John Connell: The Blog

This has been a strange gen­eral elec­tion campaign.

The core of this strange­ness undoubt­edly lies with the effects of the tele­vised debates involv­ing the lead­ers of those par­ties that the UK met­ro­pol­i­tan media unthink­ingly call ‘the major par­ties’. From my per­spec­tive in Scot­land, of course, while the spec­ta­cle of the debates has been inter­est­ing — though not nearly as inter­est­ing as that same UK met­ro­pol­i­tan media would have us believe, given the drool­ing ver­bosity of their cov­er­age of the three bouts — the way in which they have been organ­ised and run also makes explic­itly clear the utter irrel­e­vance of the pol­i­tics of my coun­try to the polit­i­cal and media estab­lish­ment in England.

For one thing, I believe it is dif­fi­cult for vot­ers south of the bor­der to under­stand, or even to believe, that every time Cameron, Clegg or Brown spoke about edu­ca­tion, health, local gov­ern­ment, trans­port, and a num­ber of other cen­tral issues, their answers had no rel­e­vance what­so­ever to the Scot­tish elec­torate. The UK Gov­ern­ment has no say on any of these issues in Scot­land. But the mere fact that these debates were car­ried out as if none of this mat­ters should be a con­cern to some­one like me who does not live in Eng­land. It tells me just how dys­func­tional our demo­c­ra­tic processes really are.

While the attempt by the SNP to use the courts to rem­edy this sit­u­a­tion was car­ried out in a silly and cack-handed way, they did have a com­pletely valid point, and one that every polit­i­cal party oper­at­ing in Scot­land should take care to think about objec­tively. It is a sim­ple fact that the debates were set up in a way that dis­crim­i­nates against the polit­i­cal processes here in Scot­land (as well as in Wales and in North­ern Ire­land). This is not a point of mere pique. In Scot­land, we have four ‘major par­ties’ — SNP, Labour, Tories, Lib­eral Democ­rats — with a roughly 2−2−1−1 split between them respec­tively in terms of their share of recent elec­tions and polls. The lift in the Lib-Dem’s polling for­tunes engen­dered by the TV debates will surely have some effect in how the Scot­tish elec­torate votes on the 6^th — but the SNP will have had no chance to counter that through the UK-wide media.

The effect of this on the elec­tion in Scot­land will be inter­est­ing to watch. My guess is that the SNP will suf­fer more from the Lib­Dem uplift than will Labour and the Tories. If that hap­pens, we in Scot­land — what­ever our polit­i­cal allegien­ces — should think care­fully about the longer term con­se­quences of what has been allowed to hap­pen over the past three weeks or so.

As a (wait for it) Labour-supporting libertarian-nationalist-internationalist (my sup­port for an inde­pen­dent Scot­land has as much to do with break­ing away from the Little-Englander view of Europe as it has to do with a desire to see Scot­land run all of its own affairs — and my lib­er­tar­ian bent makes it cur­rently extremely dif­fi­cult for me to sup­port the re-election of the most illib­eral Gov­ern­ment I have seen in my life­time) I don’t think there’s any need to get too hot under the col­lar about it all. Not because I don’t think it mat­ters — I do, obvi­ously; I’m quite relaxed because I believe that, in the long term, the sort of indif­fer­ent con­tempt shown by the UK met­ro­pol­i­tan estab­lish­ment for the polit­i­cal processes and cul­ture of my coun­try will lead inevitably to wider and wider gaps open­ing up between Scot­land and England.

The com­plete irrel­e­vance of Scotland’s polit­i­cal real­i­ties to those who have been held in thrall to the three TV debates gives me a warm feel­ing, because I know where it means we are headed.

Tech­no­rati Tags: gen­eral elec­tion, tv debates, scot­tish pol­i­tics, inde­pen­dence

While work­ing on another task yes­ter­day I came across a short paper I pro­duced for the annual con­fer­ence of the Aus­tralian School Library Asso­ci­a­tion (ASLA) in Ade­laide in 2007. I was asked to give the inau­gural Lau­rel Anne Clyde Memo­r­ial Address, an invi­ta­tion that I was proud and happy to accept. I posted at the time on some of the detail of the talk I gave, but I had for­got­ten about the paper, which I was asked to write and send to the organ­is­ers prior to the event. I uploaded the paper to Scribd last night, and I have repro­duced it here as a (lengthy) post.

Reg­u­lar read­ers of this blog might recog­nise ideas and mate­ri­als used in a num­ber of posts prior to that time and since.

Abstract

RF Macken­zie, a rad­i­cal Scot­tish edu­ca­tion­ist, saw the edu­ca­tion of his day as a ‘ram­shackle wind­mill flap­ping in the wind’. His jibe was aimed at the fac­tory model of school­ing that had served Scot­land and many other indus­tri­al­ized nations for so long, a model he despised for its basic inhu­man­ity. With the increas­ing power and per­me­ation of dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies in our lives, the oppor­tu­nity now exists for coun­tries across the world to seek to build a new kind of edu­ca­tion, an edu­ca­tion based on val­ues per­ti­nent to the world of today and, more impor­tantly, the world of tomor­row. Edu­ca­tion is a main­spring of trans­for­ma­tion, and gen­uine and last­ing trans­for­ma­tion can­not hap­pen with­out education.

Paper

Almost forty years ago, RF Macken­zie, the rad­i­cal Scot­tish edu­ca­tion­ist, was able to write:

Edu­ca­tion is an old ram­shackle wind­mill that goes on flap­ping its great arms long after the miller has left.

Macken­zie had an abid­ing dis­taste for the indus­trial model of edu­ca­tion, an antipa­thy that sprang out of his own dis­mal expe­ri­ences in var­i­ous Scot­tish schools over a num­ber of years, where teach­ing was deliv­ered by rote and harsh dis­ci­pline was dis­pensed at the end of a leather tawse. Fol­low­ing in the ide­al­is­tic trail of the For­est School, where he taught for a time in the 1930s, he had a con­cern for sim­ple com­pas­sion that cast him in a mould sim­i­lar to AS Neill and his ilk. Macken­zie rec­og­nized the innate lack of human­ity in a ped­a­gogic frame­work that relied on fear as a moti­va­tional tool, that posited the teacher as the fount of knowl­edge, and that rel­e­gated the stu­dent to the posi­tion of pas­sive recip­i­ent of that knowl­edge. Such school­ing, it can be argued, was based on a highly ques­tion­able epistemology.

Mackenzie’s later his­tory, when he became the head­teacher of the ‘other’ Sum­mer­hill – Sum­mer­hill Acad­emy in Aberdeen – where he tried to imple­ment his humane edu­ca­tional vision, did much to demon­strate the vacu­ity of the lib­eral rhetoric that, from the mid-1960s onwards, over­laid indus­trial school­ing with a patina of child-centredness and a patois of inte­grated cur­ric­ula (most ‘suc­cess­fully’ in pri­mary school­ing). His incum­bency of Sum­mer­hill was con­tro­ver­sial, trou­bled and short-lived, brought to an end by a hos­tile col­lu­sion of local author­ity, par­ents and a coterie of his own staff. Macken­zie, under­stand­ably, was either unwill­ing or unable to com­pro­mise his com­pas­sion­ate intent with the util­i­tar­ian com­pla­cency of those who opposed him.

What­ever the mer­its of Mackenzie’s vision, the unfor­tu­nate real­ity of his time was that the indus­trial model of school­ing still met, how­ever dis­tort­edly, an iden­ti­fi­able eco­nomic need for coun­tries such as Scot­land, as it did across the indus­tri­al­ized world. The fac­tory model of edu­ca­tion served the stark require­ments of the man­u­fac­tur­ing econ­omy, and the ‘com­mand and con­trol’ reg­i­men of the typ­i­cal school of the time pro­vided a basis for the con­tin­ued, if not always suc­cess­ful, pro­duc­tion of a sub­mis­sive labour force. By the loaded logic of con­tem­po­rary cap­i­tal­ism, this labour force required lit­tle more than basic lit­er­acy and numer­acy. Only tiny pro­por­tions of young peo­ple were able to rise through the sys­tem because only small num­bers were needed as bosses or as teach­ers or as other pro­fes­sion­als in soci­ety. Most of those who did pros­per in and through edu­ca­tion did so because of their luck in being born into a middle-class or upper-class fam­ily. Decades ear­lier, in 1909, Woodrow Wil­son, then Prin­ci­pal of Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity, evi­dently saw no prob­lem in stat­ing this propo­si­tion openly when he spoke to a group of trainee teachers:

We want one class of per­sons to have a lib­eral edu­ca­tion. We want another class of per­sons, a very much larger class of neces­sity, to forego the priv­i­leges of a lib­eral edu­ca­tion and fit them­selves to per­form spe­cific dif­fi­cult man­ual tasks.

RF Macken­zie him­self rec­og­nized the truth of the school as a tool of the eco­nomic and polit­i­cal sys­tem when he began an account of his short reign at Sum­mer­hill with the sentence:

…the great mis­take we edu­ca­tion­ists make is to sup­pose that schools are about edu­ca­tion. It is not so…..they are about control.

Macken­zie, belat­edly, rec­og­nized that the con­trol aspects of school­ing were sim­ply a func­tion of the rigid­ity and strat­i­fi­ca­tion of indus­trial soci­ety at the time. Whether he rec­og­nized the ulti­mate futil­ity of attempts to sub­vert this fun­da­men­tal real­ity through iso­lated projects such as the For­est School or Neill’s Sum­mer­hill School or his own Sum­mer­hill Acad­emy is a moot point.

Today, in the early years of the 21^st Cen­tury, it is a regret­table fact that the indus­trial model of school­ing still pre­dom­i­nates, in var­i­ous guises, in most coun­tries of the world. The dif­fer­ence between now and ear­lier times, how­ever, is that while most of us still live and work and learn within a cap­i­tal­is­tic struc­ture, the onset and per­me­ation of dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies is trans­form­ing many of the key rela­tion­ships that under­pin that struc­ture. One ram­i­fi­ca­tion is that tech­nol­ogy is enabling a new and ener­getic form of glob­al­iza­tion, and many long-held cer­tain­ties as a result are being widely ques­tioned, not least in the extent to which the estab­lished fab­ric of global eco­nomic rela­tions is itself chang­ing. The con­tin­u­ing real­ity of the eco­nomic divide between the rich coun­tries of the West and those coun­tries in the poor­est parts of the world remains indis­putable – but the cur­rent prodi­gious rise of the Chi­nese and Indian economies is only the most obvi­ous man­i­fes­ta­tion of a dramatically-shifting inter­na­tional eco­nomic alignment.

Edu­ca­tion, at once a reflec­tion of this shift­ing global real­ity and a tool for its con­tin­ued repro­duc­tion, is nec­es­sar­ily there­fore in a period of flux. Coun­tries, rich and poor, devel­oped and devel­op­ing, are, to vary­ing extents, look­ing to edu­ca­tion to be an engine of trans­for­ma­tion. But it is not to edu­ca­tion alone that they look: it is in the con­junc­tion of edu­ca­tion and tech­nol­ogy – and, espe­cially, the dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies — that the instru­ment of progress is being iden­ti­fied. The ideal blue­print for that con­junc­tion is dis­puted and debated, and prob­a­bly does not exist, but its merit as a panacea for the eco­nomic and social ills of a region or a coun­try is becom­ing more and more accepted, if not yet proven. So what might be the nature of that conjunction?

Edu­ca­tion and tech­nol­ogy share a num­ber of inter­est­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics. We can agree, for instance, that edu­ca­tion should be about affir­ma­tive trans­for­ma­tion, about extend­ing human hori­zons, and about real­iz­ing per­sonal and social poten­tial. We have seen, how­ever, that edu­ca­tion has too often been used to main­tain the sta­tus quo, to assert social sta­tion and to pro­tect and rein­force the pre­vail­ing eco­nomic con­di­tion with­out ref­er­ence to the inter­est of the indi­vid­ual at all lev­els of society.

We can agree that tech­nol­ogy, too, should be about affir­ma­tive trans­for­ma­tion. We have used tools since the dawn of human­ity to make our world a bet­ter place in which to live. Equally, we know that we have used tech­nol­ogy to kill, to con­trol, to dam­age our world and to ren­der pas­sive those at its (often lit­eral) sharp end.

So, if nei­ther edu­ca­tion nor tech­nol­ogy is a neu­tral instru­ment, we need to be be very sure, when we bring them together, about our pur­pose in doing so. We have to know what we want to achieve from edu­ca­tion, and we have to know how we believe tech­nol­ogy can be exploited to the ben­e­fit of those being edu­cated. To bring them together with­out a clear under­stand­ing of our rea­sons for doing so runs the risk of, at best, a set of arbi­trary and unfore­seen out­comes, or, at worst, a sit­u­a­tion in which the tech­nol­ogy itself defines how, and what, learn­ing might take place.
But what is it about the new tech­nolo­gies that gen­er­ate the power, as I firmly believe they do, to change the very essence of edu­ca­tion, to sub­vert the long-accepted rela­tion­ship between teacher and learner, to over­turn our con­cep­tion of the cur­ricu­lum, to unset­tle our approaches to ped­a­gogy – to re-frame com­pletely, in other words, many of our most cher­ished prin­ci­ples about the nature of learn­ing and, there­fore, of the insti­tu­tions we have built and main­tained for cen­turies to sus­tain those principles?

First, as so many have noted, dis­tance is dead. Where the broad­cast­ing media – radio and tele­vi­sion – allowed us to see and hear the hub­bub of human­ity trans­mit­ted from every cor­ner of our tur­bu­lent globe, the new dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies allow us to inter­act and col­lab­o­rate in real time with the indi­vid­u­als and groups that inhabit and cre­ate that hub­bub in ways that the old-media could not. At the same time, the Web has opened up access to the world’s store of knowl­edge to every­one with a con­nec­tion, with the result that the tra­di­tional rela­tion­ship between teacher and learner, between the one sup­pos­edly with the knowl­edge and the one sup­pos­edly with the lack of knowl­edge, no longer holds true. When the stu­dent has access to the same respos­i­to­ries of infor­ma­tion as the teacher, the essen­tial dynamic between teach­ing and learn­ing changes at a very fun­da­men­tal level. And when this fun­da­men­tal rela­tion­ship at the heart of the school is sub­verted, then the very con­cept of the school itself comes under ques­tion. The sim­plis­tic con­cept of the school as a place where learn­ers come together, usu­ally com­pul­so­rily, to be taught at the feet of the learned is, I believe, sim­ply no longer ten­able, at least beyond a very basic stage of ele­men­tary edu­ca­tion in lit­er­acy and numer­acy.
What was, and largely still is, cur­rently at the core of school­ing will be inverted in the new edu­ca­tion; and what has been too often periph­eral in school­ing will become the sub­stance of what edu­ca­tion is about. Whether that will occur within the con­text of a phys­i­cal insti­tu­tion known as a school will vary from place to place and over time. What­ever hap­pens, those coun­tries that begin to take advan­tage of the new con­cept of edu­ca­tion, that rec­og­nize and take action to ben­e­fit from the shift in the nature of school­ing, will be those that will ben­e­fit their peo­ple – and there­fore their economies – most.

This is not to seek to com­mod­ify edu­ca­tion as merely an instru­ment of the econ­omy. Nonethe­less, an edu­ca­tion that rec­og­nizes the shift­ing real­i­ties of today will look very dif­fer­ent from the indus­trial school­ing so despised by RF Macken­zie and oth­ers. It will involve a kind of learn­ing in which young peo­ple will be able to bring their pas­sions firmly inside the bounds of their school­ing (instead of hav­ing to defer their real inter­ests to their lives out­side of school, as is so often the case), in which the cur­ricu­lum, or part of it at least, is not fixed by some cen­tral or national author­ity but is con­stantly and con­tin­u­ously nego­tiable, in which teach­ers can accord learn­ers the max­i­mum respect by recog­nis­ing that they are learn­ers too, and that they should there­fore all learn together. The teacher will be the learner primus inter pares.

A school based on this new real­ity will be a place (actual or vir­tual) where learn­ers will take more and more respon­si­bil­ity for their own learn­ing as they get older, where teach­ers will work with stu­dents in an open, col­lab­o­ra­tive way, with the sub­stance of the teach­ing and learn­ing that goes on the result of a con­tin­ual process of trans­par­ent delib­er­a­tion and dia­logue, where teach­ers will be freed to do what they do best — to offer wis­dom, to work with young peo­ple to help them get the best out of their own efforts, to advise, to coun­sel, to cajole, to per­suade, and, yes, to impart knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence where required. But the new real­ity is not merely about method­ol­ogy, about ped­a­gogy in the face of new pos­si­bil­i­ties – it is also about inte­grat­ing into the edu­ca­tional process a set of val­ues for a truly global soci­ety and a real­is­ti­cally sus­tain­able planet. The great­est dif­fer­en­tia­tor between the old indus­trial model of edu­ca­tion and a model of edu­ca­tion based on the new real­i­ties will be found in the con­trast­ing val­ues under­pin­ning each – we must move deci­sively away from the val­ues illus­trated by Woodrow Wil­son and towards the val­ues of an RF Macken­zie and the val­ues of those who under­stand the crit­i­cal part to be played by edu­ca­tion in ensur­ing the long-term health of our Earth and its peoples.

The rapidly flat­ten­ing (and rapidly warm­ing) world in which we live means that the belief in the trans­for­ma­tive pow­ers of some opti­mum con­junc­tion of edu­ca­tion and tech­nol­ogy is a global phe­nom­e­non. Just as tech­nol­ogy is mak­ing it pos­si­ble for the so-called emerg­ing nations, increas­ingly, to com­pete eco­nom­i­cally with their already-developed neigh­bours, so these same coun­tries are real­iz­ing that they can exploit tech­nol­ogy to help them take a deci­sive leap in edu­ca­tional terms. Where so many indus­tri­al­ized coun­tries are still firmly wed­ded, given their eco­nomic dom­i­nance over decades and cen­turies, to the model of school­ing that helped get them there, the emerg­ing nations, some of them at least, have no such bag­gage to hold them back. Such coun­tries are more than capa­ble, over the next few years, of leapfrog­ging the indus­tri­al­ized nations by rec­og­niz­ing the poten­tial of the new learn­ing and by find­ing ways to imple­ment a form of edu­ca­tion or school­ing based on the new real­ity already described.

The rela­tion­ship between edu­ca­tion and tech­nol­ogy is undoubt­edly a com­plex one and cer­tain traits that they share can, when brought together, lead as read­ily to delight as to dis­as­ter. Both can be used to enhance life or to blight life, as we have seen. Per­haps Richard Fenyman’s insight­ful words about Man’s use of sci­ence, based on a Bud­dhist proverb, can be applied just as effec­tively to this pow­er­ful con­flu­ence of edu­ca­tion and technology:

To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven. The same key opens the gates of hell.

Feyn­man him­self, indeed, made exactly this con­nec­tion when he said:

It was once thought that the pos­si­bil­i­ties peo­ple had were not devel­oped because most of the peo­ple were igno­rant. With uni­ver­sal edu­ca­tion, could all men be Voltaires? Bad can be taught at least as effi­ciently as good. Edu­ca­tion is a strong force, but for either good or evil.

If nei­ther edu­ca­tion nor tech­nol­ogy is a neu­tral instru­ment, how they are used is a mat­ter of choice, and that choice will always have a moral and eth­i­cal as well as a merely instru­men­tal dimen­sion. The nature of dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies means, how­ever, that should schools or regions or coun­tries con­tinue to make the wrong choices, should they con­tinue to depend on an indus­trial model of edu­ca­tion that has had its day, learn­ers across the world will begin to make the right choice for them­selves and will even­tu­ally ren­der schools and school­ing irrelevant.

One way or another, the miller will return to the wind­mill once again.

Tech­no­rati Tags: asla, lau­rel anne clyde memo­r­ial address, edu­ca­tion, change

All those of my gen­er­a­tion who, like me, took an inter­est in the excit­ing and bur­geon­ing world of the micro­com­puter through the ‘70s and ‘80s, who read pub­li­ca­tions such as Per­sonal Com­puter World, from this side of the Atlantic, and Byte, from the other side, will have read Guy Kewney. His Newsprint col­umn in PCW was the first page I turned to every month when I picked up each new glossy edi­tion. Equally, his Newswireless.net web­site has been required read­ing for me over the past few years too.

Guy Kewney died ear­lier this month. His words live on.

Tech­no­rati Tags: guy kewney, micro­com­puter, pcw, byte

The ratio­nal and bal­anced per­spec­tive on the Orlando Figes deba­cle must lie in a com­bi­na­tion of the views, expressed on today’s Guardian’s let­ters page, of the rightly sar­donic Hugh McMillan:

I really felt for Robert Ser­vice after read­ing about the tur­moil caused to him and his fam­ily by some­one call­ing his book crap. News sto­ries of poverty, war and star­va­tion often over­shadow the intense dif­fi­cul­ties faced by aca­d­e­mic his­to­ri­ans. I’m sure I’m not alone in find­ing how he sto­ically con­tin­ued to eat sea bass and go jog­ging while his wife went to yoga dur­ing that ter­ri­ble fort­night to be truly inspirational.

…and Pro­fes­sor Ian D Thatcher’s sen­si­ble point that:

Such non­sense comes from a com­pet­i­tive view of schol­ar­ship rather than as a col­lec­tive endeavour.

What a shame to see a scholar’s rep­u­ta­tion, and prob­a­bly his career, go down the drain due to such a stu­pid mis­take.

Tech­no­rati Tags: orlando figes, robert ser­vice, rep­u­ta­tion, his­to­ri­ans

Car­olyn Reidy, of pub­lish­ers, Simon & Schus­ter, quoted in the New Yorker:

In the dig­i­tal world, it is pos­si­ble for authors to pub­lish with­out pub­lish­ers. It is there­fore incum­bent on us to prove our worth to authors every day.

I can see a con­tin­u­ing need in some book pub­lish­ing con­texts for edi­tors, cer­tainly, for design­ers, prob­a­bly, and for a few other pro­fes­sional ser­vices to authors. But pub­lish­ers? Not so sure.…

Tech­no­rati Tags: books, pub­lish­ers, Car­olyn Reidy, The New Yorker

Taken from the sta­tis­tics pro­vided by the won­drous Akismet show­ing the pro­por­tion of com­ments received on my blog that are spam in com­par­i­son to those that are ham (legit­i­mate com­ments). Akismet is so good at its job that, along with a lit­tle assis­tance from one or two other weapons in the arse­nal (such as Spam Karma), I rarely deal per­son­ally with more than a few spam com­ments per week.

I am eth­i­cally, ide­o­log­i­cally and log­i­cally against the very idea of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment — but when it comes to blog spam­mers, well.….….

Tech­no­rati Tags: spam, blog com­ments, akismet, spam karma, cap­i­tal punishment

Dale Dougherty, on O’Reilly Radar, uses Dan Meyer’s superb TED Talk above — on the new US Math(s) Cur­ricu­lum — to muse on the sim­i­lar­ity between processed food and text­books. He won­ders how a class­room vari­ant on Jamie Oliver might approach the blight of textbook-based learning.

I imag­ine a Jamie Oliver cru­sader walk­ing into a class­room and telling kids to pitch the text­books in a dump­ster. He gets them out from behind the desks, gets them off their butts and gets them doing stuff. “We’re natural-born learn­ers,” he might say. “Learn­ing is some­thing that all of us do so well — we are doing it all the time. All of us are hun­gry to learn.”

Dale does a good job of set­ting out how Jamie Oil­ver frames the prob­lem for US chil­dren (and for so many peo­ple in our own coun­try), and then asks how a sim­i­lar frame­work might be used as a basis for attack­ing processed learn­ing.

I won­der if this classroom-based Jamie would have any more suc­cess in erad­i­cat­ing processed learn­ing than the kitchen-based Jamie had with processed food in the USA!

Post­script — Jamie still has an online peti­tion run­ning, look­ing for sup­port for his Food Rev­o­lu­tion.

Tech­no­rati Tags: dale dougherty, text­books, jamie oliver, dan meyer

In my work across Emerg­ing Mar­kets, I see many exam­ples of coun­tries that are seek­ing to build a robust and effec­tive higher edu­ca­tion sec­tor. Many of them take the US model of higher edu­ca­tion as their start­ing point, and indeed often they start by form­ing a rela­tion­ship of one kind or another with one of the big-name US universities.

In a recent arti­cle in the Times Higher Edu­ca­tion Sup­ple­ment, Lloyd Arm­strong, Provost Emer­i­tus at the Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, and who has a strong inter­est in the uni­ver­sity of the future, ques­tions this approach. He won­ders whether the prob­lems of trans­fer­ring the US model to the devel­op­ing world have really been thought through suf­fi­ciently, and asks whether it really is the most appro­pri­ate model for large parts of the world. In the US, these uni­ver­si­ties do not exist in a vac­uum, they are the pin­na­cle of a pyra­mid of insti­tu­tions that has evolved nat­u­rally to serve their interests.

On this basis, he writes:

Many coun­tries con­sid­er­ing this model do not have the base of the pyra­mid in place. With­out it, the elite uni­ver­sity can­not effec­tively play the role that its pro­po­nents assume. And last but not least, this is the most expen­sive model of higher edu­ca­tion ever invented. Com­bin­ing research and teach­ing may have ben­e­fits, but it also has high costs. Research fac­ulty com­mand rel­a­tively high salaries com­pared with teach­ing fac­ulty, and they teach rel­a­tively few stu­dents. Research facil­i­ties are expen­sive to build and main­tain. Even the US is find­ing that it can no longer afford this model.

Pro­fes­sor Arm­strong believes, instead, that coun­tries should con­ceive and imple­ment their own inde­pen­dent and rad­i­cal approaches to build­ing a viable higher edu­ca­tion sector:

This inde­pen­dent path is the best way to serve their cit­i­zens and their futures. In time, the best of these insti­tu­tions will come to define “world class” in 21^st-century terms, just as hap­pened in the US in the 20^th century.

Tech­no­rati Tags: higher edu­ca­tion, lloyd arm­strong, emerg­ing mar­kets, devel­op­ment, uni­ver­sity of the future

If you haven’t yet come across the work of Phil Borges, social doc­u­men­tary pho­tog­ra­pher, the TED Talk above is a very good intro­duc­tion. Lis­ten to him talk about the endan­gered cul­tures around the world, but then go watch and lis­ten to some of his other videos:

• Learn­ing to Lead — on the edu­ca­tion of girls
• Strength in Num­bers — on ‘micro-banks’ in Malawi
• Abay — on the incred­i­ble work of one woman to end female cir­cum­ci­sion in her East African community
• Chil­dren of the World — no words spo­ken, just beau­ti­ful pho­tographs of chil­dren from around the world, accom­pa­nied by music

Much of Borges’ work has been car­ried out on behalf of Care Inter­na­tional UK.

Tech­no­rati Tags: phil borges, care inter­na­tional, social doc­u­men­tary, pho­tog­ra­phy, edu­ca­tion, chil­dren, poverty, devel­op­ment

.…the energy and nov­elty behind the cam­paign came from skep­tics con­nected by the net. Within a day of the chi­ro­prac­tors giv­ing the court their argu­ment that they could help sick chil­dren, sci­en­tists online had taken it apart brick by brick until noth­ing was left but a heap of rubble.

Mean­while, their allies tracked down the web pages of every chi­ro­prac­tor in Britain who was claim­ing they could treat asth­matic chil­dren and reported him or her to their local trad­ing stan­dards offi­cer. Every court hear­ing and pub­lic meet­ing was packed by peo­ple with an unwa­ver­ing belief in the impor­tance of the sci­en­tific method and evidence-based pol­icy. Skep­tics are less inter­ested in what peo­ple think but in how they think.

Nick Cohen, in today’s Observer, on the superb web cam­paign that sup­ported Simon Singh in his libel bat­tle against the sorry crowd that run the British Chi­ro­prac­tic Asso­ci­a­tion. The other char­ac­ter in this dis­turb­ing tale is, of course, The Hon. Mr Jus­tice Eady — I find it dif­fi­cult to dis­cern much that was ‘hon­ourable’ in his orig­i­nal judge­ment against Singh. The appeal court judges who ruled in favour of Simon Singh last week opined that Eady had “erred in his approach” and was invit­ing the court “to become an Orwellian min­istry of truth.”

As one of the appeal judges stated:

Sci­en­tific con­tro­ver­sies must be set­tled by the meth­ods of sci­ence rather than by the meth­ods of lit­i­ga­tion. More papers, more dis­cus­sion, bet­ter data, and more sat­is­fac­tory mod­els – not larger awards of dam­ages – mark the path towards supe­rior under­stand­ing of the world around us.

Tech­no­rati Tags: simon singh, nick cohen, libel, british chi­ro­prac­tic asso­ci­a­tion, jus­tice eady, quack­ery, char­la­tanism