death+70 is not reasonable). Sure, it'd be great to have legal access to these under whatever conditions--no argument there. I'm thinking long term, though.
Nothing about this proposal would change the SOP: the Disneys of the world snarfing up and then essentially blackholing characters, songs, lyrics and the like. That's the biggest problem that exists now, imo, and while this proposal is interesting, it does nothing to address the problem.
Agreed. Senior faculty go for the buy-out, junior faculty get the wage freeze. Adjuncts continue to get the royal shaft, staff is expected to do more with less. The entire UM system paid tens of millions of dollars to buy an utterly idiotic HR platform (People$oft), but we've gotta raise tuition and cut services.
Oh, and don't forget the Touhill Mausoleum. Because we need a 1600-seat performing arts space more than, say, enough computers for 10% of the campus. I'm teaching my last class right now. I'll not be back in the Fall. Time to get the flock out of Dodge.
Another St. Louisan here. Don't forget the many unique places that make StL um...stand out.
Then again, there are bunches of genuinely cool places and events that make the town with the easy-carry handle worth living in.
UM-St. Louis also produces a seriously good literary magazine and has a strong creative writing program.
There are competing issues here, and you've hit on a couple.
One of them is that the ed tech is designed, developed, and tested by companies who have only half a clue about higher education. The tech is then selected and implemented (at mind-boggling cost to the institution) by desk-jockey administrators who have no real contact with students or the instructors/profs in the trenches. So they make WebCT, Blackboard, or Banner (just three examples of closed-source coporate-edu-computing) the flavor of the month on campus.
These systems (in my experience) really shoot to be idiot proof, which is fine, but that also makes them as nimble and flexible as a hippo in molasses. They're bloated, stupid, and have too many unnecessary wingdings for the tech-savvy; they just end up being intimidating for the less tech-savvy. Because of IP issues (if you publish your notes/study guides/etc. on the site, it becomes the university's, typically), many of the profs who are able to deploy their own material on their own sites do so. Of course, they have to be fairly savvy and their students, at least initially, need to adjust to a new course materials CMS. That's the exception. Most of the time, profs don't put jack on the official CMS, even though they could if they wanted to fight with the counterintuitive GUI and lose any rights to their own intellectual property.
So I guess what you're seeing (I've certainly seen it plenty) is that administrators jump on every new tech wingding that comes down the pike, they spend good money on it (instead of crazy stuff like, say, a real library or paying their adjunct faculty a living wage) and it sits, cluttering up classrooms. They feature their sleek new all-wired classrooms in their alumni magazine, but don't say that they're used 2 hours out of the day. They pay oodles of money for proprietary, university-wide CMSs and nobody even cares, because they don't offer any real advantages over paper and chalkboard. I don't use the Blackboard deployment for my classes because it makes more work for me to do so, rather than less. When that changes, maybe I'll use it. Right now, screw it. I'm not going to bust my hump to use Blackboard when my students (middle-sized campus of a state university system) can't reliably attach files to an email, and don't really care much about it until I require it.
I'd just like to point folks to this in hopes that we can collectively steer this topic where it ought to be with our elected officials. Alternately, we could take Lessig up on his bet.