… some of the links between technology and a dead classroom.
… “[C]lickers” [are] little anonymous devices that allow students to answer multiple choice questions in class without having to raise their hand and be singled out as correct or incorrect.
There are profits being made out of “classroom response systems.” With these systems of clickers, graphics and software, shy people don’t have to step out of their comfort zone…
… who was fired from his position at the University of Poznan for pro-democracy activities, including underground publishing, but was welcomed back after 1989, has died. During his years of protest against the Polish regime, he went on hunger strikes and went to prison.
A Popperian, Nowak urged his students, as they write in an introduction to a volume in his honor, “to look for holes in his theories.”
Nowak was also a Marxist.
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Mr UD just got back from food shopping.
“Nowak. Yes. He was the only Marxist in Solidarity.”
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Mr UD reads this post and says:
Popperian? Maybe in this restricted pedagogical sense; but intellectually he was an anti-Popperian. Popper thought there could be no rational guidelines to scientific discovery. Nowak’s famous phrase, as I recall it, was “caricature in the service of explanation.” The scientist attempts, in Nowak’s view, to capture in a few lines the essence of a phenomenon. Popper would deny that one can say anything about what he considered spontaneous creative guesses about phenomena. For Popper, falsifiability is the only criterion distinguishing real from pseudo science.
… Local online auctioneer Ggi Auction said yesterday that Asia University, located in Gyeongsan, North Gyeongsang, was put up for sale on its site last Wednesday.
It marks the first time a college has been listed in an auction in Korea.
The appraised price of the school – which includes a 120,000-square-meter (1.3 million square feet) plot of land and 12,577 square meters of buildings and other facilities – was 11.064 billion won ($9.36 million).
But perhaps that was a bit too high for the online auction crowd: No one offered up a bid for the college at Wednesday’s auction, Ggi Auction said. The company plans to put the college up for sale again, this time during a live auction on Nov. 20 at Daegu District Court. Bidding will start at 7.745 billion won – 30 percent less than it was listed on Wednesday.
The college, founded in 2003, was battered by a series of corruption scandals involving the executives of its foundation, which eventually led to its closure. In 2005, its president and vice president were arrested together for receiving a combined 3.9 billion won in bribes in return for the promise of professorship. In another case, an executive was caught obtaining a loan from a bank under the name of a part-time lecturer. The amount of cumulative liabilities at the school is over 5.1 billion won, Ggi Auction said…
In the wake of his death, his students remember him. Here are some of their comments.
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He took great pleasure in making sure we understood all the possible innuendoes present in “Canterbury Tales,” shared with us the fact that he always identified with King Lear, and that Percy Shelley made no worthwhile contributions to English literature. There was always delight in his voice when he would tell the story of how he went to a staff meeting in 1987, didn’t like it, and hadn’t been back since …
He was profoundly influential in my academic life at LU. Specifically in his Satire class, where he taught me how to incorporate my subversive self into my understanding of what it is to be “academic.” I’ve always wanted to write him to let him know how meaningful his classes and views on literature were to me, so I guess now will have to do.
In the last three years, I was lucky enough to hear many of his memories and make my own with him, ranging from escaping an evening bat attack in Main Hall together to riding back from 2009’s senior dinner in his car, trapped under an umbrella. However, these were the most thrilling adventures; most of my favorite memories of Professor Goldgar take place in his office, on worn-in chairs with a thermos of coffee, where we talked about our mutual hatred of Octoberfest and old people… One of my favorite exchanges took place one one particular night when I stopped in to say hi on my way back from the YMCA. I updated him on life and told him about a recent incident in which I’d been caught stealing a cookie off a full, pristine recital table outside Harper Hall. “Why would you feel bad about that, Nicole?” he asked incredulously. “If I see a cookie, I take the cookie. If it’s on a table, on a friend’s plate, I don’t care – I take the cookie.” I love telling this story and thinking about the solemn look in his eyes as he told me to “take the cookie,” which I suppose is tantamount to”follow your dreams” in the world of Goldgar. I consider myself lucky to have known Professor Goldgar, who gave his all to me from the time I first met him three years ago until the very end. He always treated me first and foremost as a friend, rather than merely a student and for this I will always be grateful.
I can’t sum up BG of course, but if I were to try, I’d say he was a lovely curmudgeon who was fiercely dedicated to his students and took absolute joy in being hilariously naughty while also imparting great truths… BG was lovingly sarcastic, right to the end. I visited him a few weeks before he passed away and gave him a card expressing how much he meant to me. He read it, and looked up with tears and love in his eyes, and said, “Laura, you’re such a damn sap.”
[A]lthough he has a well-earned reputation as a purveyor of caustic wit and curmudgeonly satire, the moment I will remember most from his classes is his reading of the final stanzas of Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” in a lilting cadence with the famous drawl now turned to serious and transparent purpose, making Eve’s words to Adam on the threshold of Eden come alive – I still cannot hear those lines in any other voice than Bert’s. So he lives on.
[H]e had a way of criticism, which made the receiver almost proud to have gotten his attention. Once he came to class carrying a poster, which he read aloud to us: “Avoid jokes that target people or groups of people.” He read this with a deadpan glare, daring the class to come up with a joke that meant something without targeting people or a group of people. With his wit, his critical ear, and his high standards, Professor Goldgar reminded everyone to take learning seriously and to take loving it seriously, too.
I didn’t want to walk. The morning was beautiful, sugar maples blazing on Kenilworth, but I didn’t want to walk. Not to Strathmore for a Ride-on, and certainly not all the way to the metro.
Five paces along, I bumped into Mrs F., red-faced from walking her two dogs (she has four; where are the others?). We talked about our daughters, lifelong friends. How do they like college?
Mrs F. panted away down Rokeby, pulled hard by the animals.
Follow her home wait while she showers get a ride…
Not practical. Take too long.
A small green Toyota rolled by.
STOP GIVE ME A RIDE
Slower, slower, stop. Window down, white-haired lady.
“Wanna ride?”
“You read my mind!”
Then commenced a classic Garrett Park encounter.
A scan of this woman’s features told me
1.) I’d known her all my life.
2.) I had no idea who she was.
Our varied, warm conversation began with the sugar maples, moved to the town’s antique streetlamps, swerved back to trees – the royal palms I admired in Key West, the stately palms she saw in Palo Alto – and then leapt for no reason to a hotel in she stayed in once.
“They gave you the loveliest, softest white robe. I wanted to wear it the whole time I was there. My daughter said Don’t prowl around the halls wearing the robe. Only tacky guests do that.”
Now town history.
“The town put an oak in front of our house. It grew too big. Next door used to be Joan R. I loved the way she called to her son all the time. HUGHIE! HUGHIE! HUGHIE!”
“She was Welsh.”
“British. Welsh. Something like that.”
“Evil husband who left her with tons of kids.”
“Right. He left her. But she only had three. I was the one with tons. I had nine…. Our line of houses on Strathmore — three houses, three breast cancer cases. I always thought that was odd.”
“Nine kids.”
“Eight boys. One girl.”
“You kept trying for a girl?”
“No. There was no excuse for all those boys. I just kept doing it. I got pregnant in 1976 and said to my husband a child for the bicentennial. Any excuse would do.”
We pulled up to the station. She wished me a wonderful day.
Eide’s former deputy Peter Galbraith, who was fired last month, has challenged Eide’s credibility, complaining he turned a blind eye towards the extent of the fraud in the August vote.
Eide on Friday called Galbraith a “footnote in the electoral history of Afghanistan.”
Big ol’ scandal in a law school in the Czech Republic, where they’ve been selling degrees left and right.
Police began investigating the law faculty at Plzeň’s University of West Bohemia (Západočeská univerzita), which is suspected of running a bogus academic degree racket and of bestowing diplomas upon many prominent local politicians, who didn’t actually study for their degrees…
“I don’t remember who taught me law, who advised me on my diploma thesis or who authored the opponent’s opinion. And I’ve lost my transcripts,” Chomutov mayor… Ivana Řápková …, who graduated from Plzeň’s law school in 2005 and whose master’s thesis is missing from the school library, told reporters.
UD lives for quotations like that one, from Mayor Rapkova. It’s very close to perfect.
Perfect would be And my dog is dead. But it’s almost perfect.
The problem at the West Bohemian University’s (ZCU) Faculty of Law can be solved neither by its new acting dean Jiri Pospisil nor the accreditation commission for universities…
The problem is much broader as it stems from… the long-lasting and persisting love of academic titles by Czechs, as a result of which clumsy, picturesque abbreviations (for academic titles), unparalleled elsewhere in the world, mushroomed in the country in the communist period and have survived since…
Pharma sings its version of Al Jolson’s Mammy.
Background here.
**************
NAMI
Everything was lovely
When you were mine.
High-priced pills were rollin’
The day was fine.Then I got investigated
And they wouldn’t let me hide
The multimillion dollar love
I hold for you inside.Now I feel so sad.
I popped fourteen Celexas
But I still feel bad.
And here’s what I’m sayin’
As I watch my profits slide:NAMI,
NAMI,
The sun shines east, the sun shines west,
I know where the sun shines best —[SPOKEN] NAMI…
My little NAMI …
My interests are tangled around NAMI…NAMI,
My little NAMI
I spent a trillion bucks
Now I’m totally fucked
My NAMI.
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UD thanks a reader
for the New York
Times link.
The little pisher won’t be running La Défense.
In this video, Goldy Gopher from the University of Minnesota prays with a player from an opposing team.
… Chase Mejia.
Mejia has been a solid camp performer at every stop he has ever made. His top end speed and size may have held him back from some big offers, but he is amazingly quick off of the line and is almost unstoppable in a one-on-one type of situation.
This skill set has taken him from Division I to [CAUTION: This link leads to Not Safe for Work links.] a much bigger industry in no time flat.
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Thanks to Dave for the link.
… Instead of compromising (to put it very mildly) academic integrity, we should just dispense with the requirement — often, the pretense — of the “student athlete.” … If [players] think they have a shot at the big leagues (which, incidentally, ought to subsidize college sports as their farm system), then let the kids work full time as paid athletes and perfect their craft.
A local sports columnist, reflecting on the Florida State University fiasco, comes up with a solution that makes even pretend schools like FSU nervous: Throw the whole college meme out and turn your school into a farm system for the big leagues.
Having removed the education thing, you go hat in hand to the NFL and the NBA and explain that your facilities can now train their guys free and clear.
Another day, another arrest, and so it goes in a suddenly troubled West Virginia University football program.
Two days after defensive tackle Scooter Berry was arrested and charged with a pair of misdemeanors after an early morning downtown run-in with police, reserve safety Courtney Stuart was arrested on a fugitive warrant from Arizona relating to a 2007 burglary…
… in his dormitory room. He kills a fellow student and then is shot by police. He is apparently alive, under treatment at a local hospital.
… forgets to attend the October meeting of the Garrett Park Town Council. Yet she still covers the event for the town paper.
How does she do it?
Scroll down to Wordplay.