Also worked in edtech for many years and while I understand Audrey got the reputation for saying the negative, someone had to do it. The general media is so uncritically positive (for example of Knewton which was always snake oil). She had to be the voice of reason.
Yes! Expertise is good, but overrated. I've found that you can be much happier getting good enough at a broad range of skills that combine professional, personal and whimsical
Availability is only part of the answer. As article notes, even when it's available, far fewer men take it. In my experience, it still comes down to the known hit to your career. I worked for a large tech co. in a "liberal" city that offered generous parental leaves. Most new mothers took many months off. Fathers, if they took p-leave at all, would take it in small chunks. Not having to leave work for a long period helped their career growth/trajectory tremendously.
I’m curious which company and city this was? Because I also work for a large tech company in a liberal city, and almost all the fathers I’ve worked with took at least some paternity leave, although less than women.
Ah, the problems with the college. College majors are by design imperfect. Journalism, Math, Computer Science - those are very broad strokes and rarely map directly to the skills one would need for a job. OP's is a good example of why college education should move away from majors and departments, and into something more akin to "individualized studies." My undergrad had something like that. For students who had a passion and an idea of what they wanted to learn, it was golden. They got to design their own unique, multidisplinary paths through university.
Agree that it's very hard for academia to keep up with industry, and the shortcomings of the design of college majors. I still see value in a liberal arts undergraduate education, but that's awesome your school had more leniency with individual studies.
I have to disagree with you. This will make standardized testing worse, not better. With human grading, the humanities managed to avoid (to an extent) the extreme standardization of what should and should not be taught. There was still room for creativity. Now the type of writing that cannot be graded by an algorithm will get even less room in our curricula. Goodbye to poetry, satire, and other creative endeavors.
"It's not just jacking up prices; it's about keeping competition down to reasonable levels.
Limiting the number of restaurants means that there will be enough customers for most of them."
There's no such thing as 'keeping competition down to reasonable levels.' That's why we have a market. The optimal supply of restaurants and customers should be determined by the market, not government or protectionist incumbents. Unless you can make a legitimate case that allowing more food trucks, restaurants, or whatever else harms the health or security of society, there is zero reason to limit their numbers.
Why promise to be around forever? Glad they are working toward a sustainable business, but "made to last" is good, "made to last forever" is hyperbole. No company can guarantee that, no matter how good.
Thiel Fellowship draws stellar applicants who I suspect would be successful, college or not. I do wish more regular American high school students got the opportunity to do something similar, i.e., put off college for two years to work and explore passion. I won't go as far as to say college is a waste of time (it's still the most sure-fire route out of poverty for example). But a lot of people go at 18 because it's the next step and end up floundering. I believe we'd get a better return on higher education in the US if there were more regular and accepted opportunities for students to work for a year or two, then decide if college is the right next step.
> I believe we'd get a better return on higher education in the US if there were more regular and accepted opportunities for students to work for a year or two, then decide if college is the right next step.
For once the problem isn't with the colleges. Colleges, by and large, don't care how many years you took off between high school and college as long as you bring the right GPA and SAT scores to the table. At colleges that care about more than that (Harvard, etc) having interesting experience after high school can only help your admissions chances.
The problem is social acceptance. Too many parents have this silly notion that if a kid doesn't go immediately to college, he'll spend life as a barista. My wife studied in Europe for a year after high school, and she absolutely wants our kids to do something similar. She said that living independently for a year really allowed her to focus on school in a way she could not have otherwise.
Um..yes. Study groups or websites are online resources. So is facebook. If a student posts the questions online and starts discussions with anonymous posters, or even reads relevant discussions posted online before the test, how is that different from discussing with one another. There are plenty of ways to have a test that explicitly prevents collaboration. This professor clearly did not try.
There is a fundamental difference between using online resources to find an answer to a question and collaborating with others to find the same answer. Part of the grade is based on how well you can find the answers, not how well your collective group can.
If the test is open book, open Internet, that doesn't mean you can ask your friends on Facebook for help, just because Facebook is on the Internet.
I think that the class was likely poorly designed, but that doesn't mean that the students are all in the clear.
It's not even really about how well you can find the answers, it's more about what you'll learn while you're searching for and thinking about the answers.
That process is completely cut short if you just copy someone else's answer.
I dont think students are all in the clear in the least bit. I just happen to believe that permitting online resources implies permitting collaboration, as the internet is a tool for collaboration as much as it is a tool for pure research. As far as I'm concerned, it a test is open internet, then it's de facto collaboration permitted.
This is a case of the changing times leading to miscommunication.
The implied intent of the rule is that READ-ONLY NON-INTERACTIVE Internet use was permitted. To today's students, the Internet is a READ-WRITE INTERACTIVE tool, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
Can you quote the rule because in the article it appears that the intent of the rule was that above all you couldn't interact with other students [on the course] to complete the work but as long as you kept to that rule then general internet resources were fine to use?
I initially read this without looking at the date at the top (1997). Made me a little sad that I assumed the entire exchange happened recently. Not much has changed in the 15 years since.
