In pursuit of the unreadable...

[azalaisdep]

I rather enjoyed this article from today's Times Higher Ed:

"Baffled by the ease with which titles promising to turn world history on its head have won huge audiences despite defying logic and lacking proof, Daniel Melia laboured to divine the hidden secrets that allow anyone to identify truly 'bad books'"

Particularly interested, though not entirely

Comments

[azalaisdep]

our module-based style of presenting material tends to aggravate, I think

There's been quite a lot of comment in UK higher education in the last couple of years that we are just now seeing the first generation of undergraduates who came all the way through school with the National Curriculum, with its rather rigid ideas about what content should be taught where and when, plus very modularised school exam systems. Certainly a lot of academic staff are complaining that they struggle with students who think in this incredibly modular way, who don't cross-connect or cross-apply skills, and who therefore have no idea how to solve problems in an unfamiliar context. Slightly alarming, since most of the usefulness of education in later life surely relates to the solving of problems in unfamiliar contexts by applying critical faculties...

Certainly when I hear the likes of the current British Education Secretary complaining that we don't get the academic results in school of systems in the Far East, with their rote learning of huge amounts of fact in large classes, I look at the way those students fare when they come to the UK for a university degree and are expected to think for themselves, not to regurgitate what the lecturer has said but to synthesise competing points of view and arrive at their own conclusion (they flounder completely, at first), and think: No. No, we really do not want to be more like those education systems, thank you very much. Yes, we want educated citizenry, but in these days of vast quantities of readily available information, that has a lot less to do with being able to learn things by rote, and a lot more to do with being able to think about what to do with some of that information...

(A book which is making me think a good deal about all this at the moment is D.W. Shaffer's How Computer Games Help Children Learn, btw. Lots about using computer games to simulate real-world, or imaginary, complex situations and problems where children will have to integrate a lot of knowledge and use a lot of imagination to find solutions.)