While an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, writer Robert Penn Warren began writing about the south and its turbulent racial history. He traveled throughout the United States and interviewed men and women involved with the Civil Rights Movement, recording each conversation on a reel-to-reel tape recorder—a project that resulted in the 1965 book Who Speaks for the Negro? This month, Vanderbilt University’s Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities makes a full digital record available of Warren’s research for the book—an impressive and well-constructed collection of interviews with historical figures including Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Malcolm X. The richness of the site is its connective design. Each interview is tagged by topic, including a subject’s link to broader issues or to other interviewees, making evident through user experience the complex nature of the Civil Rights Movement. A search for the NAACP, for example, yields multiple interviews featuring different points of view on the organization’s formation along with PDFs of original letters and the searchable text of newspaper articles about early NAACP demonstrations. But the site’s audio offerings are its most powerful assets.
The material offers a potent portrait of a historical moment and is rich with references to politics, art and specific conflicts over integration. The group interviews with university students and protesters are worth a listen, both for the content and for the early 1960s group dynamics. When Warren interviews men and women together, men tend to speak first and at most length. But the views expressed are fascinating, as in one case when a female sit-in participant gives her opinion about assimilation.
“My first reaction of course would be, thinking of Socrates: Know thyself. We do face the problem of amalgamation into the whole of American life, being Americans first, say, or being what I would like to term Negro Americans or Black Americans. I think that we as black men have an obligation to know ourselves as black men and be proud of what we are, and contribute to America what we could actually offer to this culture.”
Kate Rix is an Oakland based writer. See more of her work at .
Adam Savage was born in New York City, not far from Sarah Lawrence College, the liberal arts school where he delivered the commencement speech this past weekend. Savage never went to Sarah Lawrence. Nor did he finish his own degree at NYU. But he had plenty to tell the graduating class. On his own web site, Savage calls himself “a maker of things.” As a kid, he made his own toys. As a young adult, he began experimenting with special effects for films, then served stints as an “animator, graphic designer, rigger, stage and interior designer, carpenter, scenic painter, welder, actor, writer, and television host.” (Perhaps you have seen his popular Discovery Channel show, Mythbusters.) In short, Savage is a “collector of skills, a polymath. How did he get this way? By casting his intellectual net widely and by continuing to learn throughout life — which is pretty much what we’re all about here. There’s a lot of good advice in this short, feel-good speech. Some of my favorite bits include:
“Don’t work for fools. It’s not worth it. Getting paid less to work for people you like and believe in is much better for you (and your career) in the long run.”
“Stay obsessed. That thing you can’t stop thinking about? Keep indulging it. Obsession is the better part of success. You will be great at the things that you can’t not do.”
“F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby and is one of our national treasures. A true giant of writing.The silliest thing he ever wrote is the quote, “There are no second acts in American lives.” This is insane. If there’s one thing that typifies the American experience it is that reinvention and rebirth are intrinsic to it. Raymond Chandler didn’t write a single word of any consequence until his 40s. Julia Child learned to cook at 40! Clint Eastwood directed his first film at 41. Don’t be afraid to be a late bloomer. Repeatedly.”
Good thoughts, all of them. You can find the full transcript here. H/T @opedr
Every actor has to start somewhere, and Morgan Freeman (Driving Miss Daisy, The Shawshank Redemption, and Million Dollar Baby) could have done worse than joining the cast ofThe Electric Company, the PBS children’s television series that aired from 1971 to 1977. The original cast included Bill Cosby and Rita Moreno (not bad company), and the versatile Freeman played a series of characters: “Mel Mounds,” “Vincent the Vegetable Vampire,” and then, of course, Easy Reader. If you’re of my generation, you might recognize his theme song above. Below, we show you Easy Reader (a pun on the 1969 film Easy Rider) in action, teaching kids to read in his effortlessly cool, hipster way. H/T Metafilter
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It’s easy to sell books and other commodities on the web. It’s not easy to deliver a quality education. But two converging trends point toward a future when we will see the traditional university give way to an online alternative — something I wasn’t willing to bank on two years ago. First, Silicon Valley is finally focusing on e‑learning. Udacity, Coursera, Kahn Academy, EdX — they’re all looking to lift e‑learning out of a long period of stagnation. And, second, times are tough, and the traditional university system doesn’t care enough about managing costs, while wrongly assuming that it has a captive audience.
The U.S. has racked up more than $1 trillion in student loans.
Today 94 percent of students earning a bachelor’s degree take out loans — up from 45 percent in 1993.
It’s estimated that the “average debt [per student] in 2011 was $23,300, with 10 percent owing more than $54,000 and 3 percent more than $100,000.”
“Payments are being made on just 38 percent of the balance of federal student loans, down from 46 percent five years ago.”
Finally, state funding of education is going down, and tuition is going up, which means that the figures above will just get worse.
You don’t need me to spell things out. Paying for a college education is getting unsustainable, so much so that many expect a crisis in the college loan market in the coming years. And then you consider this. Many universities seem indifferent to the difficulties students face, if they’re not intentionally exacerbating the problem. At one point in the Times article, E. Gordon Gee, the president of Ohio State University, goes on record saying, “I readily admit it … I didn’t think a lot about costs. I do not think we have given significant thought to the impact of college costs on families.” Now listen to the latest episode of Planet Money, The Real Price of College (audio), which underscores a more galling fact — many colleges think that they gain a competitive advantage if they have a high sticker price. For many schools, lower tuition is a sign of weakness, not strength.
Universities can behave this way because they think they have a captive audience. Because college grads still earn considerably more than high school grads, colleges assume that students will keep enrolling. But what will happen when cash-strapped students are presented with a viable alternative? It may take 10 to 20 years, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a new breed of school emerges, schools that throw away the four year model (and the humanities too) and offer students a very targeted online education in “practical” fields — from accounting to coding to nursing to law and business — at a dramatically lower cost. Here, the education cycle gets shortened to perhaps two years, and then students get credentialed (maybe by a trusted third-party provider) and go to work, only to return later in their careers to take more courses in specialized areas. This model will require the right technology platform (something that will get worked out fairly soon) and a change in the expectations of employers and society more broadly (something that will take time to develop, but less time than complacent colleges think).
The new system won’t be better than the current one in many respects. It won’t offer a rounded education. The teaching will be less personal. Long-lasting social bonds won’t be made as easily. (You’ll need to pay the big bucks at a traditional school for that. No, they won’t all go away.) And the teaching jobs created by these universities won’t be terribly fulfilling or lucrative. But the new system will offer a more focused and affordable education to students on a mass scale. And when students graduate mostly debt free, they won’t complain. Nor will they be forced to forego college altogether, as some would now advocate. There’s perhaps something inevitable about this shift. But the insouciance of administrators and faculty inhabiting the current system won’t do anything to delay it. Stick around, and you’ll probably see that I’m right. And if you think my look into the crystal ball is wrong, let me know.
In the meantime, we give you another take on how to solve our world’s educational problems — Father Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University:
For oodles of free courses, don’t forget to visit our collection of 450 Free Courses from Top Universities.
In this new video from TED Education, teacher and author Jonathan Bergmann uses colorful analogies to help us visualize the scale of the atom and its nucleus. Bergmann is a pioneer of the “Flipped Classroom” teaching method, which inverts the traditional educational model of classroom lectures followed by homework. In a flipped classroom there are no lectures. Instead, teachers assign video lessons like the one above as homework, and devote their classroom time to helping students work their way through problems. To learn more about the flipped classroom method you can read a recent article co-authored by Bergmann in The Daily Riff. And to see more TED Education videos, which come with quizzes and other supplementary teaching materials, visit the TEDEd YouTube channel.
Note: You can now find through the following link a complete list of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), many offering certificates.
In the waning days of 2011, MIT announced MITx, a new e‑learning initiative that will offer certificates (find a list of Free Online Certificate Courses here) to students demonstrating mastery of free MIT courses. The university set a spring launch date for MITx, and they have now opened for enrollment the very first course. Taught by Anant Agarwal, Circuits and Electronics is an online adaption of MIT’s first undergraduate analog design course. According the MITx web site, this prototype course will run — free of charge — for students worldwide from March 5, 2012 through June 8, 2012. And students will have the opportunity to demonstrate their mastery of the material and earn a certificate from MITx. You can get more information on the course, or simply enroll in Circuits and Electronics, today. Just click here.
Many other engineering and computer science courses can be found in our collection of 400 Free Courses Online.
UPDATE: MIT professor David Pritchard and his education research group, RELATE are offering an online MIT-level course in Introductory Newtonian Mechanics. The course is free and does not require a textbook. Enrollment has just opened (it starts with an optional prerequisites test), and the course runs from March 1 — May 14, 2012. Individuals who complete the course will receive a letter of completion. This MIT course is unrelated to the MITx project mentioned right above.
The Moon is “tidally locked” in its orbit around the Earth, meaning its rotational and orbital periods are exactly synchronized. As a result, we always see the same view of the Moon no matter when or where (on Earth) we look at it. In this interesting video, released last week by NASA, we get a rare glimpse of the Moon’s other side, starting with the north pole and moving toward the heavily cratered south.
The video was captured on January 19 by the “MoonKAM” aboard one of a pair of GRAIL spacecraft that were launched last Fall and began orbiting the Moon on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. The primary mission of GRAIL is to study the Moon’s interior structure and to learn more about its thermal evolution.
GRAIL is also the first planetary mission by NASA to carry instruments dedicated solely to education and public outreach. The “KAM” in “MoonKAM” stands for Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students. The program, led by former astronaut Sally Ride, will engage fifth- to eighth-graders from across the country in selecting target areas on the lunar surface to photograph and study. Educators interested in participating can register at the MoonKAM website. To learn more about the video and GRAIL, see the NASA news release.
Before we rush headlong into a new year, it’s worth pausing, ever so briefly, to consider the ground we covered in 2011. What topics resonated with you … and jazzed us? Today, we’re highlighting 10 thematic areas (and 46 posts) that captured the imagination. Chances are you missed a few gems here. So please join us on our brief journey back into time. Tomorrow, we start looking forward again.
1) Universities Offer More Free Courses, Then Start Pushing Toward Certificates: The year started well enough. Yale released another 10 stellar open courses. (Find them on our list of 400 Free Courses). Then other universities started pushing the envelope on the open course format. This fall, Stanford launched a series of free courses that combined video lectures with more dynamic resources — short quizzes; the ability to pose questions to Stanford instructors; feedback on your overall performance; a statement of accomplishment from the instructor, etc. A new round of free courses will start in January and February. (Get the full list and enroll here.) Finally, keep your eyes peeled for this: In 2012, MIT will offer similar courses, but with one big difference. Students will get an official certificate at the end of the course, all at a very minimal charge. More details here.
3) Books Intelligent People Should Read: Neil deGrasse Tyson’s list “8 (Free) Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read” ended up generating far more conversation and controversy than we would have expected. (Users have left 83 comments at last count.) No matter what you think of his rationale for choosing these texts, the books make for essential reading, and they’re freely available online.
4) Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry: Christopher Hitchens left us this past month. And, until his last day, Hitchens was the same old Hitch — prolific, incisive, surly and defiant, especially when asked about whether he’d change his position on religion, spirituality and the afterlife. All of this was on display when he spoke at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles last February. We covered his comments in a post called, No Deathbed Conversion for Me, Thanks, But it was Good of You to Ask. And even from the grave, Hitchens did more of the same, forcing us to question the whole modern meaning of Christmas.
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While an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, writer Robert Penn Warren began writing about the south and its turbulent racial history. He traveled throughout the United States and interviewed men and women involved with the Civil Rights Movement, recording each conversation on a reel-to-reel tape recorder—a project that resulted in the 1965 book Who Speaks for the Negro? This month, Vanderbilt University’s Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities makes a full digital record available of Warren’s research for the book—an impressive and well-constructed collection of interviews with historical figures including Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Malcolm X. The richness of the site is its connective design. Each interview is tagged by topic, including a subject’s link to broader issues or to other interviewees, making evident through user experience the complex nature of the Civil Rights Movement. A search for the NAACP, for example, yields multiple interviews featuring different points of view on the organization’s formation along with PDFs of original letters and the searchable text of newspaper articles about early NAACP demonstrations. But the site’s audio offerings are its most powerful assets.
