Even though it has been widely reported (and I had a busy morning), I can’t let Eli Wallach pass without notice.
This brought a smile to my face:
Edited to add: According to (I know, I know) Wikipedia, he graduated in 1936 with a history degree. Assuming he started in 1932, $30 then is about $520 now. If I’m reading this chart right, a history major today would be paying $4,673 a semester if they were a Texas resident.
Not that I’m grinding an axe or anything…
Lady Mary Soames passed away last Saturday. Mrs. Soames was the last surviving child of Winston Churchill, and wrote extensively (and, by all the accounts I’ve seen, well) about her family.
And we are obligated to note the passing of Chester Nez, Navajo code talker.
Nez, a painter, earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the University in Kansas in 2012.
I was tied up yesterday and couldn’t jump on the Detroit bankruptcy story. Here’s coverage from the NYT, the Detroit Free Press, and Lawrence.
The people who run the hospital want to close it, and are trying to wind down operations. But the unions that represent hospital workers are opposed to closing the hospital.
San Jose State made a deal with the online course provider Udacity to offer “low-cost, for-credit online courses” in “remedial math, college-level algebra and elementary statistics courses”. How’s that working for them? Not well. “Preliminary results from a spring pilot project found student pass rates of 20% to 44%”. SJSU and Udacity have suspended the courses while they re-evaluate. One thing that might have been a factor:
I’ve mentioned previously my belief that higher education will fundamentally change in the next decade, especially with the growth of online courses. The biggest thing that folks have been waiting on is college credit: almost all online courses that I’ve seen so far (with the exception of university specific correspondence programs) did not offer credit for course completion.
The LAT reports that Coursera, one of the major online course providers, and the American Council on Education have reached an agreement. ACE will recommend that colleges accept four Coursera courses for college credit:
The four courses in the Coursera/ACE agreement are:
ACE is also recommending that universities accept an algebra course from UC Irvine for “pre-collegiate remedial or vocational credit”.
This gives me a chance to mention something else that’s been going on. I previously noted that I was taking the Stanford University/Class2Go online course, “An Introduction to Computer Networks“. The course wrapped up at the end of November, but I’ve been waiting on various things before I posted about it.
I’m glad I took the course. I learned a great deal from it, especially about the lower levels of IP, TCP, UDP, and routing protocols. There was a lot of sweat in this course; I am willing to say that it was probably more difficult for me than any course I took at St. Edwards. Part of the difficulty may have been the self-paced nature of the course; I got a little behind at a few points and had to work hard to catch up. I think the course would also have been easier for me if I had purchased the suggested, but not required, textbook when I started the course. I didn’t do that at the time because the text was going for more than $100; I found a used copy at Half-Price about halfway through the course and paid about $25 for that.
Unfortunately, the Class2Go presentation of this course was also very buggy. You’d watch videos of lectures, interspersed with multiple-choice questions. Except sometimes the questions wouldn’t pop up. You could also watch the videos without the questions, and answer the questions in a separate window; except even then, some of the questions wouldn’t pop up until the third or fourth pass through.
The actual lecture videos, for the most part, played back okay. There were optional guest lecture videos that you could download as well. I did that, but some of the videos are huge, and don’t have smaller versions available. The Jim Kurose video is 1.7 GB and 1:16 long; by comparison, the 720p version of Top Gear’s “The Worst Cars In the History of the World” is 1.24 GB and 1:13 long. This may not be so bad if you’re on the Stanford campus and plugged into your dorm room’s Ethernet, but over a DSL connection? Not so hot.
One of the things I’ve been waiting on is the final “grade”, for want of a better word. This wasn’t a for-credit course, but you could get a “certificate of completion” from Stanford if you scored above a certain point on the two exams for the course. The two exams had a total of 960 points between them; the final decision by the instructors was that a certificate would be awarded to anyone who scored over 500 points.
So I struggled and I sweated and I waited for the light…and I scored over 500 points on both exams. I won’t say how much over 500, but it was enough, and I finally got my certificate of completion a few days ago.
Having said that, I’m not completely happy with how well I did. I’m seriously considering retaking the course when it is offered again this fall, just to see if I can do better with a textbook in hand.
Graduation is over. Back on your heads.
More seriously, the time for introspection has passed. (Also the time for action.) Expect a return to snark, guns, snark, cops, snark, pop culture, snark, art, and snark.
I still have a few things to finish up: thank you notes are being written and mailed, and I need to go through the photos and pull some out for posting.
In the meantime, frankly, things have been kind of slow. I’m not finding a lot of blog fodder; FARK has picked up most of the good stuff, including some “Art, damn it, art!” fodder.
Lawrence did send me an intriguing link yesterday about Rielle Hunter, equestrian, and how her father paid a hit man to kill one of her horses. That William Nack story rings a bell with me, like I’ve read it before, but I don’t remember where. Setting aside the John Edwards angle, it is a fascinating crime story. It reminds me of Skip Hollandsworth’s “The Killing of Alydar”, which was anthologized in one of the The Best American Crime Writing
I would also like to add one final note, for the record: I will put my family, friends, and coworkers up against any other group of people for sheer concentrated awesomeness. Thanks, gang.
He went home three years later. He explained no more than to say, “I lived with the Crows for a while. It was sometime before I could leave. They called me Horse.”
He did not find it necessary either to apologize or to boast, because he was the equal of any man on earth.
—”A Man Called Horse”, Dorothy M. Johnson
Instapundit and other folks have written eloquently about the “higher education bubble”. Other people I know and respect, like TJIC, have commented on ridiculous majors and the ridiculous people who pursue them.
So why did I go back to school? Why did I spend six years and <mumble mumble> dollars pursuing a degree? And why St. Ed’s? I’m not Catholic.
No, really, I haven’t been obsessively checking the university’s website waiting for that last grade.
Once every hour half-hour quarter-hour five minutes isn’t obsessive, is it?
The email from the professor came in at 10:29 AM yesterday, about the same time I was checking the website for the 1×101010 time.
As a reminder, the grade I was waiting on was the one for the big final paper; the “Capstone” project as they refer to it, which is supposed to be a summation of what you’ve learned up to the end of your academic career. At least in terms of ethical analysis, critical thinking, research skills, ability to write prose that makes sense, and maybe something to do with your actual major.
And?
I’m still waiting for the grade on my big final “Capstone” paper. And, no, I’m not hitting “refresh” every 30 seconds on the university’s website. I’ve managed to limit myself to checking every few hours.
In the meantime, though, my “Implementing Network Systems and Security” professor has graded all of my assignments; he hasn’t plugged the final grade into the university’s reporting system, but the numeric grades for all the assignments are there.
And…?
I’m taking today off to celebrate my birthday, and to take care of a few minor things.
(I know we joke about the DMV, but, really, why does driver’s license renewal have to be so awful?)
One of the things I have taken care of today is school; I have finished my very last academic assignment before graduation and turned it in. I am still waiting for grades, and there are a couple of surveys I need to dispose of, but I have no more real work to do at this time. Just the long countdown to the ceremony, and a couple of events between now and then.
Anyway, folks, sorry for the slowdown. It has been less academic related, and more that there’s been a dearth of stuff I wanted to write about. As graduation gets closer, I plan to write some about that. I’ve been thinking a lot about higher education, and why I did what I did. I want to put some of those thoughts down. So expect content to pick up soon-ish.
(Hattip: my brother, who both understates his Photoshop skills and needs to blog more.)
But! I have tenure!
Okay, I don’t really have tenure. But don’t you think I could pass as a distinguished professor of something like apocryphal chemistry or eschaton immanentization at Hogwarts?
This is a little early, since the final grade hasn’t been put into the main university system yet. (Edited to add 12/13: it is there now.) But I’ve been in touch with my “20th Century: Triumph and Tragedy” professor by email, and she’s confirmed the grades posted in the university’s BlackBoard system.
And…?