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Thanks to Sarita Yardi for these. Talk about CS Unplugged!

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Computing Education Blog

Law-school deans and professors, meeting in New York this weekend for the Future Ed 3 conference, invoked software and distance learning as tools that can rescue legal education from classroom doldrums, the National Law Journal reports. “Legal education significantly lags the rest of higher education in integrating online learning and other educational technologies into its programs,” Bryant G.Garth, dean of Southwestern Law School, told the meeting, according to the Journal.

To rectify that, six law schools, including Southwestern, announced a consortium to develop new technology, specifically an online-learning platform that the schools themselves would own. (Other schools in the group include the University of Miami School of Law, Australian National University College of Law, Chicago-Kent College of Law, the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law, and New York Law School.)

The conference also endorsed a program called “Apps for Justice,” a proposal to have law…

Wired Campus

Changing Higher Education

This is not the conference I attended last November, but sounds interesting and relevant. Anybody know anything about it?

Computing Education Blog

A theme we’ve talked about before here: That tuition is subsidizing research.  But now it’s coming from the Chronicle which draws more attention.

There’s an interesting implication of this finding related to the higher-education “Race to the Top” funding and President Obama’s goal of having more college graduates.  If college education is actually much cheaper than tuition would have us believe, the actual cost of generating more college graduates could be made much lower than the cost of sending more kids to college.  Could we create an alternative? Could we get more Americans educated at a college-level by avoiding colleges, perhaps creating some other institution — without research or athletics?  What would it mean culturally to set up something else that doesn’t have the “college” name but has that role?  Would we just be re-creating community colleges?

While universities routinely maintain that it costs them more to educate students than what students pay, a new report says…

Computing Education Blog

This recent article in Slate addresses an old problem in economics: Why hasn’t the computer led to a dramatically new economy?  Why hasn’t it led to a boost in productivity?  A new book on The Great Stagnation suggests that the American economy hasn’t faltered — rather, the American boom in previous years was due to “low-hanging fruit,” and all of that is gone now.  What I’m more interested in is what The Great Stagnation and another recent book The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future suggest about the role of technology in the future economy.

In general, it’s not a pretty picture.  Their idea is that computers replaced physical labor, and now are taking on more cognitive labor.  For example, in the future, you won’t need as many legal clerks, because a law-aware version of Web search will do the job so much better.  These economists argue that our ability to create new jobs won’t grow as quickly as technology’s ability to take…

Computing Education Blog

Changing Higher Education

This the title of a post I just wrote for the new Higher Education Network page of the Guardian. Readers of ChangingHigherEducation will find some of my favorite themes in this post. Check it out! 

Changing Higher Education

Changing Higher Education

Carl Wieman is now part of the White House office of science and technology policy, and the first thing he’s doing is counting — what’s out there, and is it working?

“The ACC is a list of programs, basically,” Wieman tells ScienceInsider. “You need something more nuanced than simply labeling it STEM education. Because that leads people to ask, ‘You’re spending all this money, why don’t we have great STEM education?’ The reality is that [these programs] do a large variety of different things, from graduate fellowships at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to an introduction to science for kindergarteners. Different parts of different agencies do things that are important to their mission.”

Wieman says the new panel, under the White House’s National Science and Technology Council, will look at “what these programs do, how they fit together, and how well they match what we feel are best practices.” He says that the review will rely heavily “on evidence and on what we know about…

Computing Education Blog