on line learning

 I am behind in my LOTR podcast listening, but today's podcast of Morgoth's Ring started with Prof. Olsen, who a couple years ago established an on line College (Signum University), is discussing inequality of employees in universities, and how he is trying to make all employees on the same team.

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he says earlier podcasts started with his discussion of marginalizing faculty by the administration?

Nope. Not my area of expertise. But if you are involved in higher education you might want to check out stuff on their site.

on line website

I only bring this up because my granddaughter in the USA is busy attending on line classes, with only a few regular classes at her college.

Will all on line classes be the way of the future?

probably not: Because a lot of learning is with questioning the teacher and with students discussing their subject with other students.

On the other hand, when I was in Medical school (nearly 50 years ago!), we tended to be busy, so one enterprising student started a class notes service: He would tape the lecture then have it typed out and duplicated for those who didn't want to attend classes.

So our Medical school yearbook had a photo labeled: A typical class: Showing an empty classroom with the lonely student with his large tape recorder being the only one in the class room.

Yup. the more things change the more they stay the same.

Again not my area of expertise: I am not a memorizer but learn by concepts and mind pictures. So I prefer to listen and take pithy notes of what I heard, which required me to translate the words into the concept.

On the other hand, my youngest did well with homeschool type modules that were used in his school: He knew that if he didn't master the module, he'd have to repeat it, so he actually paid attention to what he was working at. In regular classes, he'd get bored and start daydreaming and not learn anything at all.

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The reason I bring this up:

here, students are taking many of their classes on line with the help of their parents: our mayor has established a cheap internet wifi program, and our internet has been going on and off as they update the data connections with fiberoptic cables. There are also non internet ways to teach, using printed modules of the lessons. Sort of like what my son did in homeschool: You follow the module with your parents' help, and then email the teacher to get help...

here are some local videos about the new way of learning here in the Philippines, which is still in partial lockdown.

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I should add that polls show Duterte's approval rating remains high: 90 percent approve of his handling of Covid and 80 percent approve of what he is doing to run the government.

But you can see the need is to reopen the cities, and this won't happen without a vaccine. 

The WHO just decided to stop advising shutdown/quarantines because of the economic problems it is causing in much of the world.

Education videos to expand your mind

in the lockdown, here are some suggestions for your watching pleasure.

The Great courses have a lot of stuff there for you to watch: They post a couple a week (and if you like them, try buying some to watch at home).

Today's video:



I have discussed UV light in the past. Here is a TED video discussing this:



this channel, Free High Quality Documentaries, has lots of wonderful documentaries.

today's video is about kids in Siberia taking a bus to go to school, but actually about how their families live.



Oxford Professor of Mathematics John Lennox discusses AI and the future from an evangelical point of view, trying to separate the hype and hysteria from reality.



there are lots of cooking videos on line.

for example, when you watch K Dramas, did you ever wonder what is kimchee and how to make it? wonder no longer:




and finally, don't forget the cat videos:

Lecture series of the weekcop

Some of John McWhorter's lecture seires on linguistics has been posted on Youtube. quick download before the copyright cops find it.

Breaking the political bubble

so Trump meets with the presidents of Black colleges, and signs an order making them a White House priority,

President Donald Trump shakes hands as he meets with leaders of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Monday, Feb. 27, 2017. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) more >

and the press story is about: one of his staff sitting on a couch. She left her shoes on! She had her feet under her instead of on the floor! (uh, no, she had climbed on a coach in the back of the room to take a photo but who cares?).

It says a lot about the MSM that this became the talking point: it was a way to change the subject, which was that the government would help black colleges.

Black colleges fill a roll: Often students have problems in college and end up dropping out. The problem is  partly due to culture shock, but often they need help in basic studies because they graduated from lousy public schools.

They need a college that says: No, it's not your fault that you had a lousy school, or that you had a baby at 17. But if you work hard you can be as good as anyone. And we have teachers who did this for your role models.

The call for "safe spaces" is being used by Marxist professors to push guilt/victimology on the students in larger universities. So political correctness. But in the long term, victimology is fatal: Who wants to hire a "victim" who will sue you, when you can hire a hardworking immigrant to do the job?

Back to the work ethic.

But culture shock is real. And not just for black students, but small town kids and Christian kids and Jewish kids and those of us who are science nerds who the sorority type girls hate.

Students have a need to hang out with their own crowd, especially when "integration" means that essentially you are alone and lonely with a large crowd who agrees with each other but have different ideas and values than you do. True, clubs and churches help here a bit, but social isolation and inability to adjust is a big item.

I also saw this with our AmerIndian neighbors, who often were smart but needed extra help and had to go part time (because they had kids after dropping out when young). And the local tribal colleges are fulfilling a double need: to be inside their own culture and the flexibility to help them study despite their family obligations.

There is a big need to fill for those who had children or dropped out and now want an education: flexibility.

The "state college" system used to do this, but I don't know if they still do. Community colleges do this however, and also need to be supported.

my son dropped out of high school to support his wife and daughter. He got his GED from the  Job Corps, which did train him (but from his stories might need to be reformed.)

He later worked with Americorps to earn money to get tuition: working with a private charity that helped fix homes in Appalachia (he supervised spoiled rich college students who volunteered there in the summertime but didn't know how to drive a nail). Yes, he could have earned more if he worked construction, but wanted to give back for his opportunities. He then worked at a food bank in Hispanic neighborhood (He is bilingual), and used the money saved to attend a community college.

So I hope Trump doesn't stop Americorp etc. as he threatens to do.

In our small coal town where I raised my kids, many of the miners became nurses. And this story about training people to do computer work, sounds familiar because my next door neighbor took such a course when I lived in Oklahoma.  Her and her husband were nurses aids, but when the price of oil went up, he went back to work the wells, and they had enough money then for her to retrain.

Then there is the problem of rehab those who fell into addiction.

During the campaign, we read a lot about Trumpie boy criticizing a fat Miss Universe to lose weight. But now we hear about how he sent a Miss USA to rehab and told the press to stop bullying her. 

I became famous as “Mess USA” when my boss — now the president of the United States — tossed me into rehab after I tested positive for cocaine. Rather than strip me of my crown or add to the negative press with a humiliation campaign, Donald Trump surprised me, and shocked the world, when he held a news conference and declared: “Tara is going to be given a second chance.”

Yes, we need rehab and training for second chances.

Will Trumpie boy do it? He is rightly skeptical about government, but knows enough about business to get the private sector involved.

government only require the boxes to be checked. Businesses expect results.

And unlike bureaucrats, private businesses can be fired.