YouTube for the intellectual crowd?

This article (“Ex-Harvard President Meets a Former Student, and Intellectual Sparks Fly”) looks interesting – The product is a kind of YouTube for intellectuals (wanna watch lectures on modern economics, policy, and scientific discoveries, instead of wannabe rebels griping against The Establishment as embodied by their parents? Then this is for you…)

I’m also impressed with the way it all got started; the inventor basically skipped all the middlemen, went straight to the top.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/07/technology/07summers.html?em&ex=1200027600&en=798c139350ad3ce6&ei=5087%0A

A fun link

I’ll put this in Links (under medical) too, but check out this anatomy site: http://www.winkingskull.com.

You can learn all the parts of your body, and then test yourself on them. I haven’t done this yet; most of what I learned in highschool biology went in through my eyes, and spilled out onto the page, ne’er to return (pity, that), but this is very, very cool.

In other anatomical news, cardiologists will no longer be dissecting dogs as part of advanced medical training. Says the NYT, cardiological training has long included

operating on dogs to examine their beating hearts, and disposing of [the dogs] after the lesson.

They’ll be using echocardiograms (kinda like an ultrasound for the heart) and other advanced technology to study instead. I’m glad we’re saving more dogs, but find myself asking two questions: one, so (huzzah!) now we’re not operating on dogs that will now be euthanized instead – meanwhile, we keep and kill thousands of animals in less humane conditions every day. This is kind of like UN delegates – all of whom had flown to the meeting – talking about how to reduce carbon emissions. It’s good on paper, but seems not to address major underlying attitudes …

second, I do wonder if it isn’t better, after all, for a medical student to actually see and handle a beating heart, than to learn from a screen. In the end, it’s touching that’s believing, isn’t it?

New century, old education?

So this NYT opinion article on primary/secondary education makes a couple of really excellent points, the first as quoted below:

The U.S. has not yet faced up to the fact that it needs a school system capable of fulfilling the educational needs of children growing up in an era that will be at least as different from the 20th century as the 20th was from the 19th … [our kids] need something better than a post-World War II system in a post-9/11 world…

We are certainly climbing a steep technological-advances curve. My grandchildren will almost certainly play videogames with their minds alone (see this article from the NYT, or this one from the Washington Post - I also saw one about chimps and radio cars, but I can’t find it now…). They’ll play with robots, live much of their lives online, and I’m pretty sure they won’t even need cellphones any more. Instant communication and information access will be a given. Annnnd so on.

That being the case, education will have to look different, no? What should it look like? I’ll put my two cents in here (what else is a blog for, after all?!?)

… wouldn’t it be better to return to the three R’s and history (world history, ladies and gentlemen!), make school days shorter, and then have some other kind of learning after lunch? Art/painting/sports/etc etc etc. ? The problem with a lot of modern education, seems to me, is that we specialize too early, in sports, in education, in whatever you like. I vote, hand out basic skills, allow one or two ‘additional’ classes in highschool, and encourage activities for the rest.

I’ll have to ask my sister (doing CityYear in a tough city, highly impressive) if this would even remotely make sense in the average school system … but I guess I’m voting for a return to a simpler education – perhaps even a Montessouri approach in lower school. I’ll have to ask, but I suspect one runs into crowd control issues in a crowded school where parents are either uninterested in discipline, discipline destructively, or aren’t around to discipline in the first place ….) So yeah.

The second issue quoted is about teacher quality – which (to me, at least) seems to come down to incentive.