May 2011 Blog Posts (8)

Social media has arrived, but companies still aren't sure what to do with it.Fifty-eight percent of companies are currently engaged in social networks like Facebook, microblogs like Twitter, and sharing multimedia on platforms such as YouTube – but research from the Harvard Business Review Analytics Services report  "The New Conversation: Taking Social Media from Talk to Action"  [Report PDF; sponsored by SAS] finds that much of… Continue

An article in today's Education Week talks about the efforts of some social studies experts to achieve some level of consensus on national standards. They are afraid that because they are not part of state testing in the way that English and math are, they are being marginalized. The article does a good job, though, of showing how…

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There are too many doctoral programs, producing too many PhDs for the job market. Shut some and change the rest, says Mark C. Taylor.



The system of PhD education in the United States and many other countries is broken and unsustainable, and needs to be re-conceived. In many fields, it creates only a cruel fantasy of future employment that promotes the self-interest of faculty members at the expense of students. The reality is that there are very few jobs for people who… Continue

WASHINGTON May 12, 2011, 03:42 pm ET

Who's better at teaching difficult physics to a class of more than 250 college students: the highly rated veteran professor using time-tested lecturing, or the inexperienced graduate students interacting with kids via devices that look like TV remotes? The answer could rattle ivy on college walls.

 A study by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, now a science adviser to President Barack Obama,…

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"Father of the Internet" now focused on building a communications network capable of supporting deep space exploration.

What does the man who invented the Internet do for an encore? He builds a space-based version of the worldwide computing and communications network. "We need a set of protocols that work on interplanetary distances, TCP/IP does not," said Cerf, at a press conference… Continue

Education Week has just published an article  blasting teachers for the low quality of summer school courses. It is really an amazing accusation, since the teachers have little to nothing to do with it.

Summer school quality is abysmal. Students learn little to nothing. They spend a few weeks in class, get their…

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Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has just sent a letter to America's teachers during teacher appreciation week. In it Duncan touches on most of the familiar complaints teachers have about the pressures on them imposed by No Child Left Behind, but his biggest emphasis is on one of those complaints--while we put tremendous pressure on…

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