Giving exams to large numbers of students…

Giving a midterm later today has me thinking about the future of higher education. On the one hand, when remembering my very best classes at Amherst College, I recall a well-delivered lecture as a real gem, to be savored over time, potentially life changing. On the other, the logistics of handling learning assessment metrics (such as exams) for large classes, in the era before the Internet, created very real limitations, even at an elite liberal arts school like Amherst.

My worries about for-profit distance education models principally center around the genericness of the industrial scale lecture. But there may well be new frontiers in learning assessment leveraged by technology that might be usefully appropriated here in the non-profit university world. Ideally (and this is dream-ware I realize), one would want a way to use strong AI (perhaps in the context of natural language processing) to assist human professors in the grading of exams that include essays, equations and other non-multiple-choice instruments–Exams that we might have given comfortably in a seminar class of 15, but that are currently impossible in a class of 100 students.

My favorite examination at Amherst, was in quantum chemistry–it was one week long and open book. All of the questions involved sophisticated mathematics at the very limit of my education. In fact, much of the required mathematics was taught to us by the course professor so that we could understand the chemistry! Our professor was available by phone during that week pretty much 24/7. It was an incredibly exhilarating experience to pass that exam and it was about as far removed from multiple choice as one could possibly get.

My goal would be for technology to drive us towards learning experiences and assessments like the above. If we could do something like that, then we might really revolutionize higher education.

Functional Neuroimaging under the Crosshairs..

I’ve worried about this for years. Now Dorothy Bishop puts it all out there here.  Money quote:

I do not think it is worthwhile to do poorly-designed studies of small numbers of participants to test the mode of action of an intervention that has not been shown to be effective in properly-controlled trials. It would make more sense to spend the research funds on properly controlled trials that would allow us to evaluate which interventions actually work.

University of Maryland does the obvious…

as part of its strategy to be the dominant public research I university in the National Capital Area, details are here. To my mind, it’s all they can do with their medical and law schools in Baltimore and the flagship College Park campus here inside the Beltway. It’s also a first step towards the politically difficult merger of the three as the University of Maryland.

And Mason’s “chess move” in response? Stay tuned…

Davos Man on Davos

Nick Paumgarten’s long piece from the New Yorker is here.  Money quote:

Right-wingers see insidious, delusional liberalism, in its stakeholder ethos and its pretense of world improvement. They picture a bunch of Keynesians, Continentals, and self-dealing do-gooders participating in some kind of off-the-books top-down command-control charade. Left-wingers conjure a plutocratic cabal, a Star Chamber of master puppeteers, the one per cent—or .01 per cent, really—deciding the world’s fate behind a curtain of heavy security and utopian doublespeak.


China’s Future

Time Magazine’s Michael Shuman has a really interesting piece on China here. In essence, he thinks the current state capitalism model in unsustainable because it sends inaccurate price signals which are creating huge distortions. Shuman sees China going the same way as Japan.

Shuman’s report is relevant apropos of yesterday’s blog entry here on Advanced Studies regarding some serious future challenges to international science.

Henry Markram Deconstructed…

A man with a plan: Henry Markram and his Human Brain Project, in an excellent piece here by Nature’s Mitch Waldrop.

Henry is a difficult read. On the one hand, he’s Teddy Roosevelt to the Panama Canal. On the other he’s possibly Don Quixote charging at some windmills. I can’t tell yet and I don’t think Mitch knows either. But either way, Markram does recognize a key weakness of modern neuroscience: it lacks the coherent theoretical framework that other lucky fields have (such as the standard model in physics).

Challenges ahead….

To my mind progress in science faces some pretty steep challenges in the years ahead. Chief among them is the follow-on economic damage of the Great Recession. Across the World, but particularly in North America and Europe, sovereign debt, structural deficits and political paralysis are beginning to threaten governmental support for scientific research. Here in the US, the election silly season combined with automatic sequestration cuts, increasingly make the FY13 scientific budget look pretty gloomy.  In Europe, depending how the Euro crisis pans out, the ability of Brussels to go ahead with its ambitious Horizon 2020 plan is perhaps open to question. Moreover, even in Asia, there are economic clouds which have potential to derail the massive investments in science currently taking place. I worry most about the need for China to boost domestic demand in the face of reduced exports to Europe and America. If China can’t do that smoothly, then there could well be significant instability, both economic and potentially social. And the consequences for Chinese science could well be dire.

Another challenge, especially here in the States, are the increasingly frequent attacks on the credibility of scientists. This is part of a politicization of science, both with respect to scientific theories (which serve as surrogates for “culture wars”) and scientists themselves, as they find themselves drawn into those culture wars. I’ve blogged about this danger here quite recently. The upshot is, that when the general public, upon whose taxpayer dollars science depends, stops trusting science and scientists, then science progress runs into a brick wall.

Finally, Globalism itself is being challenged and with it the massive international collaborations (think LHC, Hubble, Antarctica, ISS) which make up “big science”. Many of the truly daunting scientific problems absolutely require a transnational approach. I can’t imagine a successful single country approach to pandemic flu, to say nothing of climate change, energy production or cracking the human “mind”.

Addressing those challenges wont be easy and will certainly require the sustained contributions of scientists and their supporters. Above all, it may require many scientists to look beyond the “bench” for a bit and to reach out to their colleagues, not only to collaborate scientifically, but to protect a larger scientific agenda.