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Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

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Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#181

Post by haihaibye »

jltsiren wrote: post #171
haihaibye wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of sweeping generalisations you should qualify statements if it only applies to long ago in a small non English speaking country. > I'm not familiar with the job market relevance of a bachelor's degree today. It's OK to say nothing if you have no information to add

My point was that people have different cultural backgrounds, and with that different expectations from academic degrees. A bachelor's degree from the UK is not at all like one from the US, and the differences between PhDs are even bigger. Many European countries consider master's the primary undergraduate degree. A master's may be a research degree, a taught academic degree with/without a thesis, or a professional d…

> My point was that people have different cultural backgrounds, and with that different expectations from academic degree

No. Read again what you wrote. It wasn't a qualified statement about different values in different places, ie "in this culture X is more like Y" it was a general claim with no background:

"A bachelor's is a glorified dropout. A master's is the primary academic degree"

Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#182

Post by jltsiren »

haihaibye wrote: post #181
jltsiren wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was that people have different cultural backgrounds, and with that different expectations from academic degrees. A bachelor's degree from the UK is not at all like one from the US, and the differences between PhDs are even bigger. Many European countries consider master's the primary undergraduate degree. A master's may be a research degree, a taught academic degree with/without a thesis, or a professional d…

> My point was that people have different cultural backgrounds, and with that different expectations from academic degree No. Read again what you wrote. It wasn't a qualified statement about different values in different places, ie "in this culture X is more like Y" it was a general claim with no background: "A bachelor's is a glorified dropout. A master's is the primary academic degree"

Remember the last sentence: "Or they could mean something else, depending on which traditions you are used to."

Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#183

Post by pointedset »

rrrrrrrrrrrr2 wrote: post #136
syzarian wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve taught mathematics for over 20 years in higher education and I strongly disagree with your view on the relative ease of learning math on one’s own. Let’s take a simple example. Here’s the distributive property for rings: a(b + c) = ab + ac It’s easy for me to convince someone that because of this property we get the following: 3(x + 2) = 3x + 6 It’s much harder to convince someone that 3x + 6 = 3(x + 2) It’s har…

I agree with you except for the very last point, that "students need to be guided on problems at the time they do them" . I think this issue is fundamental to the tradeoffs of self studying that I've experienced. I want to point out: the guide doesn't necessarily have to be a human. And textbooks accomplish this by giving examples that walk through how to solve problems similar to the exercises. Unfortunately this is…

I think your quote from Gallian doesn't address syzarian's example, actually.

The two properties you quoted are about the fact the distributivity works whether you're multiplying on the left or on the right. That's one possible left-right confusion, but I would argue most weak students believe it holds even when it doesn't, so in a sense they're too permissive in their reasoning.

However, syzarian's example is about a different left-right confusion: whether you can read an equality both forwards and backwards. I've seen this confusion in students: they will readily believe that you can distribute a factor over a sum (going forward), but be very skeptical about the act of factoring out (going backward), even though it's justified by the same equation. In this case, the students aren't permissive enough in their reasoning.

This is the kind of misconception (that equality has a "direction") that's much easier to suss out with an in-person interaction, whether it's with a teacher or other students.

Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#184

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrr2 »

pointedset wrote: post #183
rrrrrrrrrrrr2 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you except for the very last point, that "students need to be guided on problems at the time they do them" . I think this issue is fundamental to the tradeoffs of self studying that I've experienced. I want to point out: the guide doesn't necessarily have to be a human. And textbooks accomplish this by giving examples that walk through how to solve problems similar to the exercises. Unfortunately this is…

I think your quote from Gallian doesn't address syzarian's example, actually. The two properties you quoted are about the fact the distributivity works whether you're multiplying on the left or on the right. That's one possible left-right confusion, but I would argue most weak students believe it holds even when it doesn't, so in a sense they're too permissive in their reasoning. However, syzarian's example is about…

Oh. Wow, you are right. I honestly just read the definition in Gallian wrong, and then, even as I was typing it, I swear I thought it said "ba + bc = b(a + c)". What a crazy experience of confirmation bias by me.

I obviously agree that a human is extremely effective at explaining that "equals" is symmetric and not the same as "implies". I'm just arguing that the task also can be done in prose to similar, if inferior, effect.

I did agree however that because math has so many gotchas like this, then no textbook will ever disclaim all potential sources of confusion like the example by GGP. And so our discussion boils down to the tradeoff between the price and time investment of taking a class vs. the increased difficulty of self-studying. And how different people assign value differently to each side of the tradeoff, which I claim is the root of our disagreement.

Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#185

Post by titanomachy »

thwayunion wrote: post #176
titanomachy wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for adding your perspective. I’ve definitely always thought of this problem in terms of what you call the “national/global employers” and I’ve never really considered it in terms of non-elite colleges targeting local job markets. I’ve always been aware that there are (at least) two tiers of software engineering jobs but I have a hard time articulating the reasons for that. My high school friends seem to do rou…

> My high school friends seem to do roughly similar work to my FAANG-ish job, but for a fraction of the pay, and it bugs me because I know they are smart and deserve more. A few thoughts follow. With respect to software work, I have both personal experience and mentoring experience. First, a lot of the "type of work at FAANG vs. small shop" is extrapolation and guesswork for me. I have experience at both types of pla…

You might be right about onboarding to FAANG tooling. I was pretty surprised at how complex it was to build a non-trivial backend service at Google: the abstractions used by our chosen internal framework were not straightforward and it took some serious mental effort to wrap my head around everything, despite being familiar with Rails and Spring and the like. Of course once I figured out the tools I was able to create massively scaled stuff much more productively than I could with any open-source tooling. But if I was just a little less smart I might have never figured it out at all.

Personally I don’t think my mental “versatility” got too much exercise there, except maybe in rescuing production systems in emergencies. But presumably if you stick enough smart people together someone will eventually invent something novel and profitable, even if the median employee never does.

Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#186

Post by thwayunion »

titanomachy wrote: post #185
thwayunion wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My high school friends seem to do roughly similar work to my FAANG-ish job, but for a fraction of the pay, and it bugs me because I know they are smart and deserve more. A few thoughts follow. With respect to software work, I have both personal experience and mentoring experience. First, a lot of the "type of work at FAANG vs. small shop" is extrapolation and guesswork for me. I have experience at both types of pla…

You might be right about onboarding to FAANG tooling. I was pretty surprised at how complex it was to build a non-trivial backend service at Google: the abstractions used by our chosen internal framework were not straightforward and it took some serious mental effort to wrap my head around everything, despite being familiar with Rails and Spring and the like. Of course once I figured out the tools I was able to creat…

> Personally I don’t think my mental “versatility” got too much exercise there, except maybe in rescuing production systems in emergencies.

Given the cost of every minute of downtime at FAANG scale, the ability to rescue a production system a few hours faster than your competition is worth embarrassing multiples of your wage premium against non-FAANG engineers.

Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#187

Post by SergeAx »

First of all, author confuses information and knowledge. Reading books (and listening to lectures, FWIW) gives you only former. Next goes knowledge and skill. I can cook a steak using YouTube video, and I can tell that I possess this knowledge, but it doesn't make me even decent cook, and there is an enormous gap between that and getting a position in a cafe on the corner.

Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#188

Post by miguelazo »

entropy2048 wrote: post #37
miguelazo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Among other things. Like being able to clarify things immediately and succinctly instead of having to open yet another tab that turns into a rabbit hole distraction.

In many cases, I'd agree. However, with anything that remotely smells like it's close to the technology field? Any clarification you might get, is probably 10 years out of date. At best.

What's actually important to learn in the technology field wouldn't matter if it were 10 years behind. We're talking about higher education-- the fundamentals, not learning the syntax of some particular framework that will no longer be used in 10 years, if 5.
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