教育人行道: On Education/ 東海大學哀歌: Tunghai University: An Elegy

Webinar: Updates on Carnegie's work in developmental math

2012-02-01T23:52:00.001-08:00

Dear Ken
前一陣子跟您說台語還是"動詞最重要"
線在用英文說明一下
Xerox/Google 等變成動詞表示那些公司有大眾的得意貢獻
又如

During the broadcast, the presenters:

Provided an update on what students and faculty members are experiencing with these new pathways.
Explained how faculty and others have and can contribute to the development of the materials for these pathways.
Outlined how Carnegie integrates "Productive Persistence" into developmental math courses.
Revealed how analytics is being used to inform future development.
Gave details on how to get involved with this work in the future.

WEBINAR RESOURCES

Download the slide presentation (PDF) »
Webinar recording »

Webinar: Updates on Carnegie's work in developmental math

***

"慈濟"在漢文上自古已有
不過"做慈濟"可是台灣開始的
漢文無法像Xerox/ Google 等當名詞兼動詞

中國的教育更像一棵畸形的盆景

2012-01-31T23:01:00.000-08:00

中國的教育更像一棵畸形的盆景　　
多年來，在國內的教育中，存在著各種怪象：
上條件好的幼兒園要交數額不菲的贊助費；老師平時對孩子的態度取決於家長的背景；中高考需托關系、交擇校費進名校；老師對日常教學得過且過，把大量時間和精力放在從課外補習班上多掙灰色收入……

Struggling pupils 等待台灣教育失效的分析

2012-01-26T14:25:00.000-08:00

我沒見過類似的台灣教育失效的分析

Struggling pupils don't catch up, data shows

Comments (778)

By Hannah Richardson and Katherine Sellgren BBC News

This year's tables feature far more data than in previous years

School league tables

Just one in 15 (6.5%) pupils starting secondary school in England "behind" for their age goes on to get five good GCSEs including English and maths, official data shows.

The government data published as part of secondary school league tables suggests the majority of schools are failing struggling pupils.

Nationally 58.2% of pupils reach the five good GCSEs benchmark.

Minister Nick Gibb said schools which let pupils down would be tackled.

The Department for Education data covers England's more than 5,000 secondary schools with more than 200 pieces of information being published for each one - almost four times as much as last year.

Much of the information is broken down by pupil type, with scores offered for low, medium and high-attaining pupils, and those from disadvantaged backgrounds as well as non-disadvantaged.

As expected, those from disadvantaged backgrounds (classed as those on free school meals or in local authority care) do less well.

England league tables

Compare schools in your area

Only a third (34%) of these children achieve the government's benchmark of five GCSEs - or equivalent qualifications - graded A* to C, including English and maths.

In 909 schools, not one low-attaining pupil (those who did not reach Level 4 at the end of primary school) reached this threshold.

At the other end of the spectrum, 95% of pupils who started school "ahead" for their age (achieving Level 5 at the end of primary school) got five good GCSEs, including English and maths.

And of those who started school at the expected level for their age, (Level 4 at the end of primary school) some 45.6% failed to progress to five good GCSEs.

Overall, 58.2% of pupils in England's state schools got five good GCSEs including English and maths (including equivalent qualifications).

'One chance'

When these qualifications, such as BTecs and NVQs, are excluded, 52.4% of pupils gained five good GCSEs.

The performance data also shows what proportion of pupils get the English Baccalaureate.

This new measure, introduced in 2010, is the proportion of pupils achieving A*-C passes in English, maths, two science subjects, a modern or ancient language, and either history or geography.

Nationally across all pupils, just 15.4% got the wrap-around qualification, but most pupils would have made their GCSE choices before Education Secretary Michael Gove announced he was introducing this certificate of achievement.

Pupils with low prior attainment also performed poorly in the English Bacc, with just 0.3% gaining the wrap-around qualification.

Sevenoaks School, a private school in Kent, tops the English Bacc tables, with 99% of pupils meeting this benchmark.

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Brian Lightman: "Government needs to spend less time blaming schools"

Schools Minister Nick Gibb said: "Today's figures reveal a shocking waste of talent in many schools across the country. All too often, pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds aren't given the same opportunities as their peers.

"But there are great examples of schools achieving the best for their disadvantaged pupils. If they can get it right, then so can all schools."

The government says its data shows there are 107 secondary schools below the floor standard of 35% of pupils getting five good GCSEs, including English and maths.

Top performers

Mr Gibb added: "Children only have one chance at education. These tables show which schools are letting children down. We will not hesitate to tackle underperformance in any school, including academies.

"Heads should be striving to make improvements year on year, and we will not let schools coast with mediocre performance."

Shadow education secretary Stephen Twigg said that while many pupils, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds are not achieving their potential, the government is promoting pet projects over real need.

"The government needs to focus on the 3Rs as well," he added.

HEADLINE SCORES

National average for five good GCSEs: 58.2% of pupils
National average for English Baccalaureate: 15.4%
Best GCSE performance: Lawrence Sheriff Grammar School, Rugby
Worst GCSE performance: St Aldhelm's Academy, Poole
Best A-level performance: Colchester Royal Grammar School, Essex
Best performing local authority: Sutton, London
Worst performing local authority: Knowsley, Merseyside

NUT general secretary Christine Blower said the social inequalities with which children start school, widen as they progress through their education.

"Instead of focusing on changing school structures and on the pointless naming and shaming of schools, the Government should be ensuring that all schools have the resources and support they need for all pupils to reach their full potential."

In total, 158 schools see 100% of pupils getting five GCSEs A*-C or equivalent, including maths and English.

When the average point score per pupil is used to rank these top performers schools, Lawrence Sheriff Grammar School in Rugby comes top.

Head teacher Dr Peter Kent said much of the school's success was down to Key Stage 4 being spread over three years rather than the traditional two.

"This gives departments a chance to deliver a very personalised curriculum and we all respond well to something that's been tailored to our individual needs," he said.

The poorest performing school was St Aldhelm's Academy in Poole, Dorset, where just 3% of pupils got five GCSEs A*-C or equivalent, including maths and English.

Principal Cheryl Heron, who took over in September 2010, said the results were "disappointing but not unexpected". It would take time to change and transform pupils' learning experiences, she added.

'Focus'

At sixth form level, the Colchester Royal Grammar School in Essex comes out as the best performer, with an average point score per pupil of over 1,477 - this is the equivalent of over four A*s and one A grade at A-level.

The best performing county was Sutton in London, where 74.7% of pupils got the government benchmark of five GCSEs, including maths and English. The worst was Knowsley, Merseyside, where 40.8% of pupils reached this level. A Knowsley spokesman said its schools were improving year after year.

Your comments (778)

how much the quality of individual teachers matters over the long term.

2012-01-24T22:36:00.001-08:00

BIG STUDY LINKS TEACHERS TO LASTING GAIN
WASHINGTON — Elementary- and middle-school teachers who help raise their students’ standardized-test scores seem to have a wide-ranging, lasting positive effect on those students’ lives beyond academics, including lower teenage-pregnancy rates and greater college matriculation and adult earnings ,according to a new study that tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years. The paper, by Raj Chetty andJohn N. Friedman of Harvard and Jonah E. Rockoff of Columbia, all economists, examines a larger number of students over a longer period of time with more in-depth data than many earlier studies, allowing for a deeper look at how much the quality of individual teachers matters over the long term. The article is in The New York Times.

Japanese strategy for improving teachers is catching on in Chicago

2012-01-24T21:35:00.000-08:00

Japanese strategy for improving teachers is catching on in Chicago

By Linda Lutton

Math teacher Michael Hock during a class he taught for a lesson study session. Other teachers gauge his success. (Photo by Linda Lutton/WBEZ)

In the sunlit library at Jorge Prieto Elementary on Chicago’s’ northwest side, an experiment is under way.

A provisional classroom has been set up. A white board sits at the front of the room, and 20 eighth-graders are seated at library tables. Math teacher Michael Hock is giving a lesson about the distributive property.

Scattered throughout the room are some 30 other teachers. They aren’t wearing lab coats—but they might as well be. They clutch clipboards and carefully monitor kids’ reactions to the teacher’s explanations, peering over students’ shoulders as they write answers.

“What is the area of the garden?” Hock asks students as he points to an illustration on the white board. “Nestor, I haven’t heard from you today.”

Listen to the audio story

Nestor answers the question, and the 30 adults, including visiting teachers from Japan, scribble notes.

The exercise is called “lesson study.” It’s a professional development strategy used extensively in Japan that essentially dissects a teacher’s lesson and the way it’s delivered.

Here’s how it works: teachers come up with a detailed lesson plan and explain ahead of time to colleagues the goals of the lesson. Then, one teacher tries the lesson out on a group of students, while dozens of other teachers watch what happens.

Teachers observe students during a lesson study session at Jorge Prieto Elementary last summer. (Photo by Linda Lutton/WBEZ)

Finally, the observers offer feedback and ideas for improvement.“[We’ve been] doing lesson study more than 100 years in Japan,” says Toshiakira Fujii, a premier professor of math education in Japan who was among those teachers observing at Prieto. “But lesson study in the United States is quite new.”

Fujii says Japanese teachers see lesson study as a proving ground, a way to shine in front of their colleagues.

“You can see [it] everywhere in Japan,” says Fujii. “In Tokyo in the case it’s Wednesday. Wednesday [we] usually finish at lunch time. Then one class stays, and the other classes dismiss. And then every teacher comes to that one class and observes. Even the school nurse and school counselor also join to watch the lesson—that’s our traditional way.”

There’s been lots of talk about how Chicago should evaluate teachers. Lesson study is being billed as a way to help teachers improve.

The strategy is one both teachers unions and school districts say they like. The head of instruction in Chicago Public Schools says she’s a fan of lesson study. The Chicago Teachers Union helped organize the lesson study at Prieto—and convenes other sessions on holidays like Pulaski Day, when students and teachers volunteer to participate.

Florida included lesson study in its winning Race to the Top proposal.

After a lesson is taught and students dismissed, teachers analyze what happened. They’re like scientists looking back at their experiment, figuring out what went right, what went wrong.

Teacher Michael Hock (right) hears feedback from teachers on the lesson he taught. That can take "thick skin," he says. (Photo by Linda Lutton/WBEZ)

“Possibly you forgot—or you chose not to—ask the students to draw a model of the equation,” one teacher tells Hock after students at Prieto have left the library.

“I didn’t see much evidence that they felt challenged,” adds another, citing his extensive notes. “I know there was some discussion at two of the tables, but there didn’t seem to be very much discussion at three of them.”

The teachers discuss whether it was more successful to use concrete examples or abstract ones and whether the illustration Hock used helped students understand the concept being taught.

“I really love it because it’s all about constructive feedback,” says Hock. But he admits it can require some thick skin at times. “Because you’re going to hear some things. I mean, some people like that constructive feedback and some people are like, ‘Whoa, I hate that. It kind of points out all the things we did wrong.’ I don’t look at it that way.”

Hock was criticized the day prior for talking too much while teaching.

“But today when you were walking around between desks—you stopped talking,” Fujii told him during the feedback session. “You can change your behavior by one day. That’s amazing.”

Margaret O’Sullivan, who teaches sixth-grade science at Armstrong Elementary in Rogers Park, says participating in lesson study has changed her whole thought process as a teacher.

“Now I’m thinking before I start the lesson, ‘OK, these are the questions I’m going to ask.’ And not just questions where they give you back facts. But questions that are going to lead them to more deeper thinking.”

O’Sullivan says it’s difficult for teachers to get thoughtful feedback on their day-to-day work. Many principals observe teachers just once a year.

“When you’re in the classroom, you’re only limited to what you see, so you may miss out on a lot of what’s going on,” says O’Sullivan. “So after doing a lesson to step back and have people point out things that you may not have noticed is incredible feedback that you just don’t get.”

Lesson study advocates in Chicago hope to spread the practice further. As Chicago shifts to new “common core” learning standards, advocates hope lesson study might play a role in helping teachers teach to the more rigorous standards.

Chicago has its own lesson study guru. DePaul University education professor Akihiko Takahashi is known internationally for promoting lesson study. Here, he’s co-founded the Chicago-based Lesson Study Alliance, and he’s on a mission:

“Traditional American professional development is somebody outside comes and then does for teachers,” says Takahashi. But he argues there is a lot that teachers can do on their own. “My goal is in every school teachers gather and then find a new way to improve lessons by themselves.”

And what do students think of lesson study?

It feels “weird” having all those adults milling about, peering over students’ shoulders, says Prieto eighth-grader Hector Figueroa. But, he adds, “you get used to it.”

Hector’s teacher told kids they should just think of the adults as “flies on the wall.”

“But that would be even freakier,” Hector says. Still, he gets the point: “I think they’re just trying to make our teachers better.”

This story aired on WBEZ on January 9, 2012. It was produced with support from The Hechinger Report.

平板電腦的內文

2012-01-19T12:50:00.000-08:00

新竹市園區學校每位學生獲贈的平板電腦是那一品牌?

Apple Makes Push Into iPad Textbooks

Apple introduced tools designed to spur the development of textbooks and other classroom materials for the iPad, a push to drive demand for its tablet and change the education market.

倪明選談"學術界經驗"

2012-01-19T12:37:00.000-08:00

nascence,research,re-

港科大教授倪明選談"學術界生存經驗"

2006年11月06日 07:21:48 　來源：中國青年報

【字號大中小】　【我要打印】　【我要糾錯】

【Email推薦：

】

論文讀得太多，會被洗腦，優秀的學生變成平庸之輩。11月3日，在華中科大舉行的2006光電子信息與技術全國博士生學術論壇上，國際知名計算機專家、香港科技大學倪明選教授，結合自己的經歷，與博士生暢談“學術界生存經驗”。

倪明選指出，很多年輕的學者都會認為，選課題前別人的論文讀得越多越好，實際上這是一個很大的誤區，只會給自己“洗腦”，喪失自己的想法。“最恰當的研究方法應該是精選一定量的好論文，邊閱讀邊思考，這會給自己很多啟發。”他告訴在場的博士生，自己曾經有不少特別優秀的學生，就因為過度閱讀他人的論文而變得平庸。

怎樣做好研究？怎樣選出好的研究課題寫出好的論文？倪明選認為，首先要確信自己已經為開展科學研究做好了充分的準備，即已經精通基本技巧、具備進一步學習的能力；其次則要有開放的思維，這樣才能有新奇的想法；再次，要有批判的思想，這樣才能對事物有更深刻認識。

倪明選告訴廣大博士生，“選課題是研究的開始，是做好研究很重要的一個部分”。根據自己的經驗，他指出，“興趣是動力的源泉，找課題一定要根據自己個人的興趣來；同時還要兼顧所選課題是不是符合自己的水平，這樣才有利于自己的研究。”

課題選好了，那麼在課題研究中好的想法從何而來？倪明選提出了4個觀點：喝喝啤酒，放松一下，在放松中更容易找到靈感；靈感從天而降，就像牛頓發現萬有引力定律一樣，知識越多，我們就越善于獲得從天而降的靈感；懂得目前的工作情況，在工作中慢慢積累；對自己的研究課題一定要有深層次的認識，同時擁有廣博的知識面。

“要有好的想法並不難。”倪教授這樣告訴在場博士生，“只要注意到上面幾點，同時注意一下研究的方法，就很容易想到好的主意了。”

倪明選還通過對英文“研究”的巧妙解構，詮釋了他眼中的研究。

“研究的英文拼寫research＝re＋search。”創新、創造、合作，加上反復地探索，這就是研究的態度，“如果能夠做到這一點，我們都能做出成果。”

針對目前在部分研究生與導師之間存在的“代際關係緊張”問題，倪明選認為，這樣很不利于自己的研究。因為在學習階段，很多東西還是需要導師輔導的。要處理好與導師的關係，也不是唯導師之命是從，有自己的觀點一定要敢于提出。

對此，他講到自己經歷的一件事情：有一個學生曾經向自己提出過一個很新的觀點，當時自己也沒有很在意，認為沒有什麼研究價值，但是這個學生沒有放棄，最終他在這個方面做出了很重要的研究成果。（通訊員朱俊剛陳婧婧記者甘麗華）

"工程經濟學""系統學/分析"

2012-01-16T21:20:00.001-08:00

陳寬仁教授給我 "給力春聯" 他還做些補充我也順便再多談點
關於MTM的領域我跟林公說美國這些科學最重要的其實是方法學而非那些東西本身而日本人/工程師將類似的想法應用在"容易裝配能力" 等方面.....

我還跟陳老師談他最擅長的"工程經濟學" 我說它沒整合進 "系統學/分析"等是很遺憾的課程設計之失"

(另一方面小燕等東海建築系的畢業生出外做是經常碰到工程經濟的問題可是她們根本沒學過其實只要幾小時的課程就很有注意了)

我還跟陳老師談中鋼公司的兩位董事一個是現在90幾歲的雷穎將軍它的回憶錄有趙耀東先生1973年到東海的感人演講 (他改變了我詳2008年的抒) 以及我與盧淵源教授的一席話它如何在中華汽車受林信義之重視得以代表經濟部.....

MTM 記得似乎是 Method-Time Measurement

簡立當年為遷院，原來想要100甲。後來圈得員樹林的相思林及一小部分茶園圃，一共是67甲。他邀請林務局專家來指導種樹。樹種繁多。經過數十年，現在校園植被非常茂盛美麗。圖書館旁邊是片比足球場還大的青草坪，大禮堂前有珍貴到以寸計價的南洋杉，林務局選作試驗對象的台灣黑松林，航空安全教學大樓前面是一片橄欖樹，‧‧‧　‧‧‧　。每年春天杜鵑花盛開時，校園開放參觀。

簡立對學術界二大貢獻：一、是將隸屬於陸軍的「陸軍理工學院」晉名為「中正理工學院」直屬國防部，把陸海空的理工教育溶合，為中山科學院供應人力。二、是把淡江文理學院昇格為淡江大學。　另有二件創舉：一、中正理工學院向日本日立公司購買電子顯微鏡，

是台灣第一台。　二、淡江大學管理科學研究所與國防部簽約合作十年(民國60-70年)

Phi Delta Kappa /Phi , Tau , Phi /Sigma Xi/Phi Beta Kappa

2012-01-11T03:12:00.001-08:00

Phi Beta Kappa

(fī)
n.

An honorary society, founded in 1776, of college students and graduates whose members are chosen on the basis of high academic standing.
A member of this society.

[From the initials of the society's motto in Greek philosophiā biou kubernētēs, philosophy the guide of life : philosophiā, philosophy + biou, genitive of bios, life + kubernētēs, guide.]

Sigma Xi: The Scientific Research Society is a non-profit honor society which was founded in 1886 at Cornell University by a junior faculty member and a handful of graduate students.^[2] Members elect others on the basis of their research achievements or potential. Despite the name, Sigma Xi is neither a fraternity nor a sorority, and today is open to all qualified individuals who are interested in science and engineering.

民國十年五月二十五日，我國天津北洋大學美籍教授愛樂斯 ( J . H . Ehlers )致函國內各大學發起全國勵學會之組織，曾名定為斐陶斐，即希臘艾字母 Phi , Tau , Phi 之譯音，用以代表哲學、工學、理學( Philosophia , Technologia , Physiologia ) 三種學術。

哲學為科學之母 ; 工學即工藝之學，為應用科學 ; 理學即生理學，為純理論科學。本會籌備期間，由愛樂斯氏親任總幹事之職，教育總長范德源、南京高等師範學校校長郭秉文、國立北京大學教授胡適、南開大學校長張伯苓、燕京大學校長司徒雷登、聖約翰大學校長卜舫濟、金陵大學校長包文為第一屆董事會籌備會員。

Phi Delta Kappa (also known as "PDK" or "PDK International") is an US professional organization for educators. Its headquarters are located in Bloomington, Indiana. It was founded on 24 January 1906. Phi Delta Kappa also had a youth organization, called Xinos, girls, and Kudos, guys.^[1]

Phi Delta Kappan

www.kappanmagazine.org/ - Cached

Not a PDK member? Join now to receive Kappan magazine and other great member benefits. Phi Delta Kappa International. CONNECT WITH US; PDK Blogs ...

Harvard Educational Review (1930-)《北京大学教育评论》（季刊2003-）

2012-01-11T01:09:00.000-08:00

Harvard Educational Review - Harvard Education Publishing Group

www.hepg.org/her - 頁庫存檔 - 翻譯這個網頁

A scholarly journal on education; provides an interdisciplinary forum for discussion and debate about education's most vital issues. Founded in 1930, the Review ...

2003 年 7 月，国家新闻出版总署致函教育部，批准创办《北京大学教育评论》（季刊）。由汪永铨教授任主编，喻岳青教授任常务副主编。

发刊词

　　百年大计，教育为本。江泽民同志指出，要发展我国的教育事业，就“必须不断推进教育创新”，而教育的创新须臾离不开教育科学研究。对此，北京大学责无旁贷。一份《北京大学教育评论》，正是对繁荣中国教育研究，推进中国教育创新这一使命的一份承诺。
　　教育学科在北京大学源远流长。早在京师大学堂时期便设有师范馆，1924年正式设立教育学系。在20世纪上半叶，无论在教育理论研究，还是在教育实践，或是在教育国际交流方面，北京大学都有令人瞩目的贡献。1949年，根据政府的统一规划，北京大学取消了教育系科。三十余年之后，根据教育事业发展的需要，教育学科在北京大学又逐步得到重建：1973年建立电教组（后改为电化教育中心），1980年建立高等教育研究室，1984年建立高等教育科学研究所，1999年建立教育经济研究所，2000年建立教育学院。至此，教育学科已跻身于北京大学当前基本学科之列。本刊的创办，正是教育学科在北京大学成长壮大的一个标志。
　　本刊旨在促进教育领域的科学研究与交流，特别注重教育研究的创新性、学术性、实践性和跨学科性。
　　创新是科学研究的生命所在，是独立思考和深入探索的结果，也是学术讨论与交锋的结果。而这些都离不开百家争鸣的学术氛围。本刊有志于为教育界同人创造一个宽松活跃的学术空间，为推动我国教育理论与实践的创新而努力。
　　学术性是对学术研究的基本要求，一切论点和结论都应当建立在专门而深入的研究之上，实事求是，言之有据，符合学术研究的方法与规范。本刊愿与诸位作者一起，致力于提高我国教育研究的学术水准。
　　实践性是教育研究的根本归宿。学术研究不意味着远离实际，钻进与世隔绝的象牙之塔。恰恰相反，它应当根置于现实的土壤，汲取生活的养分，并最终以解决实践中的问题为依归。学术性与实践性的统一是我们的追求。
　　跨学科性针对的是画地为牢式的研究。教育研究应当超越人为的学科藩篱，倾听不同学科的声音，与其联手合作。同时，教育研究从来都不是教育研究者独有的领地，不少相关的学科均为教育研究做出过重要贡献。我们相信，跨学科的视野和方法将会使教育研究更趋深入、广阔，更富活力。
　　本刊刊名题字由蔡元培先生遗墨集字而成，意在承续先生所奠定的民主开放的学术传统。我们创办这份刊物，决不是要营造一处私家的花园，而是要为教育界乃至关心教育的各界同人创造一片公共的园地。希望专家学者和各界人士踊跃来此播种、耕耘和收获，与我们一起打造一份高质量的《北京大学教育评论》。

良師價無窮Big Study Links Good Teachers to Lasting Gain

2012-01-06T03:11:00.001-08:00

Big Study Links Good Teachers to Lasting Gain

By ANNIE LOWREY

Published: January 6, 2012

WASHINGTON — Elementary- and middle-school teachers who help raise their students’ standardized-test scores seem to have a wide-ranging, lasting positive effect on those students’ lives beyond academics, including lower teenage-pregnancy rates and greater college matriculation and adult earnings, according to a new study that tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years.

Enlarge This Image

Steve Hebert for The New York Times

A study found profound effects on students whose teachers helped them raise their test scores.

Multimedia

Graphic

Benefits of Good Teachers

News, data and conversation about education in New York.

The paper, by Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman of Harvard and Jonah E. Rockoff of Columbia, all economists, examines a larger number of students over a longer period of time with more in-depth data than many earlier studies, allowing for a deeper look at how much the quality of individual teachers matters over the long term.

“That test scores help you get more education, and that more education has an earnings effect — that makes sense to a lot of people,” said Robert H. Meyer, director of the Value-Added Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which studies teacher measurement but was not involved in this study. “This study skips the stages, and shows differences in teachers mean differences in earnings.”

The study, which the economics professors have presented to colleagues in more than a dozen seminars over the past year and plan to submit to a journal, is the largest look yet at the controversial “value-added ratings,” which measure the impact individual teachers have on student test scores. It is likely to influence the roiling national debates about the importance of quality teachers and how best to measure that quality.

Many school districts, including those in Washington and Houston, have begun to use value-added metrics to influence decisions on hiring, pay and even firing.

Supporters argue that such metrics hold teachers accountable and can help improve the educational outcomes of millions of children. Detractors, most notably a number of teachers unions, say that isolating the effect of a given teacher is harder than it seems, and might unfairly penalize some instructors.

Critics particularly point to the high margin of error with many value-added ratings, noting that they tend to bounce around for a given teacher from year to year and class to class. But looking at an individual’s value-added score for three or four classes, the researchers found that some consistently outperformed their peers.

“Everybody believes that teacher quality is very, very important,” says Eric A. Hanushek, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and longtime researcher of education policy. “What this paper and other work has shown is that it’s probably more important than people think. That the variations or differences between really good and really bad teachers have lifelong impacts on children.”

The average effect of one teacher on a single student is modest. All else equal, a student with one excellent teacher for one year between fourth and eighth grade would gain $4,600 in lifetime income, compared to a student of similar demographics who has an average teacher. The student with the excellent teacher would also be 0.5 percent more likely to attend college.

Perhaps just as important, given the difficulty of finding, training and retaining outstanding teachers, is that the difference in long-term outcome between students who have average teachers and those with poor-performing ones is as significant as the difference between those who have excellent teachers and those with average ones, the study found.

In the aggregate, these differences are potentially enormous.

Replacing a poor teacher with an average one would raise a single classroom’s lifetime earnings by about $266,000, the economists estimate. Multiply that by a career’s worth of classrooms.

“If you leave a low value-added teacher in your school for 10 years, rather than replacing him with an average teacher, you are hypothetically talking about $2.5 million in lost income,” said Professor Friedman, one of the coauthors.

To do the study, the researchers first tackled the question that has swirled controversy in so many school districts, including New York City’s: whether value-added scores are in fact a good measure of teacher quality. Mr. Jones might regularly help raise test scores more than Ms. Smith, but maybe that is because his students are from wealthier families, or because he has a harder-working class — factors that can be difficult for researchers to discern.

While Professor Rockoff, at Columbia, has previously written favorably about value-added ratings, the Harvard pair were skeptics of the metrics. “We said, ‘We’re going to show that these measures don’t work, that this has to do with student motivation or principal selection or something else,’ ” Professor Chetty recalled.

But controlling for numerous factors, including students’ backgrounds, the researchers found that the value-added scores consistently identified some teachers as better than others, even if individual teachers’ value-added scores varied from year to year.

After identifying excellent, average and poor teachers, the economists then set out to look at their students over the long term, analyzing information on earnings, college matriculation rates, the age they had children, and where they ended up living.

The results were striking. Looking only at test scores, previous studies had shown, the effect of a good teacher mostly fades after three or four years. But the broader view showed that the students still benefit for years to come.

Students with top teachers are less likely to become pregnant as teenagers, more likely to enroll in college, and more likely to earn more money as adults, the study found.

The authors argue that school districts should use value-added measures in evaluations, and to remove the lowest performers, despite the disruption and uncertainty involved.

“The message is to fire people sooner rather than later,” Professor Friedman said.

Professor Chetty acknowledged, “Of course there are going to be mistakes — teachers who get fired who do not deserve to get fired.” But he said that using value-added scores would lead to fewer mistakes, not more.

Still, translating value-added scores into policy is fraught with problems. Judging teachers by their students’ test scores might encourage cheating, teaching to the test or lobbying to have certain students in class, for instance.

“We are performing these studies in settings where nobody cares about their ranking — it does not change their pay or job security,” said Jesse Rothstein, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, whose work criticizing other value-added assessments unions frequently cite. “But if you start to change that, there is going to be a range of responses.”

Many other researchers and school administrators say that even if imperfect, well-calculated value-added scores are an important part of evaluating teachers.

“Very few people suggest that you should use value-added scores alone to make personnel decisions,” Dr. Hanushek, of Stanford, said. “What the whole value-added debate has done is push forward the issue of how to evaluate teachers, and how to use that information.”

The new study found no evidence for one piece of conventional wisdom: that having a good teacher in an early grade has a bigger effect than having a good teacher in later grades.

感謝有您邁向2012

2011-12-29T17:39:00.001-08:00

感謝有您 邁向2012

hc的”剪貼簿”在2011年約有25萬人次造訪

戴明圈: A Taiwanese Deming Circle

"交情千千" 電子連絡簿(日報)

胡適的世界 The World of Hu Shih

管理學新生

 Books Birdviews 書海

 People 人物

 品質世界 quality world

教育人

 英文人行道 et cetera, et cetera .

漢語人行道：演變風貌

 譯藝

 英國風

 日本心得帖

 亞洲

 SHE健康一生

東海300師生抗議工廠長期廢氣凌虐

2011-12-23T03:13:00.000-08:00

一個天堂變地獄的故事:東海300師生抗議工廠長期廢氣凌虐

工廠廢氣染黑聖誕　東海300師生抗議

2011年12月23日18:30 蘋果即時

東海大學緊鄰台中工業區，長期以來為工業區飄散的惡臭所苦，師生忍無可忍。東海大學學生日前發起「東海反工業區臭氣聯盟」，自主發起連署「黑色聖誕大遊行」，300名師生今天中午於東海大學校門口集合，頭綁戰鬥頭巾、持抗議標語，繞行校園後，於下午遊行至台中工業區世佑壁紙工廠，途經台中市工業區服務中心，將投遞陳情書與民怨箱，要求業者與環保局「踹共」。

抗議學生表示，該廠長期排放廢氣，污染空氣，師生反應多次無效，只好走上街頭，要求業者撤廠，公部門也應發揮監督力。

工業局中區工業區管理處表示，經濟部已積極輔導業者改善，遷廠事關重大，須協調市府召集相關單位評估。台中市環保局則表示，該廠於2008年曾挨罰，2009年和去年師生檢舉，但檢測未超標，今年5月抽驗，該廠確造成污染，已開罰10萬元，上月複查又違規，再開罰370萬元，業者還在訴願中。

東海大學師生發動「黑色聖誕」遊行，抗議工業區1壁紙工廠排放廢氣。林建鋒攝

戴明博士的新經濟學的教育改革

2011-12-20T00:23:00.000-08:00

"缺腿的小熊算是熊嗎? ".可運作的定義 operational definition

這一糖果回收的消息讓我想起在戴明博士的新經濟學中
他採用某小學老師的利用玩具餅乾來教小朋友什麼叫
可運作的定義 operational definition
"缺腿的小熊算是熊嗎? ".......

"缺腿的小熊算是熊嗎? ".可運作的定義 operational definition

Dr. Deming 的教育改革的故事管理學院等故事

中世紀大學./臺大開放式課程

2011-12-09T19:40:00.000-08:00

中世紀大學. 雅克韋爾熱- LES UNIVERSITES AU MOYEN AGE by JACQUES VERGER, 1973 上海人民出版社，2007
本書譯文不很清楚...

Les universités au Moyen Age [Broché]

Jacques Verger (Auteur)

Broché: 226 pages
Editeur : Presses Universitaires de France - PUF (18 avril 2007)

【圖書簡介】
　　本書從中世紀大學的“思想”作用（思想的產生）和“職業”作用（人的培養）出發，關注中世紀大學機構的運行，了解大學成員如何匯聚并生活于其中，考察這個智力活動的社會與機構的基礎，分析中世紀大學同當時社會所建立的聯系，從而試圖構建中世紀文化的社會學。書中提出的主要思想，如關于中世紀大學誕生于12世紀初和13世紀初的機構的與精神的雙重變革的思想；關于中世紀大學盡管脆弱卻催生了最初的人文環境的思想；關于對中世紀大學的控制很早便構成教會、君王和城市的政治賭注的思想；關于中世紀大學對于文化整體面貌的變革，對于歐洲社會精英的構成與功能均有重大影響的思想，都有重要的學術意義。

【作者簡介】
　　雅克·韋爾熱，法國巴黎大學中世紀史教授，國際大學史委員會副主席，中世紀晚期文化和教育史的專家。

【本書目錄】
序言
第一部分大學的誕生與確認（12-13世紀）
第一章大學之源
一、12世紀初西方的學校
二、12世紀的文藝復興
三、最早的大學
四、“自發的”大學和“創建的”大學
第二章大學如行會
一、機構與特許權
二、教學組織
三、大學歷史的社會層面
第三章 13世紀的問題與沖突
一、托缽會修士和世俗教師
二、經院哲學的頂峰與危機
第二部分中世紀末（14-15）：衰退乎？變革乎？
第四章大學與教會
一、大學神學的失敗
二、教會中的法學家
第五章大學與國家
一、君主創辦大學
二、供職于國家
三、大學與政治
四、大學自治的終結
第六章大學與社會
一、富人與窮人
二、科學與貴族
三、科學與工作
結語
后記未注明何年
參考文獻
譯名對照表

【OCW】臺大開放式課程上線！！！

關於臺大開放式課程
為促進教學資源共享，落實建構終身學習環境理念，

提供自學者更寬廣的學習內容，開放式課程（OCW）已蔚為世界風潮。而本校為響應全球開放式教育運動並善盡社會責任、提高本校能見度，將邀請各學系提供能彰顯該系特色之優質課程，建置「開放式課程」網站。其教材內容除提供社會人士免費上網自我學習外，並提供予國內外學生、教師及相關研究人員作為學習輔助、課程教學及研究題材之參考，以提昇學習效果及研究品質。

本校每學期將提供十門以上優質課程，包含各學系極具特色之基礎、專業課程、共同必修課程及通識教育課程。而置於網上之影音課程(含教材、講義、PPT及圖片等)，均會經本校相關單位處理智慧財產權之同意授權問題。由於課程所引用之內容或圖片當原創者不願提供或授權費用索價過高時，該課程會將部分影音暫時關閉，繼續尋求授權。其他依「國立臺灣大學課程創用CC授權同意書」簽訂授權同意書後，始開放瀏覽。前往臺大開放式課程>>

醜化校園

2011-12-08T17:05:00.000-08:00

"插旗文化"在校園很流行
我家對面的臺灣大學內還插著半年前某人(詹宏志)的演講旗....

旗開不得勝！選舉插旗文化砸大錢醜化台灣？
NOWnews
再過不到40天，總統和立委選舉就要到來，在法定競選活動還沒開始前，一份由品牌設計公司所發佈的調查結果顯示，台灣的選舉旗幟被評為台灣「最醜」第一名，現在消基會發起插旗文化「OUT」口號，希望還給台灣一個環保選舉。根據監察院所公佈「99年直轄市長候選人政治獻金 ...

Online Learning, Personalized

2011-12-04T21:25:00.001-08:00

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Grading the Digital School

Online Learning, Personalized

By SOMINI SENGUPTA 10:49 PM ET

At least 36 schools nationwide are combining teacher-led lessons with computer-based lectures and exercises based on Salman Khan’s popular YouTube lessons.

MBA教育再思考 : 十字路口的工商管理教育

2011-12-02T18:00:00.000-08:00

Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads/ MBA教育再思考

這本漢譯缺索引
不過還是可以知道在末章引用Herbert A. Simon 的一所工商學院的設計 (頁312 /英文 335)
(prize-winning 翻譯成"備受贊譽" 不好)

2008年哈佛大學商學院慶百年的討論主題之一
各著名管理學院的個案在2009年有一小段檢討

MBA教育再思考 : 十字路口的工商管理教育
出版年: 2011-9
頁數: 338
定價: 58.00元
ISBN: 9787300138251

內容簡介 · · · · · ·
工商管理教育的現狀解析和未來藍圖
數十年來，MBA畢業生幾乎毫無懸念地可以在最優秀的企業謀到高薪工作。然而世易時移，MBA學位帶來的優越地位已經受到撼動。世界經濟在迅速轉型，學術界和企業界對商學教育的質疑甚囂塵上，全球金融危機爆發……這些因素都把工商管理教育推到了一個關鍵的十字路口。面對這些挑戰，商學院的應對措施將決定其未來的角色及其工商管理教育是否把握時代脈搏，密切聯繫實踐。
在這本具有標誌性意義的書中，哈佛商學院三位學者研究了影響工商管理教育的三個趨勢：項目形式日趨多樣化；越來越多的雇主開始質疑MBA學位的價值；以及由此所導致的入學情況的變化。
作者展開了廣泛的調研，訪談了數十位商學院院長和企業高管，並且詳細分析了11個頂尖MBA項目。以此為基礎，《MBA教育再思考》提出了8個目前亟待滿足的教學需求，分析指出每個需求都對應著一個機遇，商學院可以..

作者簡介 · · · · · ·
斯里坎特·M?·達塔爾（Srikant M. Datar）哈佛商學院會計學教授（享有“Arthur Lowes Dickinson爵士”頭銜），在MBA項目、綜合管理項目和高級管理項目中任教，兼任資深副院長，主管高管培訓、教師招聘與培養以及科研工作。主要研究方向為管理控制和戰略執行。
戴維·A·加文（David A. Garvin）哈佛商學院工商管理教授（享有“C. Roland Christensen”頭銜），在MBA和高級管理項目中任教，負責選修課的製定，並擔任教學資源中心主任。主要研究方向為綜合管理和戰略變革。
帕特里克·G·卡倫（Patrick G. Cullen）哈佛商學院助理研究員，主要研究專業學院與相關各方的關係，尤其是商學院的發展。曾擔任AACSB助理研究副總裁。
　　◆ 譯者簡介
伊志宏中國人民大學商學院院長、教授。主要...

目錄 · · · · · ·
第1章導論：變革中的MBA學位

第Ⅰ篇 MBA教育的現狀

第2章 MBA市場形勢的變化
第3章詳探課程方案
第4章憂慮重重
第5章迎接全球化、領導力和整合性的挑戰
第6章教學方法和課程設計的創新

第Ⅱ篇商學院的應對策略

第7章芝加哥大學布斯商學院：靈活自主，以學科為基礎
第8章歐洲工商管理學院：信條——全球化
第9章創造性領導力中心：以領導力開發為核心
第10章哈佛商學院：綜合管理和注重實踐
第11章耶魯管理學院：整合與大變革
第12章斯坦福大學商學院：個性化與大變革
第13章結語：商學院，路在何方

HBS Press Book

Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads

by Srikant M. Datar, David A. Garvin, Patrick Cullen
Source: Harvard Business Press Books
400 pages. Publication date: Apr 22, 2010. Prod. #: 14724-HBK-ENG

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"Business Schools Face Test of Faith." "Is It Time to Retrain B-Schools?" As these headlines make clear, business education is at a major crossroads. For decades, MBA graduates from top-tier schools set the standard for cutting-edge business knowledge and skills. Now the business world has changed, say the authors of Rethinking the MBA, and MBA programs must change with it. Increasingly, managers and recruiters are questioning conventional business education. Their concerns? Among other things, MBA programs aren't giving students the heightened cultural awareness and global perspectives they need. Newly minted MBAs lack essential leadership skills. Creative and critical thinking demand far more attention. In this compelling and authoritative new book, the authors: Document a rising chorus of concerns about business schools gleaned from extensive interviews with deans and executives, and from a detailed analysis of current curricula and emerging trends in graduate business education Provide case studies showing how leading MBA programs have begun reinventing themselves for the better Offer concrete ideas for how business schools can surmount the challenges that come with reinvention, including securing faculty with new skills and experimenting with new pedagogies Rich with examples and thoroughly researched, Rethinking the MBA reveals why and how business schools must define a better pathway for the future.

New Calculation: Math in Preschool

2011-11-29T17:00:00.000-08:00

New Calculation: Math in Preschool

Chicago Teachers Add Principles of Arithmetic to Early-Childhood Education, Laying Base for Higher-Level Skills Later On

By STEPHANIE BANCHERO

CHICAGO—Scores of preschool and kindergarten teachers across the city are embedding math concepts into daily classroom activities, in a promising new program that gives students a foundation for more complex math and logical-thinking skills in later grades.

Enlarge Image

Clayton Hauck for The Wall Street Journal

Teacher Jennifer Flynn incorporates math concepts in her preschool class at Lovett Elementary School in Chicago.

The Early Mathematics Education Project at Erikson Institute, a nonprofit graduate school in child development, has already trained about 300 Chicago preschool and kindergarten teachers at 150 schools, funded by grants from local foundations and Chicago Public Schools.

Chicago-based Erikson recently got a $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to offer the training to 111 teachers from preschool to third grade at eight more Chicago schools and to study the program's effectiveness.

At Lovett Elementary School, where the preschool teacher adopted the new methods, math instruction is omnipresent, if not always apparent. It's there where 4-year-old Jasmine Wilson arranges four Popsicle sticks into a zigzag pattern under the number "4." It shows up when Cedric Carter mimics the teacher's syncopated clapping pattern. And it appears when students join a growing line of characters from "The Gingerbread Man" to chase Anasia Simmons around the room.

Earlier

The children don't realize it, but they are learning fundamental math concepts such as connecting numerals to quantity, building patterns, and the idea that adding something, or someone, creates a larger number.

Evidence is mounting about the importance of teaching math in preschool and kindergarten. Research has shown that if children don't have good instruction and effective teachers in early grades, they are more likely to struggle later when they face more complicated concepts. This is especially true for low-income children, who often arrive at school behind academically.

U.S. elementary-school children have shown slow but steady progress on national math exams. However U.S. 15-year-olds were 25th among 34 developed countries on a 2009 international math exam, a ranking that has remained stagnant since 2000, when the exam was first given.

At Chicago's Lovett Elementary, where 93% of students come from low-income families, preschool teacher Jennifer Flynn said that when she began teaching eight years ago, she taught math on a very "surface level," making sure students knew such things as counting to 100 and creating patterns.

"Now I work to make them mathematical thinkers and I want them to be able to tell me 'why' and 'how' they know things," said Ms. Flynn, who completed the Erikson math program two years ago. "My students are far more engaged and are more successful in kindergarten."

A study Erikson conducted found that students of teachers enrolled in its math program showed, on average, three to five months additional progress in math, compared with students whose teachers were on the waiting list to get into the program. Children who started the school year far behind in math made the most progress.

Jie-Qi Chen, an Erikson professor who helped develop the project, said proper math instruction helps students develop reasoning and logical thinking skills—cognitive building blocks that prepare them to learn any subject. But she said early math gains in preschool can "wash out" if teachers in elementary grades don't know how to teach it. And unlike reading, she said, which requires little explicit instruction after a certain level, "math cannot be fully grasped without assistance from a well-trained teacher."

A 2007 study by Erikson Institute showed that 21% of Chicago preschool and kindergarten teachers taught math on any given day, while 96% taught language arts.

Early-education teachers rarely receive more than one semester in math instruction in college. "A lot of them are math phobic," said Jeanine Brownell, assistant director of programming for Early Mathematics.

With the $5 million, five-year grant, Erikson's new math project will put teachers in the eight schools through a weeklong summer training program. The teachers will also get six training sessions during the year and meet with coaches who will observe them in the classroom and provide feedback. Erikson officials will work with the schools to help build a culture of strong math instruction.

Jennifer McCray, project director of Early Mathematics, said the program focuses on how to teach mathematical thinking, rather than basic math procedures. Instead of learning, for example, to recognize the numeral 4 and that it comes between 3 and 5, Erikson wants students to understand that "4" represents a quantity and has meaning. After Jasmine put the four Popsicle sticks into a Z pattern, Ms. Flynn prompted her to rearrange them into another shape, proving that no matter how the stick were arranged, they still represent the quantity "4."

Stephen Brown, a kindergarten teacher at Gale Math and Science Academy on Chicago's Far North Side who is currently enrolled in the Erikson math program, said he has learned to infuse math in virtually every lesson. "They've helped me understand how a 5-year-old brain thinks and helped me connect my teaching to what numbers mean in their world," he said.

In Ms. Flynn's class at Lovett, math lessons are part of storytime, puzzle time, just about any time of the day. Four-year-old Anaisa wasn't sure what "The Gingerbread Man" lesson was aimed to teach, but when asked if it was math, she scrunched her eyebrows together and said, "No, it was fun."

大學文憑失色......

2011-11-29T00:38:00.000-08:00

THE DWINDLING POWER OF A COLLEGE DEGREE
Until the early 1970s, less than 11 percent of the adult population graduated from college, and most of them could get a decent job. Today nearly a third have college degrees, and a higher percentage of them graduated from nonelite schools. A bachelor's degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability. To get a good job, you have to have some special skill - charm, by the way, counts - that employers value. But there's also a pretty good chance that by some point in the next few years, your boss will find that some new technology or some worker overseas can replace you. The article was in The New York Times Magazine.

Stanford University Online High School

2011-11-25T03:34:00.000-08:00

WHY STANFORD ONLINE HIGH SCHOOL MATTERS
Sunday’s New York Times story broke the news that Stanford University, one of the world’s most prestigious research institutions, is putting its brand squarely behind a full-time, degree-granting online high school program. It’s just one more reason to set aside the silly debate about whether online education can possibly be effective for high school students. Stanford’s move is significant. But, unless it goes further, Stanford University Online High School is still just a small, selective program for gifted students. This post is from the Quick and the Ed.

Online High Schools Attracting Elite Names

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Marilee Benson with her son Nick, a senior in Stanford's online Education Program for Gifted Youth, for which tuition is nearly $15,000 a year.

By ALAN SCHWARZ

Published: November 19, 2011

PALO ALTO, Calif. — In June, about 30 seniors will graduate from a little-known online high school currently called the Education Program for Gifted Youth. But their diplomas will bear a different name: Stanford Online High School.

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Nick during a calculus class.

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Yes, that Stanford — the elite research university known for producing graduates who win Nobels and found Googles, not for teaching basic algebra to teenagers. Five years after the opening of the experimental program, some education experts consider Stanford’s decision to attach its name to the effort a milestone for online education.

“This is significant,” said Bill Tucker, managing director of Education Sector, a nonpartisan policy institute. “One of our country’s most prestigious universities feels comfortable putting its considerable prestige and brand behind it.”

As the line between virtual and classroom-based learning continues to blur, some see Stanford’s move as a sign that so, too, will the line between secondary and higher education. Several other universities — though none with the pedigree of Stanford — already operate online high schools, a development that has raised some questions about expertise and motives.

“From my perspective, colleges, concentrate on what you’re good at,” said Ronald A. Crutcher, president of Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., who added that he had recently declined an offer from a for-profit education company to join other small liberal arts institutions in forming an online high school in their image. “Be consultants, but don’t contribute to a trend that I think has some real problems.”

About 275,000 students nationwide are enrolled full time in online schools, according to Susan Patrick, president of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, a nonprofit advocacy group. Most of these are free public charter schools, but colleges — private and public — have begun to get into the business as well.

The University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and the University of Missouri have awarded diplomas to about 250 and 85 students, respectively, annually for the last several years. The George Washington University Online High School opened in January.

Capitalizing on its reputation in foreign language instruction, Middlebury College in Vermont last year worked with K12, a for-profit company, to develop online high school language courses serving 50,000 students nationwide. An individual student’s course costs $749 per year, and Middlebury will share the profits. Ronald Liebowitz, Middlebury’s president, said that while “it looks like mission creep beyond belief,” the opportunity to raise revenue carried the decision.

“The risk is great, and I’d be silly if I said otherwise,” Mr. Liebowitz said of lending Middlebury’s name to a program whose teachers are not affiliated with the college. But, he noted, “we could have millions of dollars coming into the operating budget, which eases the burden of other revenue streams — mainly tuition and other fees. It’s a for-profit venture.”

Ms. Patrick said the typical online high school student lives in a remote area, was previously home-schooled or is deeply involved in an extracurricular activity that is incompatible with traditional schooling.

In this growing market, Stanford Online High School aims to be the destination for the most talented students. About 20 percent of the current 120 students receive financial aid to offset the $14,800 tuition, which is about half the average private-school tuition nationwide but far more than the University of Nebraska program’s $2,500. About 300 more students take one or more $3,200-per-year classes to supplement a bricks-and-mortar program.

Stanford officials said that the online high school had not yet yielded a profit, but that if it did, the money would be used for high school financial aid, not for the wider institution.

There is no entrance exam, but a college-like application requires essays, letters of recommendation and standardized test scores. About 70 percent of the applicants were accepted this year, a far cry from Stanford University’s 7.3 percent acceptance rate in 2010-11.

Of the high school’s 75 graduates, 69 so far have enrolled directly in four-year colleges, according to Raymond Ravaglia, the high school’s executive director. Eight attend Stanford, and 25 others are at Ivy League institutions or other elite campuses.

“I don’t see this for a second competing with quality high schools, but for some people this could be an education they can’t get,” said John Etchemendy, Stanford’s provost. “I’m quite impressed with it, and they are clearly attracting capable students. It’s something that does make me comfortable making Stanford’s ownership of it more prominent.”

Mr. Ravaglia, a 1987 Stanford graduate, helped pioneer the university’s online education programs in the 1990s. A few years after the 2001 opening of the university’s summer program for high school students, he recommended a fusion of the two that could cater to Stanford-caliber high school students wanting an online option.

The high school teachers are not university professors, though Mr. Ravaglia said a majority had doctorates. He declined to say how much they are paid.

In a typical class session, about 14 students simultaneously watch a live-streamed lecture, with video clips, diagrams and other animations to enliven the lesson. Instead of raising hands, students click into a queue when they have questions or comments; teachers call on them by choosing their audio stream, to be heard by all. An instant-messaging window allows for constant discussion among the students who, in conventional settings, might be chastised for talking in class.

“You’re interacting with people all the time — with people all over the world,” said Nick Benson, a senior whose career as an actor required the flexibility of online schooling. “The nature of the classes is that you do interact with people quote-unquote in person — you’re seeing their face and responding to them like in any normal class.”

Nick, who scored 2,340 out of 2,400 on the SAT and is applying to Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ivy League schools, said some college admissions officers needed some convincing. “It’s a conversation starter,” he said. “I haven’t had an interview that doesn’t run long, because they’re curious what the school is about.”

Students taking a full five-course load must be present for 10 seminars per week, each of them 60 to 90 minutes, with an additional 15 to 20 lectures of about 15 minutes that are recorded by the teachers and viewable at the students’ convenience. Fridays are reserved for activities like a student newspaper and an engineering team. Papers are submitted electronically, and students are required to find a Stanford-approved proctor to oversee exams.

“It’s uncommon for an online high school to not rely on more of an honor system, and it is a pain for kids to find suitable proctors,” Mr. Ravaglia said. “But we want legitimacy in the results, and don’t want students coming to the school for the wrong reason.”

Mr. Ravaglia said the school would gradually expand to about 100 students per grade and would keep class sizes around 15. (“We don’t have plans to have 1,000 kids and then press control-C to start replicating it,” he said.)

But Mr. Etchemendy, the provost, said he “would be neither upset nor shocked” if enrollment at Stanford Online High eventually approached that of Stanford’s undergraduate population, about 6,500.

Some outsiders have suggested that students and their parents might assume that enrolling in a prestigious university’s online high school would give them a leg up at college admission time. Mr. Ravaglia said the only advantage his students got in applying to Stanford was admissions officers’ familiarity with and respect for the program.

Harold O. Levy, a former New York City schools chancellor and founder of Kaplan’s online master’s of education program, said Stanford’s involvement in this sector could be a watershed.

“If Stanford proves that online high schooling can work for the high end, then that’s a great proof of concept,” said Mr. Levy, who is now a partner in a venture fund that invests in education companies, many of them for-profit or online. “But if it’s used by the low-end for-profits for marketing a poor product — and you know that will happen — in a way that undermines quality, that’s what scares me. That would be very dangerous.”

網路之得失/記我今年(2011) 的一些小事

2011-11-13T05:07:00.000-08:00

記我今年(2011) 的一些小事

(我在校友會的留言版上將校有寫成「校有」，所以寫這篇。我應該說，所有的敬稱都只是隨緣。)

我最近讀了聖嚴法師的四本傳記，很[欣賞法鼓宗的活力。他們走的路正好與東海大學不同，是靠信眾的眾志成宗的；東海初期是美國的虔誠基督徒所樂捐的。我們工學院學生似乎選修過「世界宗教」(美國老師， 1974年) 。不過約1998年，東海接到何家捐的一筆前要蓋一學系大樓，初期有提議取一梵文漢譯的「大智慧」大樓，學校有些基督教友很生氣，而我對他們的文字障也很不以為然，跟他們說我家隔壁的真理堂之真理，在唐詩中找得到「真理寺」。

上周，永安太太邀我參加真理堂的聖誕聚會。我跟她說今年多在附近的懷恩堂聽音樂會和上日文課。我喜歡陳其寬老師的設計。前幾天在民視的《台灣演義‧蔡英文前傳》中還看到蔡女士與她好同學在東海的路思義教堂的合照。

昨天到東吳大學的「張佛泉人權研究中心」(直屬校長，陣容堅強；我2年前回東海，某教授說他們也在申請成立研究中心---願神保佑東海，不要太沒格調。) 網頁去。注意到張先生還當過3年的東海大學院長。他跟東海的關係可能比東吳來的深。不過東吳可能比較有眼光。

我曾跟許達然學長轉述：聶華苓女士(86歲)回台大演講，說她因《自由中國》冤獄賦閒在家，有兩所學校伸出援手，臺灣大學的臺靜農先生和東海的徐復觀先生。許老師馬上說這是崇尚自由主義吳德耀校長的幫忙。

我曾請教過許達然學長：徐復觀先生為什麼離開東海大學？

他說他不好意思問。後來，在《徐復觀文存》的附錄中讀到王孝廉學長的《古道照顏色‧徐復觀師逝世三周年祭》，它披露徐復觀是因為"梁容若(教授)投匪案"而離開東海的。徐徐復觀一生中的敵人也相當多。

今天到某兩國立大學網站去
再到東海的 (如果台灣各大學的來排名應該百來名)
比一下真氣餒
連校有的刊物都是2010的

***
2011/9/3

現在文們依賴網路日甚
譬如說我今天在某電視看到 Reuters 字我知道那是路透社
不過與妻談完後懷疑它否有特別意思查大辭典沒說
網路上可知它是創始人的姓 Reuter

不過今天也讀些blog 內部都有錯誤
譬如說朱自清為什麼倫敦雜記一書薄
該作者自作聰明是朱先生只在倫敦呆七天-- 七天怎可能寫這些東西
朱先生在倫敦近8個月
至於為什麼倫敦雜記是他國後近十年才出版這故事長了不過網路上有倫敦雜記卻都不收它的序言......
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另一例是

.....達夫的第二怪，怪在他三十歲就給自己編訂全集，以後每年寫一封遺書。他在《<達夫全集>自序》開篇便說：“男子的三十歲，是一個最危險的年齡。大抵有心人，他的自殺，總在這前後實行的。”他在其中一封遺書裡說：“天有不測風雲，每年歲首，例作遺言，以防萬一。”

郁達夫死的時候，不到50歲，不是自殺，是“他殺”。....

根據郁達夫文集
第12卷译文、其他
末篇是他54歲的遺書他自認為已中壽

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但是李敖非常自大，他說五百年裡中國白話文的前三名是：李敖、李敖、李敖。他喜歡自大也就罷了，但是，他還不忘時時要貶損他人。

他嘲笑他早年的同學（應該是指張澔、林毓生），說他們到美國去學方法論，有什麼用，一樣寫不出東西來。他表示瞧不起這些出國深造的同學。但是，我認為這兩位在學術上的功力都超過李敖。

張灝才對
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我自己過去將名字寫錯的情形

underlings

在那兒（Dear Brutus by J. M. Barrie），一位劇中人引用莎士比亞《裘力斯‧凱撒》第一幕第二場裡的兩行詩：

Casius The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

朱生豪的譯文是：

凱歇斯要是我們受制於人，親愛的勃魯托斯，那錯處並不在我們的命運，而在我們自己。

朱譯把underlings譯作受制於人，這在《裘力斯‧凱撒》這個劇本裡是合式的，在 Barrie這個劇本裡不合式，譯做「小人物」或「沒出息的人」較好。

出處：《第二夢》載《呂叔湘文集》北京：商務，第5卷，頁401

說明：這underlings（常用此複數型underlings）或說是貶義的 subordinate 或 a person lower in status or rank.

The Evolution of Higher Education

2011-11-12T18:33:00.000-08:00

THE EVOLUTION OF HIGHER EDUCATION
What with shrinking government funds and growing competition from online for-profit institutions, American colleges and universities are facing hard times, and being forced to rethink what they do. Richard A. DeMillo, director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at Georgia Institute of Technology, discusses the evolution of universities in his new book, “Abelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities.” Drawing on his experience as the first chief technology officer at Hewlett-Packard, director of the National Science Foundation’s computer and computation research division, and dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, Dr. DeMillo offers an engineer’s view of the challenges facing higher education. The article was in The New York Times Education Life section.

Q. and A. | The Academy

The Evolution of Higher Education

By TAMAR LEWIN

Published: November 4, 2011

WHAT with shrinking government funds and growing competition from online for-profit institutions, American colleges and universities are facing hard times, and being forced to rethink what they do. Richard A. DeMillo, director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at Georgia Institute of Technology, discusses the evolution of universities in his new book, “Abelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities.” Drawing on his experience as the first chief technology officer at Hewlett-Packard, director of the National Science Foundation’s computer and computation research division, and dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, Dr. DeMillo offers an engineer’s view of the challenges facing higher education.

Enlarge This Image

Michael Schwarz

Richard A. DeMillo

Q. Are colleges doing the right things to get ready for the future?

A. With a handful of exceptions, college presidents today are recruited to be stewards, not leaders. For the most part, they have gotten their jobs by convincing the search committee and the trustees that they’ll preserve the best of what the university has to offer. That’s a great goal, but as society changes, and universities are subject to the same political, geographic and economic forces as every other institution, preserving the past isn’t the only goal. Sometimes you have to be a chief executive officer, make priorities and set a direction that’s different from where you were going before.

There’s a big disconnect right now between how university presidents see the landscape and how everyone else sees it. A large majority of the American public thinks universities are doing a fair or poor job. But a huge majority of college presidents think they’re doing a good or excellent job. I think many of them are so concerned with stewardship that they lose sight of the data.

Q. In your book, you talk about some of the recent online educational innovations, like iTunes U and M.I.T.’s OpenCourseWare. What are those going to mean to universities?

A.What Chuck Vest did at M.I.T. with OpenCourseWare, putting every course online, free, showed that the value of a degree from M.I.T. was not contained in the lectures and the exams and homework. It’s contained in the experience of passing through the network of M.I.T. scholars. So why hang on to what should be shared widely? OpenCourseWare was an important signpost that hammered home the point that the content of a university course was being rapidly commoditized by technology. If you can easily access a lecture in quantum mechanics from the best lecturer on quantum mechanics, how many other quantum mechanics lectures do you need?

Q. Do you hear a lot from professors worried that having so many brilliant lectures available online will eventually do away with their jobs?

A. Absolutely. If you think your value is in 13 weeks of lectures, then exams, it’s true that that’s probably not going to be as valuable in the future. To some extent, that’s already happening with iTunes U, where you can hear a lecture on English literature or the global financial meltdown from someone who can explain it very well. What you get there is pretty much all you need to get students involved in the discussion. But that’s not the discussion. The discussion is what takes place afterward, maybe not in the classroom, but in the learning community. That’s where professors can add value.

Q. Can you give me an example of how your university, Georgia Tech, has evolved to meet the future?

A. When I stepped down as dean of computing in 2009, we had just come through a big transformation of computer science at Georgia Tech. After the dot-com bust, enrollment had fallen off dramatically, with people staying away from computer science for all the wrong reasons. They were afraid the jobs would be outsourced to India. Women were scared away from the field. So we went to employers — video game companies — to ask what they were looking for from computer science graduates. We talked to maybe two dozen companies, big and small. They said they needed people who not only know the technology but were skilled in the art of storytelling, the narrative arc. So we started an Introduction to Computer Science course for people who had grounding in humanities and liberal arts.

People who’d been turned off from computer science flooded in. Women flooded in. It was a group of Georgia Tech students who were impassioned about using computers for things that are impactful in art and in society. So we redesigned the undergraduate curriculum to let students choose two interdisciplinary threads, like computing and media, or computing and people, or computing and modeling.

What engineers are good at is out-of-the-box solutions, prototyping, and not waiting for a big system change to make an improvement.

Q. So from your vantage point at a leading engineering school, can you tell me what the university of the future will look like?

A. That’s the question everyone asks, but I really believe it’s not the right question. The 1910 landscape for higher education is almost unrecognizable today. A hundred years ago, when Edwin Slosson ranked universities by their reputations, there was no public funding of academic research, and his list of the top 14 elites included five public universities. Now, public research funding is huge and there isn’t a single public university in the U.S. News top 20. The only thing we can be sure of, here in 2011, is that there’s going to be a wave of innovation over the next century, and 100 years from now, higher education won’t look the same.

This interview was edited and condensed.

說禪/寺

2011-11-07T03:10:00.000-08:00

因為想寫禪學問某校宗教系的畢業生台灣的禪寺
妙的是他竟然答台灣沒....

我的文章舉聖嚴法師的農禪寺和他晚年的: 聖嚴《美好的人生》(台北：法鼓山 /桂林：廣西師範大學出版社，2010)為例....

*** 不料今天在網路上讀這些他例
可知台灣的禪院似乎不少
馬英九Home Stay 過中台禪寺以及下一"聖德禪寺"

佛門醜聞！法師和比丘尼竟聯手猥褻女義工| 頭條新聞| NOWnews ...

www.nownews.com/2011/11/07/91-2755565.htm

3 小時前 – 位於台中市佛法山的聖德禪寺，驚傳創辦人聖輪法師假藉對信徒開示之名義 ... 平面報紙頭條, 馬英九Home Stay 蔡英文批：只會用錢處理現在的問題 ...

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以下是中文大學的一網頁
http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/chinese/features/master-hsing-yun.html
讀完之後不免哈哈大笑
這種貨色/水準的禪

我有明珠一顆──聽星雲大師說禪

字型大小 A A A

2010年4月

誰是最偉大的環保專家？是環保局長？是綠色團體？還是大學裡研發環保技術的學者？在星雲大師眼中，古往今來最偉大的環保專家是阿彌陀佛。因為阿彌陀佛所建設的西方極樂世界，到處鳥語花香，是如公園般的淨土。這是星雲大師在中大舉行講座回應聽眾提問時的妙答。

星雲大師是著名宗教領袖，台灣佛光山開山宗長，積極推動和實踐人間佛教。2005年，佛光山文教基金會與中大合作，於文化及宗教研究系成立人間佛教研究中心。今年雙方簽訂第二期合作協議，星雲大師蒞校出席簽約儀式，並於4月13日傍晚假本校邵逸夫堂舉行「禪與悟」佛學講座。

在講座中，星雲大師深入淺出，解釋禪為何物。他說：「禪是我們的心，是我們自己。」他把禪比喻為庭院裡開的一朵花，客廳掛的一幅畫，飯菜裡加的調味料，漂亮小姐的化妝；有了禪，人生會更美麗和快樂。

他又以多個禪公案和故事，開示悟禪的法門。他說參禪就如做學問，小疑小悟，大疑大悟，不疑不悟，所以必須打破沙鍋問到底。另外還要用心悟禪，要苦思冥想，千錘百煉，方能有悟。

按大師說，修禪的人，內心會不斷蛻變進步。最後他希望大家能隨遇而安，隨緣生活，隨喜工作，隨心自在，他說：「那不是很有意義的人生嗎？」

是晚邵逸夫堂可說一座難求，千多名中大教職員、學生和公眾人士慕名而來。星雲大師風趣幽默，妙語如珠，不時惹得哄堂大笑，鼓掌如雷。

當教授作假性親剝削.....時/「四不」十大基本素養

2011-11-07T02:55:00.000-08:00

我今天午餐在台灣大學對面兩位男同學一直在講某位該系的名師
他們強破將該老師最欣賞的女同學排座位最接近尊師.....

對面的看版: 繼「四不」後台大推十大基本素養

台灣大學繼校長李嗣涔提出「四不」後，學校再推出「台大人的十大基本素養」，包含落實溝通表達與團隊合作、培養美感品味、履行公民責任和獨立思考與創新等，要求台大同仁和學生熟記、落實，以「能符合社會期待」；台大學生認為，十大素養儼然是軍隊口號，與其喊喊，學校應該提供資源，讓學生在課程中自然融入。

李嗣涔在新生典禮要求學生「考試不作弊、作業不抄襲、上課不缺席、腳踏車不亂停」，這學期再推出「十大基本素養」連同「四不」印製成行事曆，送給大一新生，並在校務會議上要求學校行政人員協助學生熟記十個素養內容，另外六個素養有：道德思辨與實踐、身心健康管理、專業知能、人文關懷、團隊視野、了解尊重多元文化。

法律系大四生吳俊志說，十個素養應該是個人決定要不要培養的基本能力，學校寫成教條，根本是把大學生當成國中生。許多台大生在網路表示，「十條素養根本是軍隊口號，不懂李嗣涔在想什麼。」還有人要校長先默寫，再叫大家背。

台大學生會會長鄭明哲表示，十月中，校長在校務會議上說起十大素養，希望台大人都能熟記。但鄭明哲說，與其背誦，學校應該是在課程中落實，例如增聘TA（研究生教學助理），開設專業課程外的討論課時間，讓學生訓練思辯能力，還有團隊精神。

大一新生醫學系蘇喨言說，不會背十大基本素養，但她認為，台大學生多數會念書卻不懂關心別人，表現較冷漠，確實須讓醫學系、理工科系學生多培養人文關懷。

台大學務長馮燕說，台大學生有負起人類生存問題與永續經營的責任，尤其社會對台大學生期望高，卻普遍認為台大學生較自我，因此更需培養各素養，提升道德感。

台大化學系教授周必泰則不認同台大生需要這個使命，他認為，社會對台大期待太沉重，「台大有責任發展學術，但人格培養應該是全民責任。」
****

Prominent Social Psychologist Faked Data For Years

Diederik Stapel was the man behind a number of headline-grabbing experiments.

By Abby Ohlheiser | Posted Friday, Nov. 4, 2011, at 9:34 AM ET

(A prominent Dutch social scientist was fired from his university job after his fraudulent body of work was dismantled.)

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.

Can meat eating make you more selfish? Do messy rooms make you more racist? Uh, no.

As it turns out, the prominent Dutch social psychologist who conducted those media-friendly experiments faked data for most of his career, in dozens of separate experiments going back to the mid-1990s.

The Associated Press reports that Diederik Stapel was fired from his university job after his fraudulent body of work was dismantled. His former employer, Tilburg University, said Thursday that it will press charges against him for forgery of documents and fraud.

He was unmasked when his own doctoral students called shenanigans. According to the investigation’s interim report, released this week, Stapel often refused to allow his students to participate in the experimental process. They were instead relegated to analyzing and writing about the data Stapel said he collected himself.

The AP explains that Stapel apparently coasted on his reputation – even co-authors of his papers would trust his "elaborate" setups for experiments that never happened. Siegwart Lindenberg, the co-author of Stapel’s April paper on stereotyping and messy environments told PRI’s The World that he had "no reason to be suspicious in any way about what he presented to me as the results of the experiments he conducted."

The World spoke to Lindenberg before the revelations, back when they did a story on the study’s findings. At the time, Lindenberg explained the experiment that may not have taken place:

Researchers questioned people and watched their behavior at a Dutch train station, during and after a strike by janitors that left the station a mess.

"In the messy condition, people stereotyped a lot more and they actually and they sat down much further from the person who was actually sitting there, when it was a different race," explained Lindenberg.

Science published that report back in April, and like many of Stapel’s experiments, it received a lot of press attention. According to the AP, they’ve since flagged the article with a note to readers.

At the request of the investigating committee, Stapel provided journal articles containing fabricated data. The articles date back to 1994.

The disgraced psychologist has apologized. In a public statement, Stapel writes: "I realize that via this behavior I have left my direct colleagues stunned and angry and put my field, social psychology, in a poor light."

美國的老師薪水太高? Conservative Think Tanks: Teachers Are Overpaid

2011-11-02T22:13:00.000-07:00

Conservative Think Tanks: Teachers Are Overpaid

New study claims that teachers would actually make less if they opted for non-classroom jobs.

By Greg Howard | Posted Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2011, at 1:49 PM ET

A new study from a pair of conservative think thanks argues that school teachers are overpaid by more than 50 percent.

Photo by Michael Nagle/Getty Images.

There are a just a few inalienable truths in life and, for many, one of them is that school teachers are underpaid—but that's just not the case according to two leading conservative think tanks.

In a new report that is unlikely to make any friends on the other side of the political spectrum, the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute argue that not only are teachers not underpaid but that, when factoring in things like job security and benefits, they're actually substantially overpaid, earning 52 percent more than "fair market levels."

Part of their argument is based on the groups' findings that the wage gap between teachers and non-teachers is at least partly due to the fact that the former, on average, have lower cognitive abilities than those private sector workers with similar educational backgrounds.

"Public-school teachers earn less in wages on average than non-teachers with the same level of education, but teacher skills generally lag behind those of other workers with similar 'paper' qualifications," the authors write.

The American Independent has more:

The authors point to research spanning 50 years indicating degrees in education are easier to obtain with high marks. They include a recent study by economist Corey Koedel in which he examined grade-point averages of graduates at three large research institutions, and found education majors finished with an average GPA of 3.65, while math, science and economics majors graduated with a 2.88.

The think tanks also claim that contrary to what would be expected, workers who switch from non-teaching jobs to teaching jobs receive a wage increase of roughly 9 percent, while those that do the reverse see their wages drop by roughly 3 percent.

As expected, many progressives and teachers around the country went nuts upon reading the report, vehemently objecting to its findings, which conflict with what they say their own studies show.

"Not only should we question the reliability of this study, but we should also consider the source," Kim Anderson, director of advocacy for the National Education Association, told the Independent in an email. "The study is funded by the very same groups that are trying to eliminate the right of workers to have a voice in their workplace all together."

教育的浪費

2011-10-30T19:07:00.000-07:00

讀蒙田壽命 20歲時已成熟不要浪費直接面對人生
旅のチカラアンコール「マイ・ラスト・ミュージックを探して　ジャーナリスト　鳥越俊太郎」
難忘的最期 71歲:さい‐ご【最期】

與山外老闆談我1987年的貿易商奇遇談G2000之連鎖店
感謝Justing 和Fanny和kj 寄東西給我參考

讀《白居易集》中的北宗文獻與北宗禪師中山大學中文系副教授　簡宗修
陳寅恪: 白的人生觀主要是老子佛教是小部分

馬祖道一開始的土著性--柳田
柳田聖山與《胡適禪學案》

---
午拿起Peter 很久以前送的羅耀拉的神操 (因此要談禪的修鍊....)
一個晚上的電視節目和書籍讓我們遨遊:
遊走在台灣的政論"名嘴"台尋找國家的認同--說要去FM 98.1/說要去華山園區找藝術還是都忘了
The Tudors 的亨利八世的英國的燒/燙極刑 (對新教徒....)
Esalen America and the Religion of No Religion 美國20世紀下半葉的心靈追求
昨晚NHK :邪馬台国/ 宮﨑康平夫婦世間總有這種愛情故事夫人還健在
CNN crunch time, ding, dinge,

蘋論：要求候選人誠實

2011年 10月31日

「我要好總統公民連線」的一群年輕人昨天到立法院舉行記者會，提出幾個讓年輕人焦慮的問題給馬、蔡，要他們回答：一、總統一直說失業率下降，但青年失業率高達13％，要如何解決失業和派遣工的問題？二、加碼老農津貼、18趴優惠、政府不斷舉債、青年卻要背債，稅制不公平，如何解決？三、獎學金太少，托育津貼不公，養不起下一代，政府的獎學金和托育政策為何？

不要再開空頭支票

就學與就業的確是青年人的焦慮，所有的國家（除了北韓）都有同樣的困境。歐美的情況比台灣更嚴重，讀大學更貴、失業率更高，政府也都無計可施。所有這些問題只有一帖解藥，就是經濟繁榮。經濟成長了，就業率會提高，舉債下跌、津貼容易、稅收也增、獎學金和學生貸款金額升高，托育補助也沒有問題。經濟衰退一切都捉襟見肘，巧婦難為無米之炊，什麼問題都浮現出來。
每4年全民都有機會綁架總統候選人一次，要他開出承諾才投他一票。誠實的候選人對無力回天的問題不會昧著良心開空頭支票，反而會據實以告，請求選民諒解，並努力找出替代方案。騙子政客才會滿口吹牛當選後解決，其實根本不可能。「先騙到選票再說」、「競選時的政見做不到沒關係，大家都這樣」，已成為候選人的口頭語。
柯林頓第一次競選總統時，去一家因沒有定單而即將關門的造船廠拜票。他的幕僚要他先哄造船工人當選後一定不會讓他們失業；但柯林頓對工人演講時，老老實實地承認該造船廠非關門不可，失業無可挽回，但他提出政府補助工人上新技術的課程，學習新技能後再改行就業的政策。工人對他的誠實很感動。

別把選民當小孩哄我們須接受一些殘酷的現實：不管誰執政，高就業率今後將很難達成，除非出走的產業大量回潮。18％優惠與過高的軍公教退休金確實不公義，但兩黨執政時根本沒誠意解決。稅制不公也許是比較容易調整的事，但卻攸關企業主、金主是否出走的問題，他們一走，失業率更高。大學獎學金應鼓勵民間捐輸，政府相對出資，較容易做到。
我們希望馬、蔡都能誠實說出無法解決的困境，並找出替代計劃，千萬不能把選民當小孩哄。

A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute

2011-10-29T05:53:00.000-07:00

Grading the Digital School

A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The Waldorf School in Los Altos, Calif., eschews technology. Here, Bryn Perry reads on a desktop. More Photos »

By MATT RICHTEL

Published: October 22, 2011

LOS ALTOS, Calif. — The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.

Grading the Digital School

Blackboards, Not Laptops

Articles in this series are looking at the intersection of education, technology and business as schools embrace digital learning.

Previous Articles in the Series »

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Old-School in Silicon Valley

Bits Blog: Technology, Schools and a Big Black Bug (October 22, 2011)
Times Topics: Education and Schools | Computers and the Internet

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Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Cathy Waheed helps Shira Zeev, a fifth grader. Waldorf parents are happy to delay their children's engagement with technology. More Photos »

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But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.

Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. But the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and schools don’t mix.

This is the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, one of around 160 Waldorf schools in the country that subscribe to a teaching philosophy focused on physical activity and learning through creative, hands-on tasks. Those who endorse this approach say computers inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans.

The Waldorf method is nearly a century old, but its foothold here among the digerati puts into sharp relief an intensifying debate about the role of computers in education.

“I fundamentally reject the notion you need technology aids in grammar school,” said Alan Eagle, 50, whose daughter, Andie, is one of the 196 children at the Waldorf elementary school; his son William, 13, is at the nearby middle school. “The idea that an app on an iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that’s ridiculous.”

Mr. Eagle knows a bit about technology. He holds a computer science degree from Dartmouth and works in executive communications at Google, where he has written speeches for the chairman, Eric E. Schmidt. He uses an iPad and a smartphone. But he says his daughter, a fifth grader, “doesn’t know how to use Google,” and his son is just learning. (Starting in eighth grade, the school endorses the limited use of gadgets.)

Three-quarters of the students here have parents with a strong high-tech connection. Mr. Eagle, like other parents, sees no contradiction. Technology, he says, has its time and place: “If I worked at Miramax and made good, artsy, rated R movies, I wouldn’t want my kids to see them until they were 17.”

While other schools in the region brag about their wired classrooms, the Waldorf school embraces a simple, retro look — blackboards with colorful chalk, bookshelves with encyclopedias, wooden desks filled with workbooks and No. 2 pencils.

On a recent Tuesday, Andie Eagle and her fifth-grade classmates refreshed their knitting skills, crisscrossing wooden needles around balls of yarn, making fabric swatches. It’s an activity the school says helps develop problem-solving, patterning, math skills and coordination. The long-term goal: make socks.

Down the hall, a teacher drilled third-graders on multiplication by asking them to pretend to turn their bodies into lightning bolts. She asked them a math problem — four times five — and, in unison, they shouted “20” and zapped their fingers at the number on the blackboard. A roomful of human calculators.

In second grade, students standing in a circle learned language skills by repeating verses after the teacher, while simultaneously playing catch with bean bags. It’s an exercise aimed at synchronizing body and brain. Here, as in other classes, the day can start with a recitation or verse about God that reflects a nondenominational emphasis on the divine.

Andie’s teacher, Cathy Waheed, who is a former computer engineer, tries to make learning both irresistible and highly tactile. Last year she taught fractions by having the children cut up food — apples, quesadillas, cake — into quarters, halves and sixteenths.

“For three weeks, we ate our way through fractions,” she said. “When I made enough fractional pieces of cake to feed everyone, do you think I had their attention?”

Some education experts say that the push to equip classrooms with computers is unwarranted because studies do not clearly show that this leads to better test scores or other measurable gains.

Is learning through cake fractions and knitting any better? The Waldorf advocates make it tough to compare, partly because as private schools they administer no standardized tests in elementary grades. And they would be the first to admit that their early-grade students may not score well on such tests because, they say, they don’t drill them on a standardized math and reading curriculum.

When asked for evidence of the schools’ effectiveness, the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America points to research by an affiliated group showing that 94 percent of students graduating from Waldorf high schools in the United States between 1994 and 2004 attended college, with many heading to prestigious institutions like Oberlin, Berkeley and Vassar.

Of course, that figure may not be surprising, given that these are students from families that value education highly enough to seek out a selective private school, and usually have the means to pay for it. And it is difficult to separate the effects of the low-tech instructional methods from other factors. For example, parents of students at the Los Altos school say it attracts great teachers who go through extensive training in the Waldorf approach, creating a strong sense of mission that can be lacking in other schools.

Absent clear evidence, the debate comes down to subjectivity, parental choice and a difference of opinion over a single world: engagement. Advocates for equipping schools with technology say computers can hold students’ attention and, in fact, that young people who have been weaned on electronic devices will not tune in without them.

Ann Flynn, director of education technology for the National School Boards Association, which represents school boards nationwide, said computers were essential. “If schools have access to the tools and can afford them, but are not using the tools, they are cheating our children,” Ms. Flynn said.

Paul Thomas, a former teacher and an associate professor of education at Furman University, who has written 12 books about public educational methods, disagreed, saying that “a spare approach to technology in the classroom will always benefit learning.”

“Teaching is a human experience,” he said. “Technology is a distraction when we need literacy, numeracy and critical thinking.”

And Waldorf parents argue that real engagement comes from great teachers with interesting lesson plans.

“Engagement is about human contact, the contact with the teacher, the contact with their peers,” said Pierre Laurent, 50, who works at a high-tech start-up and formerly worked at Intel and Microsoft. He has three children in Waldorf schools, which so impressed the family that his wife, Monica, joined one as a teacher in 2006.

And where advocates for stocking classrooms with technology say children need computer time to compete in the modern world, Waldorf parents counter: what’s the rush, given how easy it is to pick up those skills?

“It’s supereasy. It’s like learning to use toothpaste,” Mr. Eagle said. “At Google and all these places, we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. There’s no reason why kids can’t figure it out when they get older.”

There are also plenty of high-tech parents at a Waldorf school in San Francisco and just north of it at the Greenwood School in Mill Valley, which doesn’t have Waldorf accreditation but is inspired by its principles.

California has some 40 Waldorf schools, giving it a disproportionate share — perhaps because the movement is growing roots here, said Lucy Wurtz, who, along with her husband, Brad, helped found the Waldorf high school in Los Altos in 2007. Mr. Wurtz is chief executive of Power Assure, which helps computer data centers reduce their energy load.

The Waldorf experience does not come cheap: annual tuition at the Silicon Valley schools is $17,750 for kindergarten through eighth grade and $24,400 for high school, though Ms. Wurtz said financial assistance was available. She says the typical Waldorf parent, who has a range of elite private and public schools to choose from, tends to be liberal and highly educated, with strong views about education; they also have a knowledge that when they are ready to teach their children about technology they have ample access and expertise at home.

The students, meanwhile, say they don’t pine for technology, nor have they gone completely cold turkey. Andie Eagle and her fifth-grade classmates say they occasionally watch movies. One girl, whose father works as an Apple engineer, says he sometimes asks her to test games he is debugging. One boy plays with flight-simulator programs on weekends.

The students say they can become frustrated when their parents and relatives get so wrapped up in phones and other devices. Aurad Kamkar, 11, said he recently went to visit cousins and found himself sitting around with five of them playing with their gadgets, not paying attention to him or each other. He started waving his arms at them: “I said: ‘Hello guys, I’m here.’ ”

Finn Heilig, 10, whose father works at Google, says he liked learning with pen and paper — rather than on a computer — because he could monitor his progress over the years.

“You can look back and see how sloppy your handwriting was in first grade. You can’t do that with computers ’cause all the letters are the same,” Finn said. “Besides, if you learn to write on paper, you can still write if water spills on the computer or the power goes out.”

世界上很少有這種大學: 董事會和校友會對幹…

2011-10-26T05:14:00.001-07:00

前幾天在台灣大學的”世界大學”書架上巧遇東海的三本書

勞作制創校30周年(薄) 創校40周年…..是書海中的微波

今天看到沈先生的樓下留言

今天接到東海大學寄來的鑰匙環禮品和一張捐款意願書

世界上很少有這種大學: 董事會和校友會對幹…

台灣最需改變的是教育問題 (李登輝)

2011-10-24T22:15:00.001-07:00

類似的見解許多人都說過如W. Edwards Deming 博士等
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新書發表李︰台灣最需改變的是教育問題

〔記者林恕暉、林曉雲／台北報導〕前總統李登輝昨天出席《哲人政治家李登輝之「我」》新書發表會，李登輝表示，台灣最需要改變的就是教育問題，「許多大學校舍蓋太多，卻沒有在作研究」。

旅日作家黃文雄撰寫的《哲人政治家李登輝之「我」》，日文版已於上月在日本發行，昨天舉辦這本書的中文版發表會，由於前總統李登輝親自出席，使昨天會場湧入三百多人，包括台聯黨主席黃昆輝、台獨聯盟主席黃昭堂、台教會長張炎憲、前駐日代表許世楷、羅福全都到場，李登輝夫人曾文惠也在發表會進行中趕來參加。

對於新書，李登輝說，世間有很多的問題，大部分都可以用科學的方式或意識來解決，唯有對「自我」的問題，無法清楚來解釋、處理，人經常「找不到自我」，認識「我」是什麼？了解自己存在的意義？清楚「自己要做什麼」？這本新書就針對這些問題，來作進一步的探討、分析。

面對讀者提問對台灣教育建議時，李登輝說，「台灣最需要改變的就是教育問題」，例如台灣大學過去在世界學術上相當有地位，現在排名卻掉到一百五十多名，理由就是「學校校舍蓋得滿滿，都沒有在研究室好好作研究」，「研究不夠啦！」

李登輝說，若他是大學校長，他會逐一了解每個系所在做什麼研究？在教什麼？現在很多教授有時間去電視講大聲話，「沒什麼用的政治事，講一大堆」，把時間用在這種事情上，沒有好好作研究。

李登輝強調，現在教育經費用太多在蓋校舍，「學校起厝起太多啦！」應該把錢、教育預算用在研究上，關心世界的各種變化。

對此，教育部高教司長何卓飛回應表示，以五年五百億元頂尖大學計畫為例，獲補助的大學可使用在興建校舍等資本門的比率，第一期上限為二十五％，第二期上限為十五％，以每年高教預算八百多億元為例，補助各大學校院用於蓋校舍等資本門預算為二、三十億元，比率僅約四％，絕大部分預算都是在研究及教學相關事務上，教育部也提醒各校院要加強研究及教學能量。

New ways with old numbers

2011-10-20T02:02:00.000-07:00

別給學術研究估價
New ways with old numbers
作者：英國《金融時報》專欄作家蒂姆•哈福德

Academics are always being asked to demonstrate the “impact” of their research. (Is it like being hit by a rogue cyclist? Or is it more like a pile-driver, or even an asteroid strike?) But while it is not unreasonable to ask whether a particular piece of academic research is useful, the difficulties in answering the question are extraordinary.

學者總是被要求證明其研究的“影響”。（是像被一輛不規矩的自行車撞了一下？還是更像一台打樁機、甚至是一次小行星撞擊？）儘管詢問某項學術研究是否有用並非不合情理，但要回答這一問題，難度非常大。

The quality of a piece of research is subjective, and using measures such as the number of peer-reviewed articles published simply outsources the subjective judgment to somebody else. But there is a deeper problem: in a complex world, it is impossible for anyone to judge what the significance of a research breakthrough might eventually be.

一項研究的質量高低是主觀的，用發表的同行評審文章數量等標準作為衡量尺度，不過是把主觀判斷“外包”給了別人。但有一個更深層次的問題：在一個複雜的世界裡，任何人都不可能判斷出一項研究突破的最終意義。

Nowhere is this more true than in the field of mathematics. The most famous example is the development of imaginary numbers. The very name conveys the supposed uselessness of the concept. Square the imaginary unit, i, and you get minus one. Baffling.

在數學界，這一點最為明顯。最著名的例子便是虛數理論的發展。虛數這個名字本身就傳遞出了人們認為這一概念無用的態度。虛數單位i的平方等於-1。這真是令人費解。

Imaginary numbers were regarded with great scepticism after they were developed in Bologna in the 16th century as the logical solution to an abstract problem. Eventually, however, they turned out to be essential for, among other applications, electrical engineering – hardly something that could have been imagined by their creators.

虛數於16世紀誕生在意大利的博洛尼亞，試圖用邏輯解決一個抽象問題。自誕生之日起，人們對它一直持有強烈的懷疑態度。然而，最終，它被證明對於電子工程至關重要（還有其它應用），而這是虛數的發明者們很難想像得到的。

So are imaginary numbers typical of the unexpected bounties of pure mathematics – or an unrepresentative poster child? Two recent commentators have tried to expand the number of examples. Professor Caroline Series of the University of Warwick devoted a recent presidential lecture at the British Science Festival to this topic, focusing on the applications of non-Euclidian geometry.

那麼，虛數在理論數學的意外收穫中到底有沒有代表性呢？最近，兩位評論人士試圖增加樣本數量。華威大學(University of Warwick)的卡羅琳•希爾麗絲(Caroline Series)教授最近在英國科學節(British Science Festival)上的校長演講就關注於這一主題，主要討論了非歐幾里得幾何學的應用。

When Euclid originally laid down the axioms of his geometric system 23 centuries ago, one of them seemed less than obvious. For 2,000 years mathematicians tried to derive the “fifth postulate” – equivalent to the claim that the internal angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees – from more basic building blocks, and failed. Eventually it transpired that the axiom was optional. Consistent systems of geometry were possible in which the internal angles of triangles summed to more than 180 degrees, or even to fewer.

2300年前，當歐幾里得(Euclidian)最初提出構成他幾何體系的那些公理時，其中一個公理似乎一點也不顯眼。 2000年來，數學家們試圖用更基礎的公設推導出“第五公設”(fifth postulate)——其內容相當於一個三角形的內角之和等於180度——但都沒有成功。最終，事實表明，這一公理並非放之四海皆準。有可能存在一些一致的幾何體系，其中三角形的內角之和可能超過180度，甚至可能小於180度。

Surfaces on which the sum of angles in a triangle is less than 180 degrees look like leaves of kale. Prof Series points out that the development of kale-like geometric systems, called hyperbolic geometry, initially seemed a curiosity but made possible Einstein's theory of special relativity. Now, says Prof Series, hyperbolic geometry promises to advance our understanding of the way complex networks such as the internet behave and grow.

三角形內角之和小於180度的面，看上去就像是甘藍的葉子。希爾麗絲教授指出，甘藍狀幾何體系——即“雙曲幾何”——的提出，最初純粹就是奇言怪論，但卻讓愛因斯坦(Einstein)的狹義相對論得以成立。希爾麗絲教授表示，如今，雙曲幾何將有望提升我們對互聯網等複雜網絡表現和增長方式的理解。

Peter Rowlett, a maths educator and historian, recently gathered further examples together in the journal Nature. The “sphere packing problem” – beginning with the conjecture that grocers have found the most efficient way to stack oranges – has been an open area of research for four centuries, but in the 1970s a solution for eight-dimensional “spheres” was used to design efficient modems. This meant that internet access no longer required specialised cables.

數學教育家、歷史學家彼得•羅萊特(Peter Rowlett)最近在《自然》(Nature)雜誌上收集了更多的例子。 400年來，“球體填充問題”一直是一個懸而未決的研究領域。該問題源自於一種猜想，即水果店老闆發現瞭如何最有效地擺放橙子的方法，但在上世紀70年代，用於解決八維“空間”的一種方法被用於設計高效調製解調器。這意味著，互聯網接入不再需要專門電纜。

Quaternions, which extend imaginary numbers into a further dimension, began to be developed by William Hamilton in Dublin in 1843. They were eclipsed by matrix algebra, before being rediscovered as indispensable for generating 3D computer graphics efficiently. Rowlett's contributors offered several other examples.

1843年，威廉•漢密爾頓(William Hamilton)在都柏林發明了四元數，將虛數擴展到四維空間。這一理論在很長一段時間內都因矩陣代數的存在而不受重視，直到被重新發現，成為高效製作3D電腦圖像不可或缺的理論。羅萊特的投稿人還提供了其它幾個例子。

Cost-benefit analysis has its place. But the benefits of academic research can pop up in such unexpected ways, sometimes immediately and sometimes after centuries. We should not set too much store by any bureaucrat's analysis of “academic impact”.

成本效益分析自有其道理。但學術研究的好處可能會以極其意外的方式突然出現，有時是馬上出現，有時則是在幾個世紀之後。我們不應過於看重某個官員對“學術影響”的分析。

Tim Harford's latest book is 'Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure' (Little, Brown)

本文作者的新書《適者生存：為何失敗是成功之母》(Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure)由利特爾-布朗公司(Little, Brown)出版

譯者/梁艷裳

Teacher, Leave Those Kids Alone 南韓小朋友不要太K書才好

2011-10-10T19:01:00.000-07:00

Hitting the books Andrew Kim, who teaches English at a Seoul cram school, believes South Korea's educational system isn't quite right

Photograph by Jean Chung for TIME

On a wet Wednesday evening in Seoul, six government employees gather at the office to prepare for a late-night patrol. The mission is as simple as it is counterintuitive: to find children who are studying after 10 p.m. And stop them.

In South Korea, it has come to this. To reduce the country's addiction to private, after-hours tutoring academies (called hagwons), the authorities have begun enforcing a curfew — even paying citizens bounties to turn in violators. (See pictures of Seoul, the world's most connected city.)

The raid starts in a leisurely way. We have tea, and I am offered a rice cracker. Cha Byoung-chul, a midlevel bureaucrat at Seoul's Gangnam district office of education, is the leader of this patrol. I ask him about his recent busts, and he tells me about the night he found 10 teenage boys and girls on a cram-school roof at about 11 p.m. "There was no place to hide," Cha recalls. In the darkness, he tried to reassure the students. "I told them, 'It's the hagwon that's in violation, not you. You can go home.'"

Cha smokes a cigarette in the parking lot. Like any man trying to undo centuries of tradition, he is in no hurry. "We don't leave at 10 p.m. sharp," he explains. "We want to give them 20 minutes or so. That way, there are no excuses." Finally, we pile into a silver Kia Sorento and head into Daechi-dong, one of Seoul's busiest hagwon districts. The streets are thronged with parents picking up their children. The inspectors walk down the sidewalk, staring up at the floors where hagwons are located — above the Dunkin' Donuts and the Kraze Burgers — looking for telltale slivers of light behind drawn shades.

At about 11 p.m., they turn down a small side street, following a tip-off. They enter a shabby building and climb the stairs, stepping over an empty chip bag. On the second floor, the unit's female member knocks on the door. "Hello? Hello!" she calls loudly. A muted voice calls back from within, "Just a minute!" The inspectors glance at one another. "Just a minute" is not the right answer. Cha sends one of his colleagues downstairs to block the elevator. The raid begins. (Read about South Korean schools going paperless.)

South Korea's hagwon crackdown is one part of a larger quest to tame the country's culture of educational masochism. At the national and local levels, politicians are changing school testing and university admissions policies to reduce student stress and reward softer qualities like creativity. "One-size-fits-all, government-led uniform curriculums and an education system that is locked only onto the college-entrance examination are not acceptable," President Lee Myung-bak vowed at his inauguration in 2008.

But cramming is deeply embedded in Asia, where top grades — and often nothing else — have long been prized as essential for professional success. Before toothbrushes or printing presses, there were civil service exams that could make or break you. Chinese families have been hiring test-prep tutors since the 7th century. Modern-day South Korea has taken this competition to new extremes. In 2010, 74% of all students engaged in some kind of private after-school instruction, sometimes called shadow education, at an average cost of $2,600 per student for the year. There are more private instructors in South Korea than there are schoolteachers, and the most popular of them make millions of dollars a year from online and in-person classes. When Singapore's Education Minister was asked last year about his nation's reliance on private tutoring, he found one reason for hope: "We're not as bad as the Koreans."

In Seoul, legions of students who fail to get into top universities spend the entire year after high school attending hagwons to improve their scores on university admissions exams. And they must compete even to do this. At the prestigious Daesung Institute, admission is based (diabolically enough) on students' test scores. Only 14% of applicants are accepted. After a year of 14-hour days, about 70% gain entry to one of the nation's top three universities. (Read "Asia's Latest Miracle.")

From a distance, South Korea's results look enviable. Its students consistently outperform their counterparts in almost every country in reading and math. In the U.S., Barack Obama and his Education Secretary speak glowingly of the enthusiasm South Korean parents have for educating their children, and they lament how far U.S. students are falling behind. Without its education obsession, South Korea could not have transformed into the economic powerhouse that it is today. (Since 1962 the nation's GDP has gone up about 40,000%, making it the world's 13th largest economy.) But the country's leaders worry that unless its rigid, hierarchical system starts to nurture more innovation, economic growth will stall — and fertility rates will continue to decline as families feel the pressure of paying for all that tutoring. "You Americans see a bright side of the Korean system," Education Minister Lee Ju-ho tells me, "but Koreans are not happy with it."

South Koreans are not alone in their discontent. Across Asia, reformers are pushing to make schools more "American" — even as some U.S. reformers render their own schools more "Asian." In China, universities have begun fashioning new entry tests to target students with talents beyond book learning. And Taiwanese officials recently announced that kids will no longer have to take high-stress exams to get into high school. If South Korea, the apogee of extreme education, gets its reforms right, it could be a model for other societies.

The problem is not that South Korean kids aren't learning enough or working hard enough; it's that they aren't working smart. When I visited some schools, I saw classrooms in which a third of the students slept while the teacher continued lecturing, seemingly unfazed. Gift stores sell special pillows that slip over your forearm to make desktop napping more comfortable. This way, goes the backward logic, you can sleep in class — and stay up late studying. By way of comparison, consider Finland, the only European country to routinely perform as well as South Korea on the test for 15-year-olds conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. In Finland, public and private spending combined is less per pupil than in South Korea, and only 13% of Finnish students take remedial after-school lessons.

Koreans have lamented their relative inefficiency for years, and the government has repeatedly tried to humanize the education system — simplifying admissions tests, capping hagwon tuition, even going so far as to ban hagwons altogether during the 1980s, when the country was under a dictatorship. But after each attempt, the hagwons come back stronger. That's because the incentives remain unchanged. South Korean kids gorge themselves on studying for one reason: to get into one of the country's top universities. The slots are too few — and the reward for getting in too great. "Where you attend university haunts you for the rest of your life," says Lee Beom, a former cram-school instructor who now works on reform in the Seoul metropolitan office of education.

But this time, the administration argues, its reforms are targeting not just the symptom of the dysfunction but also the causes. It is working to improve normal public schools by putting teachers and principals through rigorous evaluations — which include opinion surveys by students, parents and peer teachers — and requiring additional training for low-scoring teachers. At the same time, the government hopes to reduce the strain on students. Corporal punishment, an entrenched and formalized ritual in South Korean schools, is now prohibited (although students told me it still happens occasionally). Admissions tests for prestigious, specialized high schools (like foreign-language schools) have been eliminated. Middle schoolers are now judged on the basis of their regular grades and an interview. And 500 admissions officers have been appointed to the country's universities, to judge applicants not only on their test scores and grades but also other abilities. (Read "Tiger Moms: Is Tough Parenting Really the Answer?")

The Parent Trap
No one defends the status quo in South Korea. "All we do is study, except when we sleep," one high school boy told me, and he was not exaggerating. The typical academic schedule begins at 8 a.m. and ends sometime from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., depending on the ambition of the student. To be sure, some students opt out of this system — those who go to certain vocational high schools, for example. But most cannot transcend the relentless family and peer pressure to study until they drop from fatigue. "It breaks my heart," another teenage boy tells me, "to see my classmates compete against each other instead of helping each other."

Parents remain the real drivers of the education rat race, and they will be the hardest to convert. Han Yoon-hee, an English teacher at Jeong Bal High School in Ilsan, a suburb of Seoul, says parental anxiety is profound. "I suggest to [my students] that they should quit hagwons and focus on school," she says. "But their parents get very nervous when they don't take classes at night. They know other students are taking classes. They have to compete with each other."

Sometimes it's hard to know who is competing with whom — the students or their mothers. In 1964 a school entrance exam contained a question about the ingredients in taffy. But the exam inadvertently included two right answers, only one of which was counted as correct. To protest this unfairness, outraged mothers — not students — began cooking taffy outside government offices using the alternative ingredient. Eventually, the mothers won the resignation of the Vice Education Minister and the superintendent of Seoul, and several dozen students received retroactive admission offers.

Still, the Education Ministry can point to one recent victory in this long fight: spending on private instruction decreased 3.5% in 2010, the first drop since the government began tracking the figure in 2007. Does the decline signal a trend? Well, Koreans still spent 2% of their GDP on tutoring, even with the downtick. Andrew Kim, a very successful instructor at Megastudy, South Korea's largest hagwon, says he earned $4 million last year from online and in-person lectures. He agrees that the system is far from ideal, but so far he has seen no impact from the reforms on his income. "The tougher the measures," he says, "the more resilient hagwons become." In response to the government-imposed curfew, for example, many hagwons have just put more lessons online for students to buy after hours at home. (See TIME's special report on what makes a school great.)

Other hagwons flout the law, continuing to operate past the curfew — sometimes in disguise. The night of the Daechi-dong raid, the inspectors I am following wait for the door to open. Then they take off their shoes and begin a brisk tour of the place. In a warren of small study rooms with low ceilings and fluorescent lights, about 40 teenagers sit at small, individual carrels. The air is stale. It is a disturbing scene, sort of like a sweatshop for children's brains.

This is technically not a hagwon but an after-hours self-study library — at least in theory. Self-study libraries are allowed to stay open past 10 p.m. But the inspectors suspect this is a camouflaged hagwon. The students are studying from the same work sheets, and there are a handful of adults who appear to be teachers.

One of them denies any wrongdoing. "We are just doing our own work here," she says indignantly. "We don't teach." Cha, the squad leader, shakes his head. "I've allowed your excuses before, but we're getting too many tips about this place," he says. "It's an open secret in this community that you've been operating illegally."

Afterward, the squad makes a few more stops at other self-study libraries. It finds nothing suspicious. At about midnight, Cha lights a cigarette on a corner and chats with his colleagues. Then they head home for the night, having temporarily liberated 40 teenagers out of 4 million.

— with reporting by Stephen Kim / Seoul

Ripley is an Emerson fellow at the New America Foundation

This article originally appeared in the October 3, 2011 issue of TIME Asia.

The University of Wherever By BILL KELLER

2011-10-09T05:53:00.000-07:00

THE UNIVERSITY OF WHEREVER
Bill Keller writes in The New York Times: Two recent events at Stanford University suggest that the day is growing nearer when quality higher education confronts the technological disruptions that have already upended the music and book industries, humbled enterprises from Kodak to the Postal Service (not to mention the newspaper business), and helped destabilize despots across the Middle East.

Op-Ed Columnist

The University of Wherever

By BILL KELLER

Published: October 2, 2011

FOR more than a decade educators have been expecting the Internet to transform that bastion of tradition and authority, the university. Digital utopians have envisioned a world of virtual campuses and “distributed” learning. They imagine a business model in which online courses are consumer-rated like products on Amazon, tuition is set by auction services like eBay, and students are judged not by grades but by skills they have mastered, like levels of a videogame. Presumably, for the Friday kegger you go to the Genius Bar.

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Nicholas Blechman

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Disrupters and Adapters, Continued: Will the Internet Save Newspapers?

More from the Op-Ed columnist on the impact of new technology.

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Room For Debate: Can New York Rival Silicon Valley?

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It’s true that online education has proliferated, from community colleges to the free OpenCourseWare lecture videos offered by M.I.T. (The New York Times Company is in the game, too, with its Knowledge Network.) But the Internet has so far scarcely disturbed the traditional practice or the economics at the high end, the great schools that are one of the few remaining advantages America has in a competitive world. Our top-rated universities and colleges have no want of customers willing to pay handsomely for the kind of education their parents got; thus elite schools have little incentive to dilute the value of the credentials they award.

Two recent events at Stanford University suggest that the day is growing nearer when quality higher education confronts the technological disruptions that have already upended the music and book industries, humbled enterprises from Kodak to the Postal Service (not to mention the newspaper business), and helped destabilize despots across the Middle East.

One development is a competition among prestige universities to open a branch campus in applied sciences in New York City. This is Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s attempt to create a locus of entrepreneurial education that would mate with venture capital to spawn new enterprises and enrich the city’s economy. Stanford, which has provided much of the info-tech Viagra for Silicon Valley, and Cornell, a biotechnology powerhouse, appear to be the main rivals.

But more interesting than the contest between Stanford and Cornell is the one between Stanford and Stanford.

The Stanford bid for a New York campus is a bet on the value of place. The premise is that Stanford can repeat the success it achieved by marrying itself to the Silicon Valley marketplace. The school’s proposal (unsubtly titled “Silicon Valley II”) envisions a bricks-and-mortar residential campus on an island in the East River, built around a community of 100 faculty members and 2,200 students and strategically situated to catalyze new businesses in the city.

Meanwhile, one of Stanford’s most inventive professors, Sebastian Thrun, is making an alternative claim on the future. Thrun, a German-born and largely self-taught expert in robotics, is famous for leading the team that built Google’s self-driving car. He is offering his “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” course online and free of charge. His remote students will get the same lectures as students paying $50,000 a year, the same assignments, the same exams and, if they pass, a “statement of accomplishment” (though not Stanford credit). When The Times wrote about this last month, 58,000 students had signed up for the course. After the article, enrollment leapt to 130,000, from across the globe.

Thrun’s ultimate mission is a virtual university in which the best professors broadcast their lectures to tens of thousands of students. Testing, peer interaction and grading would happen online; a cadre of teaching assistants would provide some human supervision; and the price would be within reach of almost anyone. “Literally, we can probably get the same quality of education I teach in class for about 1 to 2 percent of the cost,” Thrun told me.

The traditional university, in his view, serves a fortunate few, inefficiently, with a business model built on exclusivity. “I’m not at all against the on-campus experience,” he said. “I love it. It’s great. It has a lot of things which cannot be replaced by anything online. But it’s also insanely uneconomical.”

Thrun acknowledges that there are still serious quality-control problems to be licked. How do you keep an invisible student from cheating? How do you even know who is sitting at that remote keyboard? Will the education really be as compelling — and will it last? Thrun believes there are technological answers to all of these questions, some of them
being worked out already by other online frontiersmen.

“If we can solve this,” he said, “I think it will disrupt all of higher education.”

Disrupt is right. It would be an earthquake for the majority of colleges that depend on tuition income rather than big endowments and research grants. Many could go the way of local newspapers. There would be huge audiences and paychecks for superstar teachers, but dimmer prospects for those who are less charismatic.

It’s ironic — or maybe just fitting — that this is playing out at Stanford, which has served as midwife to many disruptive technologies. By forging a symbiotic relationship with venture capital and teaching students how to navigate markets, Stanford claims to have spawned an estimated 5,000 businesses. This is a campus where grad school applicants are routinely asked if they have done a startup, and some professors have gotten very, very rich.

John Hennessy, Stanford’s president, gave the university’s blessing to Thrun’s experiment, which he calls “an initial demonstration,” but he is cautious about the grander dream of a digitized university. He can imagine a virtual campus for some specialized programs and continuing education, and thinks the power of distributed learning can be incorporated in undergraduate education — for example, supplanting the large lecture that is often filled with students paying more attention to their laptops. He endorses online teaching as a way to educate students, in the developing world or our own, who cannot hope for the full campus experience.

But Hennessy is a passionate advocate for an actual campus, especially in undergraduate education. There is nothing quite like the give and take of a live community to hone critical thinking, writing and public speaking skills, he says. And it’s not at all clear that online students learn the most important lesson of all: how to keep learning.

As The Times’s Matt Richtel recently reported, there is remarkably little data showing that technology-centric schooling improves basic learning. It is quite possible that the infatuation with technology has diverted money from things known to work — training better teachers, giving kids more time in school.

THE Stanford president is hardly a technophobe. Hennessy came up through computer engineering, used his sabbatical to start a successful microprocessor company, and sits on the boards of Google and Cisco Systems.

“In the same way that a lot of things go into the cost of a newspaper that have nothing to do with the quality of the reporting — the cost of newsprint and delivery — we should ask the same thing about universities,” Hennessy told me. “When is the infrastructure of the university particularly valuable — as it is, I believe, for an undergraduate residential experience — and when is it secondary to the learning process?”

But, he notes, “One has to think about the sustainability of all these things. In the end, the content providers have to get paid.”

I see a larger point, familiar to all of us who have lived through digital-age disorder. There are disrupters, like Sebastian Thrun, or Napster, or the tweeting rebels in Tahrir Square. And there are adapters, like John Hennessy, or iTunes, or the novice statesmen trying to build a new Egypt. Progress depends on both.

Who could be against an experiment that promises the treasure of education to a vast, underserved world? But we should be careful, in our idealism, not to diminish something that is already a wonder of the world.

從Jobs 2005年在史丹佛大學的畢業典禮演說說起 Reed College

2011-10-08T00:18:00.000-07:00

Kevin "1.傳奇人物的一生，雖然短暫，但我相信他對世界的影響已是值回票價；謝謝您的分享。就用他留下的" Stay hungry, Stay foolish"共勉之。"

上述那句是2005年在史丹佛大學的畢業典禮演說當時Tube 有他一整個小時的演講很震撼....

影片請參考
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

Loren Pope, former education editor for The New York Times, writes about Reed in Colleges That Change Lives, saying, "If you're a genuine intellectual, live the life of the mind, and want to learn for the sake of learning, the place most likely to empower you is not Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, or Stanford. It is the most intellectual college in the country—Reed in Portland, Oregon".^[56]

值得注意的是這所很著名的有特色的私立大學 Reed College

http://www.answers.com/topic/reed-college

Stanford Report, June 14, 2005

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.

Video of the Commencement address.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

吳清基吹完牛，開始拍馬。

2011-09-28T18:25:00.000-07:00

蘋論：馬屁部長

教育部長吳清基最近運氣很背，剛才吹完牛、拍完馬，北市教師會就公布一項新的老師民調，當場吐槽，狠狠搧了吳大部長一耳刮子。這下子有分教：大部長吹牛拍馬，小教員痛心疾首。

自吹政績恐為留任

前天吳清基為慶祝教師節，給教師、家長一封信，結果被發現兩封信超過9成以上完全一樣，形同一稿兩投。更惹人厭的是通篇都在自吹自擂，表揚自己政績。家長團體痛罵：「太沒誠意，把教師節當選舉舞台。」一名老師說：「內容敷衍，看了也沒感動。」不但經濟無感復甦，教育部長也讓老師無感過節。扁時代，令藍軍恨之欲其死的教育部長杜正勝，在教師節給教師的公開信中都不敢自吹政績，只說明政策理念，並安慰受委曲的教師。比起來，受盡貶抑嘲諷的杜部長，還比吳部長素質高、品質好。教育部長是王小二過年，一年不如一年。

自吹的政績包括：教育帶動台灣的國際競爭力在很多項目的世界排名都有進步；推動祖父母節，以及公私立高中職學費齊一的政策等。國際競爭力的評比內容很多，教育只是其中一環。學費齊一對私校的學生家長是好事，但破壞了自由市場機制，是社會主義的搞法。其實，我們也可列出教育部的多項錯誤，絕不會比政績少，例如北北基的學測風波就錯得足夠要部長下台了。

吹完牛，開始拍馬。內閣不是在大選前改組，就是若馬連任後必定要改組。吳在此時吹政績、拍馬屁，是希望留任吧！吳部長昨天在典禮上致辭說，馬總統重視教師，「在馬總統領導下，教育工作者有尊嚴。」還在短短的致辭過程中，數次提到馬總統。有人以為聽錯了，誤以為說的是蔣總統；還有人諷刺說，吳的意思是否代表兩蔣李扁時代，教師都沒有尊嚴？

可憐36％教師憂鬱

可憐的是，吳吹牛拍馬的聲音還沒落地，北市教師會公布「2011年台北市教師憂鬱傾向」調查，顯示壓力負荷到臨界點的教師佔48％；憂鬱傾向的有36％；教師壓力源是家長態度的63％，來自教育政策的60％。經常考慮轉業的佔9％；偶爾考慮轉業的61％。此前一項調查指出，教師最大的煩惱來自校園霸凌，而且也擔憂被學生毆打。這麼普遍的教師問題還能吹噓成「在馬總統領導下，教育工作者有尊嚴」？有尊嚴還有 61％偶爾考慮轉業？太扯了吧！

學店公開帳簿(OPEN-BOOK MANAGEMENT)

2011-09-25T23:03:00.000-07:00

上周五，帶二位日本和台灣的朋友去某書店，取上海1946-48年的電影雜誌重印本。

老闆是東海哲學系的學弟。他問我有沒看東海某人的八卦新聞。我說：沒。他跟我複述什麼校長薪水30萬/月，是平均值的2倍…..

我們這些在工商界打轉過的，對月薪或福利等，沒什麼意見。畢竟，東海一年收入16-17億以上…..

我認為重要的是，不是爭論東海是否為學店---一些20-30年前被冠上學店的私立大學，現在辦校成績並不輸給東海。

建議董事長等：採用公開帳簿(OPEN-BOOK MANAGEMENT)的方式經營東海。

Jewish Moms Are Behind Tech Success Of Israel

2011-09-25T17:44:00.000-07:00

胡說八道姑且聽之

Jewish Moms Are Behind Tech Success Of Israel

Israel lives up to its reputation as the Start-up nation. Israeli start-ups are everywhere. It is what people aspire to. It is what they dream of.

It was Dan Senor and Saul Singer who nicknamed the country that has given birth to more start-ups than any country outside of the U.S. It is a nickname that it well deserves.

There are many reasons given for this success. Israel has little in the way of natural resources, so it has had to create its wealth from the one thing it does have, its people. Then there is the unique role of the Israeli Defense Forces, and in particular the elite intelligence unit, 8200. At one start-up, all of the coders had met there. It functions almost as a high-tech networking event.

And then there is the unique Israeli culture and spirit. Call it chutzpah, call it simply refusing to be told what to do. For some it would be determination, an admirable quality in an entrepreneur, for others it looks a lot like sheer stubbornness -- a less desired trait.

Everywhere you go in this Start-up nation, there is one name you hear time and again, and although he will deny it when you meet him, Yossi Vardi is the father of the start-up culture in Israel.

To prove the point about how deeply woven the start up culture is in the society, at lunch, the avuncular Mr. Vardi starts to chat with the young waitress, switching between Hebrew and English. What is she doing, he asks her? She is a linguist, in her first year at university. What does she want to do when she graduates, he asks? 'Oh, I want to work in voice recognition,' she says. 'Probably in a small company or a start-up.'

So what is his theory for the success of this country of only 7.5 million and its ability to punch way over its weight?

'Jewish mothers,' he says. 'We succeed because of the guilt we all feel. From birth we are told we have to be better, that we are such a disappointment.

'You know the difference between an Italian mother and a Jewish one? An Italian mother says to her son 'Eat this food or I will kill you.' A Jewish one says 'Eat this food or I will kill myself.'

'They are our secret.'

創業之國以色列的成功秘訣英文

字體

以

色列沒有辜負它作為“創業之國”的美名。在以色列﹐新成立的企業隨處可見。這是以色列人的期盼。這是他們的夢想。

相關報導

中國猶太人面臨身份難題

正是丹‧塞諾(Dan Senor)和索爾‧辛格(Saul Singer)給了以色列創業之國這個稱謂。作為美國以外孕育最多新興企業的國家﹐以色列當之無愧。

這份成功得益於多方面的原因。以色列的自然資源儲量並不豐富﹐因此它若要創造財富就必須依賴它真正擁有的一樣東西──：以色列人。以色列國防軍 (Israeli Defense Forces)也發揮了的獨特的作用﹐特別是它的精英情報部門──“8200部隊”。這也是一個新成立的機構﹐所有的編碼人員都在那裡匯聚﹐看起來就像是一場專門為高科技人員舉辦的社交活動。

另外﹐還應該提到的就是以色列獨特的文化和國民精神。有人稱這種精神為chutzpah（過度自信又厚顏無恥）﹐乾脆點說就是不肯接受別人的安排。對於一些人來說﹐這意味著決心和毅力﹐是一個創業家應該具有的值得嘉許的品質﹔而對其他人而言﹐這簡直就是冥頑不靈──這可不是什麼好品質。

在這個創業的國度里﹐不論你走到哪裡﹐你總會反復地聽到一個人的名字﹐儘管當你見到他的時候﹐他不會認賬。這個人就是以色列的創業文化之父──約西‧瓦爾迪(Yossi Vardi)。

為了證明這種創業文化已經深刻地融入了以色列社會﹐午餐時分﹐慈祥和藹的瓦爾迪用希伯萊語和英語與年輕的女服務員攀談了起來。她是做什麼的？他問她。她是個語言學專業的學生﹐今年上大學一年級。畢業後她想從事什麼工作？他問道。“哦﹐我想從事語音識別工作﹐”她說﹐“可能會找一家小公司或者新成立的企業吧。”

那麼﹐他認為以色列這個僅僅擁有750萬人口的國家是如何獲得成功﹐又是如何具備了發揮超出自身實力的能力的呢？

“原因就在於猶太民族的母親們”﹐他說。“我們能夠獲得成功﹐是因為我們都感覺到了我們的罪過。從出生的那一刻起﹐我們就被告知一定要做得更好﹐被告知我們是如此令她們失望。”

“你知道意大利母親和猶太母親有什麼不同嗎？意大利母親會對她的兒子說﹐‘吃掉這些東西﹐否則我就殺死你。’而猶太母親則會說‘吃掉這些東西﹐要不我就死給你看。’”

“她們就是我們的成功秘訣。”

Ben Rooney

博幼社會福利基金會需要你幫助

2011-09-23T15:56:00.000-07:00

博幼社會福利基金會需要你幫助
【董事長李家同的理念】

我們國家一直有非常嚴重的教育落差問題，要考上建中，學力測驗一定要高達290分，但是很多鄉下的國中，平均學力測驗只有50分，有些孩子到了小學四年級，仍不會加法，到了小學五年級，仍不會減法。至於英文，情形更嚴重，很多弱勢家庭的孩子們在唸英文的時候，完全跟不上其他同學，只好放棄英文。

我們該注意的是：大多數功課不好的孩子來自弱勢家庭，大多數弱勢家庭的孩子功課也會不好。弱勢家庭的孩子功課不好，使他們長大成人以後，相對缺乏競爭力，缺乏競爭力的人當然又是弱勢團體的一份子，因此我們必須知道，如果這種情形繼續下去，我們國家的貧富不均問題勢必越來越嚴重。

要停止這種惡性循環，我們必須拉拔弱勢孩子們的學業程度。我們發現弱勢孩子們往往回家不做功課，博幼基金會就在這種思維中成立了，我們的工作是吸引弱勢孩子晚上來到我們這裡，我們請專人督導他們做功課。以埔里為例，孩子們每週五天會來到基金會，每天三小時，一切都是免費的。

前往了解此基金會>>

全球網路開會/To Google Plus 你

2011-09-21T04:56:00.000-07:00

校友會開會

http://www.thu.org.tw/max/front/bin/home.phtml

要弄 webcasting

好讓全球關心的校友等利害關係人都可參與

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哀哉!「書院」教育

2011-09-14T23:55:00.000-07:00

光看這些書院的座椅設計布置就知道這些21世紀的假古人的未來.....

「台北書院」揭牌林谷芳接首任山長

更新日期:2011/09/15 12:16 江昭倫

台北市即日起又多了一處洋溢禪意的人文空間！在副總統蕭萬長的見證下，位於台北市中山堂內的「台北書院」今日(15日)舉行揭牌儀式。台北書院首任山長林谷芳表示，台北書院未來將兼顧修行、學問、藝術、生活4個面向，提供國內外民眾一個體驗台灣獨特文化生活美學空間。

台北市長郝龍斌競選連任的重要政見之一「台北書院」15日正式掛牌運作，包括副總統蕭萬長、公益平台文化基金會董事長嚴長壽、廣達文教基金會董事長林百里等人都到場表達祝賀；高齡96歲的國家文藝獎得主張光賓，特別揮毫為「台北書院」題匾，也親自出席書院開幕記者會。

副總統蕭萬長致詞時肯定台北市政府設置「台北書院」，與政府致力推動具有台灣特色的中華文化政策目標一致，今年10月文建會也將在美國3個城市率先成立「台灣書院」，推廣台灣文化與台灣研究，提升台灣國際形象，期待未來「台北書院」同樣能以文化高度，將台灣文化思維發揚光大。

台北書院第一任山長由佛光大學藝術學研究所長林谷芳接任。林谷芳指出，書院自古以來就是一個重要傳承經典、體踐所學於重要場域，而在他看來，台灣魅力也在於此，真正體現了中華文化精髓，也是台北書院成立最重要精神。林谷芳說：『(原音)我常常對大陸朋友、對外國朋友介紹台北介紹台灣的時候，總用這樣一句話開頭，就是我們這個地方十步之內必有芳草，陋巷之中就有春天，在任何一個地方都可以看到台灣、台北那種沉潛的力量；真的讓台灣安定、真的可以讓台灣覺得是一個長居的地方，是那隱現台灣在一方天地裏面實踐生命理想的那種安頓的力量，那這樣的力量其實就是書院的根本精神。』

「台北書院」是利用台北市中山堂三樓原有台北市立國樂團排練室重新打造，三樓兩側迴廊則規劃為茶坊，未來民眾到這裡不只一邊品茗，觀賞演出、展覽，也能參與書院講座，探究經典、品茗、插花、體驗生活美學與創意。

"適得其反"的管理/教育學

2011-09-14T15:38:00.000-07:00

這標題可當"管理/教育學的教訓"用
大部分教導成功或幸福或金錢或修養的課程/說教
效果最可能"適得其反":

Christine Walsh for The New York Times.

Magazine Preview

What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?

By PAUL TOUGH

Kids’ success — and happiness — may depend less on perfect performance than on learning how to recover from setbacks and improve regardless of the obstacles.

美國的報告: 大學畢業生和年長者破產者大增

2011-09-13T19:11:00.000-07:00

2010年是美國人最窮的一年.....

College Grads Behind Increase in Bankruptcy Filings

A new report suggests that advanced education can’t protect people from financial reality.

By Greg Howard | Posted Tuesday, Sep. 13, 2011, at 1:01 PM EDT

College graduates represent the fastest growing demographic of consumers who have filed for bankruptcy over the past five years, according to a new report out Tuesday.

Wait, really? Our high school guidance counselors always told us that a college degree guaranteed financial success down the road.

Not necessarily so, according to the survey by the Institute for Financial Literacy, which found that wealthier, more educated households are driving the recent spike in bankruptcy filings.

“We’re told that if you do go and get advanced education, you’re going to be almost guaranteed this economic success,” Leslie Linfield, the group’s executive director, told the Washington Post, which got an early look at the report. Linfield added that the recession proved that “higher education was no guarantee that you weren’t going to be at risk.”

The percentage of debtors with bachelor’s degrees rose from 11.2 percent to 13.6 percent between 2006 and 2010, and debtors with graduate degrees increased from 4.9 percent to 6.7 percent. In the same span, there was a decline in the percentage of bankruptcy filers who didn’t finish college, though they still accounted for about a third of all bankruptcies, the Post reports.

The institute also found sharp changes in the ages of consumers filing for bankruptcy. While the number of consumers between 18 and 34 who have filed since 2006 has fallen 31 percent, the amount of people 55 and older who have filed has increased 25 percent.

Linfield said that although credit cards and unsecured loans are generally what cause most people to file, hefty mortgages and falling home values are also contributing to the current rise in bankruptcies. More than 70 percent of bankrupted consumers blame their current troubles on being overextended in credit.

Still, Linfield thinks we may have seen the worst of it as the number of bankruptcies across the board is beginning to drop. Research from the American Bankruptcy Institute supports Linfield’s hunch, reporting an 11-percent drop in August bankruptcies from a year ago as consumers are learning to embrace the shock, slowing down their spending to balance their personal funds.

Photo by Joshua Lott/Getty Images. (Arizona State University graduate students celebrate during their graduation ceremony at Sun Devil Stadium May 13, 2009, in Tempe, Arizona.)

Immanuel Lutheran science teacher exchanges knowledge on Taiwan trip

2011-09-11T19:44:00.000-07:00

Immanuel Lutheran science teacher exchanges knowledge on Taiwan trip

By Julie Mullen For The Courier-News September 11, 2011 5:06PM

Domeier-ECN-0911-2.jpg

Updated: September 11, 2011 5:06PM

EAST DUNDEE — Answering the question usually asked of students, veteran teacher Sue Domeier couldn’t wait to talk about what she did on her summer vacation.

Domeier, who teaches science to fifth- through eighth-graders at Immanuel Lutheran School, journeyed to Taiwan on a Christian mission trip to open youngsters’ eyes to Western culture.

Trading her lab coat for more casual attire as part of the team from Concordia University-Wisconsin, the Carol Stream resident said it was the experience of a lifetime.

“The people there are so warm and friendly … and they look out for you,” Domeier said. “It is a wonderful, wonderful culture.”

Domeier plans to share her knowledge and photos of Taiwanese life with her students, as well as some indigenous candy treats she brought back for them.

The trip’s aim was to work a weeklong camp run by the university, titled “A Closer Look at America.”

Children in Taiwan are eager to learn American culture, and their parents want that for them, too, Domeier said, to enhance their future in business.

Held at the Taiwan Children’s Center — a local version of the YMCA — students ages 7 to 13 ranged from poverty-stricken to middle class.

At camp, they learned about American holidays, and the traditions and foods that go along with them.

“They were so eager to learn, and loved sampling American customs and cuisine,” she said. “On the last day, we did an East versus West cuisine cook-off. It was hard finding things in the store to make American pizza, but the kids loved it.”

A chance to
‘share Christ’

As part of a Lutheran school, Domeier said she also was drawn in by the mission’s underlying Christian theme.

“Only 3 to 5 percent of Taiwanese are Christian,” she said. “The most important thing we did there was share Christ.”

Domeier first learned about the opportunity through the university after teaching STEAM camp — which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics — an outreach summer program it sponsors in Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana.

The mission trip was funded partially by the university, with part paid by Domeier, who added that the school — which has an MBA program in Taiwan — has been making efforts to build relations there.

“They have been wanting to build connections there,” Domeier said. “It’s a nice partnership.”

The team was represented by seasoned teachers and administrators, as well as some newer to the education field.

Domeier, who has been teaching for 26 years and is in her fourth year at Immanuel Lutheran, said that while she learned many differences between students among the two cultures, she was more struck by the similarities.

“Children are children no matter where they live,” Domeier said. “They love to laugh, learn and explore. A smile needs no interpretation.”

芬蘭的教育觀摩WHY ARE FINLAND’S SCHOOLS SUCCESSFUL?

2011-09-08T05:54:00.000-07:00

WHY ARE FINLAND’S SCHOOLS SUCCESSFUL?
Finland has vastly improved in reading, math and science literacy over the past decade in large part because its teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around. The article is in the Smithsonian Magazine.

新生入門

2011-09-06T06:03:00.000-07:00

5日台大新生訓練上，李嗣涔校長對新生的勉勵，竟然是希望學生不作弊，不翹課，不抄襲作業，不亂停腳踏車，外界認為這些願望好渺小，覺得校長的叮嚀未免太細了，但也有人覺得，就是因為現在學生品格教育不理想，才會讓一個堂堂台大校長，都必須如此耳提面命的再三提醒。

台大校長李嗣涔，今年對於新生提出四不要求，呼籲學生不作弊，不翹課，不抄襲作業，連不能亂停腳踏車這種小事，都能拿出來勉勵學生，只不過這些聽起來似乎真的是很基本的教養，真的需要堂堂一個台大校長，來耳提面命嗎?

大部分的人，看來都能了解校長這番話，其實真是有他的道理。

像之前，記者就曾直擊台大學生，上課也在偷偷玩牌，睡大覺，校園腳踏車亂停狀況，也很普遍，根據台大校方統計，每月違規停車，被拖吊的腳踏車，就高達2000多台，這些情況，再再都反映出，大學生的自律，真的不太好。

這四個要求，聽起來說來簡單，但大家不妨捫心自問，自己真的做得到嗎?只不過這些基本教養，還需要堂堂一個台大校長來叮嚀，這似乎也反映出，近年大學生品格，日益低落的情況，.....

台灣每年博士生畢業人數3700多市場過份飽和

2011-09-04T21:52:00.000-07:00

目前的高教教育系統可以改過來嗎
且讓他們/高教自生自滅
管理管理規畫規畫鬼打架
---

博士生供過於求教育部全面檢討

台灣高等教育也出現供過於求的問題！現在每年博士班畢業生超過3700人，跟84年相比，大幅增加二倍，國科會副主委張清風就表示，國內培育的博士已經太多，而培育出來的人才，卻找不到好出路。

要念到博士班不容易，但隨著人數限額逐年開放，博士生也出現過剩問題，國科會副主委張清風就直言，台灣培育的博士已經太多，大筆資源栽培出的人才，卻找不到好出路，真的是如此嗎，CG1根據教育部統計，博士生限額從82學年到今年，人數確實大幅成長141%，每年畢業生就超過3700人。

博士生畢業人數，從84年的1000多人，到現在增加到3700多，過去為因應產業需求，教育部放寬博士生限額，但當初看好生技和電資系所，大量開放各校增班，但實際上，產業卻沒有發展起來，導致研究生只能轉投入研究和教職。

教育部也坦言，博士生確實太多，將進行檢討，未來將更嚴格審查，各校招生狀況，看是否有限縮名額的必要，還要積極規劃產學合作，避免流浪博士的問題變得更嚴重。

(2011-09-05 12:00) 公視午間新聞

廖玉蕙：在充滿偏見的教育下

2011-09-02T19:50:00.000-07:00

轉載有空再加故事半評論

【聯合報╱廖玉蕙】

2011.08.31 02:59 am

我們常會在不知不覺中形塑出集體的偏見，譬如：「學生的要務就是讀書，不要貪玩。」而所謂的「貪玩」可能是在球場上騁馳、或著迷於下棋、組織樂團、看連環漫畫……凡是跟文字書本無關的活動，都被歸類為不正經的活動；這叫「貴書本、輕人生」的偏見。

哈雷彗星出現的那年，朋友Ｌ的兒子去學校請假要到南部去看彗星，學校老師說：「都要聯考了，還請假去看什麼彗星！要請假，讓家長來。」Ｌ到學校去，跟老師說：「彗星七十六年才來一次，聯考年年都舉行。今年考不好，還有明年。」老師被氣得吹鬍子瞪眼睛。

我兒子上國中時，段考前一天黃昏，在學校操場打籃球，竟被導師扭送教員休息室罰站，回家委屈哭訴，不知錯在哪裡。老師隨即電話告狀：「要段考了，居然還在操場打球！你知道這時候還在打球的都是怎樣的孩子嗎？」當我向他致歉並表示其錯在我，是我要他以平常心對待的，老師當下負氣地回說：「既然如此，那以後我就不再管你兒子囉！」在考試的壓力下，書本成為學生的緊箍咒，家長擔心一旦緊箍咒鬆了，孩子就會像孫悟空一樣，翻出學測的藩籬外。考試到了，百事盡皆可廢。

其次，我常在有關閱讀的演講中被問到：「我的孩子只喜歡看繪本和漫畫，不喜歡看文字，怎麼辦？有什麼方法可以讓她的閱讀由圖像『進化』到文字？」他用「進化」二字，充分顯示心目中對圖像價值的鄙視！然而，屬於圖像的年代也許真的來臨了，大人們可能得先解放腦裡「文字優於圖像」的成見，讓二者的價值並列齊驅。

我曾建議聽眾，何妨讓孩子由喜歡的繪本和漫畫入手，由少至多逐漸進入文字的世界。一位聽眾幾近絕望地坦言：「我兒子看漫畫書從來不必借助旁邊的文字！」我大為嘆服，提醒他，那樣的兒子顯然對圖像的領略別具天分，將來也許會成為重要的圖像工作者亦未可知！其實，他最該憂心的是色情、暴力的劣質漫畫充斥才是，若是優質漫畫會有什麼問題！何況深層的圖像解讀能力也並非人人可得，跟文字解讀能力同樣是可貴的資產。漫畫不可怕，如今正在中正紀念堂展出的手塚治蟲，創造四五○部、十五萬頁充滿人道精神的漫畫，誰敢小看他的成就！而活在當下，誰又能漠視國際書展中，動漫館裡大排長龍的空前盛況。

語文教育也常走偏鋒—重視讀和寫、忽略聽和說，很少給孩子發言討論的機會，一逕要求他們閱讀之後必須勤寫學習單。學生厭煩之餘，索性連書都不肯讀了。我曾看到文學獎比賽奪魁的學生代表得獎者致詞，站在台上支支吾吾，滿嘴「然後」、「對」……語焉不詳的狀況和文字所虛構的精采絕倫成了荒謬的對照，簡直讓人無法置信。

總之，最重要的生活體驗被記誦之學取代，世界將窄得只剩書本和電腦；對動漫、影像的輕蔑，在圖像當道的時代，將淪為落後人種；而進入社會後，遠比讀、寫更重要的聽和說又缺乏訓練，只能在虛構的網路或沉默的文字世界裡流連，勢將成為名副其實的宅男、宅女，人際溝通勢必成為大問題！總而言之，以目前的情況看來，幾乎只要學測不考的，都不在家長及學生的關心之列，當然也包括生活教育、品德涵養。

教育的目的，應該是讓生活更容易，可是如今扭曲變形得厲害；將來等到所有求學時的考試都圓滿結束後，工作、交友甚至最簡單的親人溝通……等進入社會後的種種考驗要期待及格，恐怕就難上加難了。

（作者為國立台北教育大學語文與創作系教授）

給1971年認識的朋友

2011-09-02T05:22:00.000-07:00

給周曉宏及40年前認識的朋友：

就算今天好了--- 40年前，我們大家有緣相聚，那時，山是情，谷是夢。

學校趕走校長，真不幸；然而，唯有如此，那時瑋說的有點靈性的建築群，才更屬於我們的。總之，詩家和我們這些東海的過客，最幸。

臺大哲學系的一位老師多年前跟我開玩笑地說：教育部的成就之一，就是毀了東海。這話，我很久以後才懂。

不過，這，只對了三分之一。剩下的三分之二是，從四十多年來，這兒的人、事、物，不可說，不可說。

上周我同金標說，現在校園內外，有的地方，污染極為嚴重。

他是我歷史系的事。恰巧，我知道一些不堪說的故事。最令我痛心的是，許教授曾說，他是教徒，可是鬥爭(當時)，他少禱告了。(我是非信徒，聽了這，也相當難過)。他是校長器重的教授，很單純，一次校長跟他提，有董事缺，請推薦…..。

以後一年多的發展和故事，更讓我覺得，我們都只是過客……。

換句話說，我更懷念的是那些具體的老朋友，雖然隔著太平洋。至於學校變成三流大學，奈何奈何，真是一言難盡。這封留言只想問候老朋友，更多從未有機會筆談的朋友。

學校系統/ 郁達夫德文詩/柳無忌耶魯博士論文

2011-09-02T03:00:00.000-07:00

今天翻一本口袋冊子精裝
題國立臺灣大學--給2007年臺大畢業生一輩子的禮物

從校長開始白來位師長每人一頁一句/一段
從新翻一下嚇一跳
竟然沒一位用毛筆連中文系的文學院的院長都是如此

書法已死你們要一輩子記住

KJ 吳又開始寄東西新竹科學園區內的某房子內還有人大寫書法的....
我總想起他說的學校是系統之一而已可以不須它的肯定.....

----
郁達夫文集/ 第10卷詩詞 pp.552-53 是郁達夫的一首德文詩郭沫若譯 (漢字比德文多約10字)

: ......不知來何從
只有一聲確是只有一聲
嚮往令我心深疼
煩悶煩悶
我在十分思慕君

其實我是在找 "大度....."的詩沒找到
---

阿尾的落地窗 *我最早的記憶*....

時瑋的父親我見過一次
不知怎的我最近讀柳無忌 (95歲) 講當年倫敦的朱自清
經常坐在桌前......會想起一些類似的前輩身影

朱的日記譯文其實那是柳的(通過的) 博士論文我查一下這篇1931年的耶魯英文系博士論文絕少引用過

柳君以論文見示,乃《雪萊在英國的聲譽》(Shelley’s reputation in England) 後抄各教授評語,首列方法,次材料之統率( Command) ,次新舊材料之運用,次創造力( Originality) ,次邏輯(Logic0 與文體風格( English Style) 分優 Superior) 與與可(Acceptable)兩等,後有總評,大抵謂柳君英文不甚符合語言習慣(Idiomatic) ..重複太多轉折重複太多. 柳君云下半寫成太匆促導致爾爾,現仍在不列顛博物館蒐集此題材料也。又謂此次得一十九世紀題目,甚屬不易,因題目大都為人做過矣。 ...

書法已死你們要一輩子記住

2011-09-02T00:28:00.000-07:00

我在2011年7月15寫道"

錦坤兄：
2010年6月26日閣下送我的明信片《阿空加瓜峰頂峰攀登隊‧題詞》：

恐風月被他拘束

放江山入我襟懷

我將它寫下來，因為原件可能被一些食用油污染，致使蟑螂蠺食之，真是抱歉。

今天翻一本口袋冊子精裝
題國立臺灣大學--給2007年臺大畢業生一輩子的禮物

從校長開始白來位師長每人一頁一句/一段
從新翻一下
嚇一跳
竟然沒一位用毛筆連中文系的文學院的院長都是如此

書法已死你們要一輩子記住

Free Stanford Class Draws 58,000 Students (online)

2011-08-18T02:12:00.000-07:00

Free Stanford Class Draws 58,000 Students

That’s roughly four times the size of the school’s entire student body.

By Peter Fulham | Posted Tuesday, Aug. 16, 2011, at 2:35 PM EDT

A free online course being offered by Stanford University this fall has drawn more than 58,000 people from around the world—a total roughly four times the size of the school’s entire student body, the New York Times reports.

The class on artificial intelligence is one of three being offered by Stanford’s computer science department and will be taught by two leading AI experts, Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig.

Thrun led an effort at Stanford to build a robotic car that drove 132 miles over unpaved roads in a California desert. Lately, he has spearheaded a Google project to develop self-driving cars, many of which have already been tested successfully on American roads.

Norvig is Google's director of research and a former NASA scientist. He has also written a widely read textbook on artificial intelligence.

The online students will not get grades or credit for participation, but they will be ranked in comparison to their online classmates.

Thurn explained that the course was part of an effort to increase the accessibility of once cost-prohibitive higher-education. “The vision is: change the world by bringing education to places that can’t be reached today,” he told the Times.

The scientists said they were inspired to create the class by Salman Khan, an engineer who set of a nonprofit organization that posted instructional videos on YouTube for students around the world. (Read Slate's recent profile of Khan.) “The idea that you could put up open content at all was risky 10 years ago, and we decided to be very conservative,” Thurn said. “Now the question is, 'How do you move into something that is more interactive and collaborative?' And we will see lots and lots of models over the next four or five years.”

Photo by Al Bello/Getty Images.

雪舟破墨山水図變奏

2011-08-15T00:09:00.001-07:00

在某 used books 買到歷史博物館的《主題‧原象---莊喆畫展》* (2005)
末頁「學歷」：第2行 1963-73 執教於東海大學建築系
(然後他出國榮歸台灣兩次任教1年或一學期
都不是東海。這，當然有公立大學的因素。
不知道是否有其他讓他感到回東海會有"物非人非"之處?? 我想主要原因可能是東海建築或美術系的人跟他都關係淡了。雖然還有這樣寫：
"建築系的同學是多才多藝的，過去莊喆老師、張肅肅老師所引燃同學們對繪畫和藝術的狂熱是值得重視與記憶的"

我的1974的「藝術欣賞課」延到2011年才續修。

*我跟玉燕說，此書是莊家三兄弟都有作品。莊喆照相者為莊靈。他為莊因哥祝壽；而莊因有「十六羅漢尊者造像」一文。這方面也有許多創意，不過我將學習重點放在下述另外一主題。

雪舟破墨山水図變奏11幅頁40-50

雪舟（せっしゅう、応永27年（1420年） - 永正3年8月8日（諸説あり）（1506年））は、室町時代に活動した水墨画家・禅僧。「雪舟」は号で、諱（いみな）は「等楊」（とうよう）と称した。備中に生まれ、京都相国寺で修行した後、大内氏の庇護のもと周防に移る。その後、遣明船に同乗して中国（明）に渡り、中国の画法を学んだ。現存する作品の大部分は中国風の水墨山水画であるが、肖像画の作例もあり、花鳥画もよくしたと伝える。宋・元の古典や明代の浙派の画風を吸収しつつ、各地を旅して写生に努め、中国画の直模から脱した日本独自の水墨画風を確立。後の日本画壇へ与えた影響は大きい。現存する作品のうち6点が国宝に指定されており、日本の絵画史において別格の高い評価を受けているといえる。このため、花鳥図屏風など「伝雪舟筆」とされる作品は多く、真筆であるか否か、専門家の間でも意見の分かれる作品も多い。代表作は、「四季山水図（山水長巻）」「秋冬山水図」「天橋立図」「破墨山水図」「慧可断臂図」など。弟子に、秋月、宗淵、等春らがいる。

現在我們可以在網路上觀賞莊喆老師的「雪舟破墨山水図變奏11幅」 (頁40-50)的原本：山水図（破墨山水図）（東京国立博物館、1495年（明応4年））

我查國內兩本美術辭典中的「破墨」的解釋之後，我相信這是必須向日本再次「請回來」學習的，不只是此圖，因為我們讀日本的雪舟專著，知道這是他76歲的作品，而他年紀稍小時，另有「仿玉澗 (牧溪)的破墨畫」。

(は‐ぼく【破墨】水墨画の技法の一。淡墨で描いた上に、さらに濃墨で手を入れて立体感や全体の趣などを表すこと。中国、盛唐前期に始まる。)

莊老師的，不只是學習，他是進一步發揮。用他自己的話：

「……說明我的目的。南宋畫家像馬逺、夏圭二位的簡約表現一直吸引我，輪郭與墨染之外，神妙的是在繪畫上的面與線竟能合而為一。….. 「破墨山水」一幅對我更特別突出，因為這幅畫實已把山水結構做一次總結，視覺上山是上下縱的走向，而水是水平的橫，一豎一橫，放在正中央，真美而實的最基本兩條線，還能有其他更簡的形狀嗎？……這幅的長與寬是直立的兩個正方體，所以用三竹寺分把山勢分成上中下。在三元空間表現距離正好又是遠、中、近三等分。山、樹、岩、岸、村舍、小舟就一次在這三等分中準確調配完成。簡與繁就這樣奇妙的融合在一起了。我想把這個解悟到的心得用不同的幅度來呈現。不同於原畫的水墨，我期望也把色彩的明暗度加進去，抽取出筆與染的純粹繪畫性，省略一切細節，既是「抽象」，又是「自然」。這完全也躲一再敗過去四十年想結合的，從古畫中看出現代，可能與可表現的究竟有多少？反覆推敲求證，在真實自然與已有的畫蹟中實際還埋藏無限生機。我相信這種雙限性的發展可以越過時空，無盡無限！」 (頁11)

故君子之教，喻也，道而弗率，強而弗抑，開而弗達。

2011-08-12T04:50:00.001-07:00

標點問題討論
可能是
禮記˙學記：「故君子之教，喻也，道而弗率，強而弗抑，開而弗達。」

不是: 禮記˙學記：「故君子之教喻也，道而弗率，強而弗抑，開而弗達。」

Disruptive Innovation is Remaking the University

2011-07-27T22:37:00.000-07:00

除了有趣之外此種大學受科技影響論還有什麼意願呢?

How Disruptive Innovation is Remaking the University

Published:	July 25, 2011
Authors:	Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring

Forum open for comment — 5 Comments — Post a comment

Executive Summary:

In The Innovative University, authors Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring take Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation to the field of higher education, where new online institutions and learning tools are challenging the future of traditional colleges and universities. Key concepts include:

A disruptive innovation brings to market a product or service that isn't as good as the best traditional offerings, but is less expensive and easier to use.
Online learning is a disruptive technology that is making colleges and universities reconsider their higher education models.

About Faculty in this Article:

Clayton M. Christensen is the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

Editor's note: It has been more than a decade since the publication of The Innovator's Dilemma, in which Clayton M. Christensen introduced the idea of disruptive technologies—those unexpected products and services that shake up the market not because they are better than the traditional competition, but because they are are cheaper and easier to use. In The Innovative University, Christensen and Henry J. Eyring take the idea of disruptive innovation to the field of higher education, where new online institutions and learning tools are challenging the future of traditional colleges and universities. In this excerpt, they discuss the idea of a university's DNA.

In the absence of a disruptive new technology, the combination of prestige and loyal support from donors and legislators has allowed traditional universities to weather occasional storms. Fundamental change has been unnecessary.

That is no longer true, though, for any but a relative handful of institutions. Costs have risen to unprecedented heights, and new competitors are emerging. A disruptive technology, online learning, is at work in higher education, allowing both for-profit and traditional not-for-profit institutions to rethink the entire traditional higher education model. Private universities without national recognition and large endowments are at great financial risk. So are public universities, even prestigious ones such as the University of California at Berkeley.

Price-sensitive students and fiscally beleaguered legislatures have begun to resist costs that consistently rise faster than those of other goods and services. With the advent of high-quality online learning, there are new, less expensive institutional alternatives to traditional universities, their standing enhanced by changes in accreditation standards that play to their strengths in demonstrating student learning outcomes. These institutions are poised to respond cost-effectively to the national need for increased college participation and completion.

A disruptive technology, online learning, is at work in higher education, allowing both for-profit and traditional not-for-profit institutions to rethink the entire traditional higher education model.

For the vast majority of universities change is inevitable. The main questions are when it will occur and what forces will bring it about. It would be unfortunate if internal delay caused change to come through external regulation or pressure from newer, nimbler competitors. Until now, American higher education has largely regulated itself, to great effect. U.S. universities are among the most lightly regulated by government. They are free to choose what discoveries to pursue and what subjects to teach, without concern for economic or political agendas. Responsibly exercised, this freedom is a great intellectual and competitive advantage.

Traditional universities benefit society not just by producing intelligent graduates and valuable discoveries but also by fostering unmarketable yet invaluable intangibles such as social tolerance, personal responsibility, and respect for the rule of law. Each is a unique community of scholars in which lives as well as minds are molded. Pure profit-based competition would produce fewer of these social goods, just as increased government regulation would dampen the great universities' genius for discovery.

Ideally, the faculty members, administrators, and alumni who best appreciate the totality of the university's contributions to society will, in the spirit of self-regulation, play a leading role in revitalizing their beloved institutions. They have the capacity to determine their own fate and in so doing take the indispensable university to new heights.

In performing that critical task, they must understand not only current realities, especially the threat of competitive disruption, but also how universities have evolved over the past several hundred years. Even more than most organizations, traditional universities are products of their history. That history is shared, because most universities have emulated a handful of elite American schools that began to assume their modern form a century and a half ago. Prominent among them were Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and MIT. Together, they have evolved to share common institutional traits, a sort of university DNA.

Much as the identity of a living organism is reflected in its every cell, the identity of a university can be found in the structure of departments and in the relationships among faculty and administrators. It is written into course catalogs, into standards for admitting students and promoting professors, and into strategies for raising funds and recruiting athletes. It can be seen in the campus buildings and grounds. These institutional characteristics remain the same even as individual people come and go.

Pioneering institutions such as Harvard and Yale first began granting Ph.D.s in the mid-nineteenth century. As graduates of their doctoral programs joined the faculties of other universities, they took their experiences and expectations with them. With the support of ambitious university presidents, they strove to make their new academic environments like those from which they had come. This internal drive was reinforced by external systems for accrediting, classifying, and ranking universities. It also became embedded in a common academic culture. As a result, even the smallest and most obscure universities bear many of the essential traits of the greatest ones.

Much as the identity of a living organism is reflected in its every cell, the identity of a university can be found in the structure of departments and in the relationships among faculty and administrators.

University DNA is not only similar across institutions, it is also highly stable, having evolved over hundreds of years. Replication of the DNA occurs continuously, as each retiring employee or graduating student is replaced by someone screened against the same criteria applied to his or her predecessor. The way things are done is determined not by individual preference but by institutional procedure written into the genetic code.

There is evolution in the university, though its mechanism typically is not natural selection of random mutations. As a general rule, the university alters itself only in thoughtful response to significant needs and opportunities. Entrepreneurism occurs within fixed bounds; there is rarely revolution of the type so often heralded in business or politics. This steadiness is a major source of universities' value to a fickle, fad-prone society.

Yet the university's steadiness is also why one cannot make it more responsive to modern economic and social realities merely by regulating its behavior. The genetic tendencies are too strong. The institutional genes expressed in course catalogs and in standards for admitting students and promoting faculty are selfish, replicating themselves faithfully even at the expense of the institution's welfare. A university cannot be made more efficient by simply cutting its operating budget, any more than a carnivore can be converted to an herbivore by constraining its intake of meat. Nor can universities be made by legislative fiat to perform functions for which they are not expressly designed. For example, requiring universities to admit underprepared students is unlikely to produce a proportional number of new college graduates. It is not in the typical university's genetic makeup to remediate such students, and neither regulation nor economic pressure will be enough, alone, to change that.

美國大富豪的教育慈善款50億美元經驗談Was the $5 Billion Worth It?

2011-07-27T20:24:00.000-07:00

美國大富豪的教育慈善款50億美元經驗談

THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW
JULY 23, 2011 Was the $5 Billion Worth It? A decade into his record-breaking education philanthropy, Bill Gates talks teachers, charters—and regrets.

By JASON L. RILEY

Seattle

'It's hard to improve public education—that's clear. As Warren Buffett would say, if you're picking stocks, you wouldn't pick this one." Ten years into his record-breaking philanthropic push for school reform, Bill Gates is sober—and willing to admit some missteps.

"It's been about a decade of learning," says the Microsoft co-founder whose Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is now the nation's richest charity. Its $34 billion in assets is more than the next three largest foundations (Ford, Getty and Robert Wood Johnson) combined, and in 2009 it handed out $3 billion, or $2 billion more than any other donor. Since 2000, the foundation has poured some $5 billion into education grants and scholarships.

Seated in his office at the new Gates Foundation headquarters located hard by the Emerald City's iconic Space Needle, Mr. Gates says that education isn't only a civil-rights issue but also "an equity issue and an economic issue. . . . It's so primary. In inner-city, low-income communities of color, there's such a high correlation in terms of educational quality and success."

One of the foundation's main initial interests was schools with fewer students. In 2004 it announced that it would spend $100 million to open 20 small high schools in San Diego, Denver, New York City and elsewhere. Such schools, says Mr. Gates, were designed to—and did—promote less acting up in the classroom, better attendance and closer interaction with adults.

"But the overall impact of the intervention, particularly the measure we care most about—whether you go to college—it didn't move the needle much," he says. "Maybe 10% more kids, but it wasn't dramatic. . . . We didn't see a path to having a big impact, so we did a mea culpa on that." Still, he adds, "we think small schools were a better deal for the kids who went to them."

The reality is that the Gates Foundation met the same resistance that other sizeable philanthropic efforts have encountered while trying to transform dysfunctional urban school systems run by powerful labor unions and a top-down government monopoly provider.

In the 1970s, the Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations, among others, pushed education "equity" lawsuits in California, New Jersey, Texas and elsewhere that led to enormous increases in state expenditures for low-income students. In 1993, the publishing mogul Walter Annenberg, hoping to "startle" educators and policy makers into action, gave a record $500 million to nine large city school systems. Such efforts made headlines but not much of a difference in closing the achievement gap.

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Martin Kozlowski

Asked to critique these endeavors, Mr. Gates demurs: "I applaud people for coming into this space, but unfortunately it hasn't led to significant improvements." He also warns against overestimating the potential power of philanthropy. "It's worth remembering that $600 billion a year is spent by various government entities on education, and all the philanthropy that's ever been spent on this space is not going to add up to $10 billion. So it's truly a rounding error."

This understanding of just how little influence seemingly large donations can have has led the foundation to rethink its focus in recent years. Instead of trying to buy systemic reform with school-level investments, a new goal is to leverage private money in a way that redirects how public education dollars are spent.

"I bring a bias to this," says Mr. Gates. "I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts." Compared with R&D spending in the pharmaceutical or information-technology sectors, he says, next to nothing is spent on education research. "That's partly because of the problem of who would do it. Who thinks of it as their business? The 50 states don't think of it that way, and schools of education are not about research. So we come into this thinking that we should fund the research."

Of late, the foundation has been working on a personnel system that can reliably measure teacher effectiveness. Teachers have long been shown to influence students' education more than any other school factor, including class size and per-pupil spending. So the objective is to determine scientifically what a good instructor does.

"We all know that there are these exemplars who can take the toughest students, and they'll teach them two-and-a-half years of math in a single year," he says. "Well, I'm enough of a scientist to want to say, 'What is it about a great teacher? Is it their ability to calm down the classroom or to make the subject interesting? Do they give good problems and understand confusion? Are they good with kids who are behind? Are they good with kids who are ahead?'

"I watched the movies. I saw 'To Sir, With Love,'" he chuckles, recounting the 1967 classic in which Sidney Poitier plays an idealistic teacher who wins over students at a roughhouse London school. "But they didn't really explain what he was doing right. I can't create a personnel system where I say, 'Go watch this movie and be like him.'"

Instead, the Gates Foundation's five-year, $335-million project examines whether aspects of effective teaching—classroom management, clear objectives, diagnosing and correcting common student errors—can be systematically measured. The effort involves collecting and studying videos of more than 13,000 lessons taught by 3,000 elementary school teachers in seven urban school districts.

"We're taking these tapes and we're looking at how quickly a class gets focused on the subject, how engaged the kids are, who's wiggling their feet, who's looking away," says Mr. Gates. The researchers are also asking students what works in the classroom and trying to determine the usefulness of their feedback.

Mr. Gates hopes that the project earns buy-in from teachers, which he describes as key to long-term reform. "Our dream is that in the sample districts, a high percentage of the teachers determine that this made them better at their jobs." He's aware, though, that he'll have a tough sell with teachers unions, which give lip service to more-stringent teacher evaluations but prefer existing pay and promotion schemes based on seniority—even though they often end up matching the least experienced teachers with the most challenging students.

Teachers unions can be counted on "to stick up for the status quo," he says, but he believes they can be nudged in the right direction. "It's kind of scary for them because what we're saying is that some of these people shouldn't be teachers. So, does the club stand for sticking up for its least capable member or does it stand for excellence in education? We'll, it kind of stands for both."

Asked if the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers have any incentive to back school reforms that help kids but also diminish union power, Mr. Gates responds by questioning the scope of that power. "We have heavy union states and heavy right-to-work states, and the educational achievement of K-12 students is not at all predicted by how strong the union rules are," he says. "If I saw that [right-to-work states like] Texas and Florida were running a great K-12 system, but [heavy union states like] New York and Massachusetts have really messed this up, then I could draw a correlation and say it's either got to be the union—or the weather."

Mr. Gates's foundation strongly supports a uniform core curriculum for schools. "It's ludicrous to think that multiplication in Alabama and multiplication in New York are really different," he says. He also sees common standards as a money-saver at a time when many states are facing budget shortfalls. "In terms of mathematics textbooks, why can't you have the scale of a national market? Right now, we have a Texas textbook that's different from a California textbook that's different from a Massachusetts textbook. That's very expensive."

A national core curriculum, detractors say, could force states with superior standards, like Massachusetts, to dumb down their systems. And even if good common standards could be established, how would they improve going forward if our 50-state laboratory is no longer in operation?

Mr. Gates responds to that by saying there's no need to sacrifice excellence for equity. "Behind this core curriculum are some very deep insights. American textbooks were twice as thick as Asian textbooks. In American math classes, we teach a lot of concepts poorly over many years. In the Asian systems they teach you very few concepts very well over a few years." Nor does he see the need for competition among state standards. "This is like having a common electrical system. It just makes sense to me."

On the fraught issue of school choice, his foundation has been a strong advocate of charter schools, and Mr. Gates is particularly fond of the KIPP charter network and its focus on serving inner-city neighborhoods. "Whenever you get depressed about giving money in this area," he volunteers, "you can spend a day in a KIPP school and know that they are spending less money than the dropout factory down the road."

Mr. Gates is less enamored of school vouchers. "Some in the Walton family"—of Wal-Mart fame—"have been very big on vouchers," he begins. "And honestly, if we thought there would be broad acceptance in some locales and long-term commitment to do them, they have some very positive characteristics."

He praises the private school model for its efficiency vis-à-vis traditional public schools, noting that the "parochial school system, per dollar spent, is an excellent school system." But the politics, he says, are just too tough right now. "We haven't chosen to get behind [vouchers] in a big way, as we have with personnel systems or charters, because the negativity about them is very, very high."

It's a response that in some ways encapsulates the Gates Foundation's approach to education reform—more evolution, less disruption. It attempts to do as much good as possible without upsetting too many players. You can quibble with Mr. Gates about that strategy. You can second-guess him. You can even offer free advice. Or you can shake his hand, thank him for his time and remember that it's his money.

Mr. Riley is a member of the Journal's editorial board.

豐田汽車公司北海道設第二所技術學校

2011-07-18T22:14:00.000-07:00

Toyota to establish new school in Tohoku

2011/07/19

A Toyota Motor Corp. employee teaches students to use computer-aided design (CAD) programs at Toyota Technical Skills Academy in Toyota, Aichi Prefecture. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

Toyota Motor Corp. will set up a new in-house school in the disaster-hit Tohoku region that will train junior high school graduates in the basics of manufacturing before hiring them, sources said.

The carmaker's second such training school will emulate the Toyota Technical Skills Academy in Toyota, Aichi Prefecture, which dates back to 1938, according to the sources.

Toyota intends to provide solid employment and step up efforts to train human resources in the Tohoku region, which the company sees as its third main manufacturing area following the Tokai and Kyushu regions.

The automaker's subsidiaries in the region--Kanto Auto Works Ltd., Central Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Tohoku Corp.--have main plants either in Iwate or Miyagi prefectures, which means the school most likely will be located in one of the two prefectures.

Sources said many of young people in Tohoku hope to find jobs in or near their hometowns to support their families.

Toyota Technical Skills Academy, established under professional skill development laws, has about 400 students. It offers three-year high school diploma programs for junior high school graduates and one-year technical programs for high school graduates.

Students at the school learn the corporation's philosophies and manufacturing methods, in addition to English and engineering. The academy has about 17,000 alumni, and of the graduates, about 8,000 people work at Toyota inside and outside Japan.

台清交強徵農民農地

2011-07-18T05:37:00.000-07:00

台大: 意識報039刊目錄（3/14/2011）竹北特刊

有空再研讀東海的學生刊物

昨天向台大的《意識報》敬禮 !!!!

《意識報》網址:

http://cpaper-blog.blogspot.com/

特別參考各國立大學逐錄竹北的報導: 039刊目錄（3/14/2011）竹北特刊

它的一缺點是”放過”清華大學…..

台大: 意識報039刊目錄（3/14/2011）竹北特刊

---

台、清兩大學「為了5年500億，為了土地，什麼事都做得出來。」

蘋論：台清交強徵農民農地

2011年 07月16日

農民怒吼，在古代是改朝換代的預兆，在今天的台灣何嘗不是執政黨的危機？為了「堅持土地正義，力抗搶水圈地」，2千名農民今天將夜宿凱道抗爭。

台灣農陣發言人說，因苗栗大埔遭怪手毀田，去年農民夜宿凱道抗議，獲政府保障優良農地承諾，但到今年承諾跳票，農民決定重返凱道。最讓農民痛心疾首的還不是水果價格低賤，而是政府和大學強制徵地。68歲的農民陳明生拿著得到政府頒獎的米說，為什麼這個政府要強徵他的農地？「政府比強盜還兇悍！」「全國農地權益自救會」昨天就在凱道遊行，訴求是抗議農委會踐踏集村農舍申請人興建的權利。他們強調，已寫了好幾百封信給總統及農委會表達心聲，但沒有回音，逼他們走上街頭。

作秀騙不到農民票

長期關心農民與農業的清華大學教授彭明輝批評農委會官員「腦殘」，不知道農業對國家的價值，日本把農業當藝術品行銷，台灣卻把農民當賤民。此外，他也痛批台大、清華、交大向農民搶地，什麼都幹得出來。

彭教授指出，交大有個「璞玉計劃區」，有一些不可告人的祕密；而台、清兩大學「為了5年500億，為了土地，什麼事都做得出來。」他說，據他聽到的消息，從來無法讓他以為這個計劃除了搶佔校地外，還有什麼目的。「璞玉計劃」就是「台灣知識經濟旗艦園區特定區計劃」，由新竹縣政府委託交大規劃，涵蓋地區包括高鐵站以東447公頃的土地，其中包括40公頃的「交大竹北園區」。整個計劃其實是「炒地皮計劃」，與農地變建地的炒作前後輝映。

可惡之處在於這些國立大學與地方政府聯合動手強徵農地，美其名說建設科學園區或研究用地，其實只拿出部分興建科學、研究園區，其他地皮竟由建商興建房宅，其間的利益輸送問題與弊端不問可知。用便宜的價格強制徵收農民的農地，部分興建房宅出售，其中獲利殺很大，看在老農眼中真是欲哭無淚。

很多農田遭政府徵收，拿去做什麼呢？去蓋蚊子館。政客競選時開支票要在每個鄉鎮蓋活動中心，結果很多變成蚊子館，原來的良田從此作廢。這不但顯示出政府的昏瞶無能，還破壞生態，掠奪弱勢農民，是赤裸裸的權力濫用。馬總統放縱地方政府與大學剝削農民，這回再去long stay作秀也騙不到農民的票了。

Imagine Cup 2011：アイルランドと台湾が栄光に輝く

2011-07-14T04:55:00.000-07:00

微軟創意盃兩岸選手鋒頭健

第九屆「微軟潛能創意盃」(2011 Microsoft Imagine Cup)10日公布決賽進入最後一輪的21個入圍隊伍名單，其中軟體設計(Software Design)小組有六隊獲晉級，包括來自中國的大連理工學院Care Everyone，而嵌入式設計(Embedded Development)小組也有六隊晉級，包括來自中國的清華大學Hormonicare及來自台灣新竹的清華大學NTHUCS。

決賽入圍者9日的首輪比賽中，來自台灣及大陸的代表隊陸續上場，通過簡報演示及作品操作向來自不同國家的評委展示了他們的參賽項目，大連理工大學Care Everyone團隊、新竹清華大學NTHUCS隊等兩岸代表隊的精彩表現博得現場評委連連讚賞。

大連理工大學Care Everyone團隊主講簡雅楠在隊員林顥的配合下，完美演示並講解了幫助殘障人士上網的「Mind Touch」軟件的多種功能，通過攝像頭捕捉並追蹤他們設計在帽子上的綠色標識來移動鼠標，因此殘疾人士可以通過頭部移動和語音命令，實現上網瀏覽新聞、查看及回覆郵件、打電話、玩遊戲、畫圖等多項操作，評委熱情稱讚。其中一個評委觀賞後還問道，「為什麼只設計給殘障人士使用，像我這種想偷懶的人很想要用」。指導老師金建設表示，在準備的時候因為中國設備相素和這邊的相素不一致，所以有點擔心，好在有驚無險，選手們都超水平發揮，現場應變也很快。

金建設還表示，他們在準備這個項目一年多的過程中很辛苦，遇到很多困難，他們為了讓軟件能更加完美經常熬夜，來紐約的這幾天幾乎每天大家都只睡三、四個小時。一開始為了達到高識別率，他們重複試驗安裝在帽子中標識的各種顏色及形狀，到最後發現綠色是識別率最好的，花了將近一個月的時間，頭部移動了數千次。

來自台灣的新竹清華大學NTHUCS隊表示，去年台中發生幾十人死亡的大火後，他們就一直在思考如何讓人們在火災中有效地逃生。他們設計的「Right! This Way」系統通過將樓宇內的探測器、E-box微型中央處理器及動態信號燈用無線信號進行連接，並以不超過10秒的處理速度在瞬間整合訊息，為火災中的人們提供快速、可靠的逃離指令。他們表示在已經進行過的測試中該系統達到100%的準確率。

在隨後的現場展示環節，NTHUCS隊通過向建築模型內注入煙霧模擬火災，展示系統「Right! This Way」的引導工作方式，處理器E-Box在模型內被注入煙霧後，逃生指示燈箭頭方向隨即發生改變，有序地指向模型的四個出口。

Imagine Cup 2011：アイルランドと台湾が栄光に輝く

米国ニューヨークで開催されていたMicrosoft主催の学生技術コンテスト「Imagine Cup 2011」の結果発表式典が7月13日、同市内にある複合芸術施設Lincoln Center for the Performing ArtsのDavid H. Koch Theaterにて行われた。

　60以上の国と地域の参加者が世界大会に参加したソフトウェアデザイン部門では、交通事故防止を目指す自動車向けソリューションを発表したアイルランドのチーム「Team Hermes」が優勝を勝ち取った。2位には米国の「Team Note Taker」が、3位はヨルダンの「Oasys Team」が名を連ねた（2位、3位の発表については前日行われたプレゼンテーションを参照）。

アイルランドのチーム「Team Hermes」

　組み込み開発部門では、ビルなどでの火災時に、矢印をかたどった電灯とレーザーで人々を安全な避難経路に誘導する「RIGHT!! This Way」を発表した台湾の「NTHUCS」が優勝。2位には中国の「Harmonicare」、3位にはルーマニアの「Endeavour_Design」がそれぞれ入賞した。

台湾の「NTHUCS」

　また、女優で活動家の Eva Longoria氏も登場。自身が見て回った発表について語った後、プレゼンターとして、視覚障がい者向けソリューションでソフトウェアデザイン部門に出場したバングラデシュのチーム「Team Rapture」にPeople's Choice Awardを贈った。

Eva Longoria氏（左から2人目）と「Team Rapture」

　式典にはニューヨーク市長のMichael Bloomberg氏も登壇。異なる国や地域からやってきた多様な住民が住むニューヨークを例に挙げ、学生らがともに協力し、世界のさまざまな問題の解決に取り組むよう語った。

ニューヨーク市長のMichael Bloomberg氏

　またMicrosoftも、世界中にあふれる問題の解決に向け、3年間で総額300万ドルに上る助成金プログラムを開始することをあきらかにした。このプログラムはImagine Cupのファイナリストらに適応される見込みだ。詳細は今夏にも明らかにされるという。

　2012年のImagine Cupは、オーストラリアで開催される予定だ。オーストラリア副総領事のGerard Seeber氏とMicrosoft Australia マネージングディレクターのPip Marlow氏らが、自国でのImagine Cup開催に向けて思いを語った。

　ソフトウェアデザイン部門および組み込み部門以外の入賞者は次のペー

ゲームデザイン部門（モバイル）
優勝：フランス「Geekologic」
2位：フランス「Close World Mobile」
3位：米国「Team Dragon」
ゲームデザイン部門（モバイル）
優勝：ポーランド「Cellardoor」
2位：フィリピン「Signum Fidei」
3位：スロバキア「Quegee Team」
ゲームデザイン部門（Windows/Xbox）
優勝：ブラジル「Signum Games」
2位：タイ「JubJub」
3位：チェコ共和国「WickedTeam」
デジタルメディア部門
優勝：ルーマニア「M.N.A.」
2位：オマーン「Brothers Forever」
3位：台湾「CottonCandy」
Windows Phone 7部門
優勝：韓国「HOMERUN」
2位：韓国「Zipi Zigi 」
3位：米国「The LifeLens Project」
インターオペラビリティチャレンジ部門
優勝：ギリシャ「alaniarides」
2位：ブラジル「Bells Team」
3位：ポーランド「DemosceneSpirit」
ITチャレンジ部門
優勝：フランス Jean-Sébastien Duchene氏
2位：ポーランド Błażej Matuszyk氏
3位：シンガポール Yunheng Mong氏
オーチャードチャレンジ部門
優勝：デンマーク「MP Brun」
2位：ブラジル「Virtual Dreams」
3位：セルビア「Zveen Zveen Team」
Windows 7 タッチチャレンジ部門
優勝：フランス「India Rose」
2位：インドネシア「dreambender」
3位：日本「IUVO」

知之為知之的中華文化基本教材

2011-07-08T17:17:00.000-07:00

什麼科舉餘孽
都假中華文化基本教材之惡名
來毒害青少年
老師們有多少真正懂得這玩藝的
教育第一要義是不要假裝你懂得這些古文字
知之為知之
醒醒吧
去翻翻毛子水先生的論語今譯...的毛子水先生 (1893-1988)《毛子水全集》與胡適之先生

****

台灣立報2011-7-06 20:50 作者：社論

　　教育部擬將四書以「中華文化基本教材」形式，列為高中必修，引起正反意見交鋒。由於茲事體大，教育部實有必要兼聽、兼視而後動。

　　在這場辯論中，最不可取的意見，就是粗糙的政治大論述。例如，支持一方，希望把台灣打造成「文化中國」的正統品牌；而反對陣營則認為這是執政黨親中、去台灣化的包藏禍心。

　　這兩種貌似對立，實則同質的政治大論述，都預設了某種「國家文化傳統」的存在，因此具有某種優先性與排他性。這也是為什麼支持四書陣營多懷抱「復興」夢想，而所謂台灣本土派則擔憂「殖民」捲土重來。

　　實際上，文化是一個開放的互動系統，就像19世紀的美國文化和20世紀的美國文化，不會長同一個模樣。因此無論是中國想像或台灣想像，那種問題重重的本位觀，都是一種空洞的政治懷舊，不具往前看的積極性。

　　西方民主社會，有一個重要的前提：政教分離。這個前提的出現，和「包容」這個普世價值息息相關。如果有國教或國家價值，則必有「異教徒」。因此若無適當保障，極易淪為對異教徒的壓迫。問題在於，對少數的保障，需由國家為之，若國家即教會，勢必產生角色衝突：這是一個為正信者而存在的國家？還是保障信仰自由的國家？

　　這也是為什麼國家必須分離於教會角色之外，並受憲法規範，而憲法必須保障個人信仰自由的原因所在。

　　或有人謂，將四書列入文化基本教材必修，不應上綱到「國教」層次，而僅是希望修補國人道德基本素養。若然，則我們必須討論，四書是否合乎這個要求？為什麼不是聖經？柏拉圖？

　　進一步論，晚近人們所感受到的道德危機相當程度是源於政治危機所致，但卻怯於制度改革，而鴕鳥式地退縮回個人修身。舉例而言，美國黑人的犯罪率高、未婚生子普遍、校園暴力嚴重，是因為「缺德」與信仰不堅？抑或是體制不義所導致的邊緣化現象？實際上，把貧窮、犯罪等現象視為一種道德問題，正是美國保守福音派的政治策略，他們對於解決社會問題毫無興趣，而僅僅熱中於區分「好人」與「壞人」。

　　在規範價值上，獨尊四書，違反了民主；就改革而言，寄望四書的道德感化來解決社會亂象，更是保守、怯懦的政治意志表現。基於上述理由，教育部必須三思。

California Master Plan (1960-2011)

2011-07-05T22:00:00.000-07:00

California Master Plan (1960-2011)

The California Master Plan was born in Sacramento in the spring of 1960, the loving creation of Governor Pat Brown and University of California President Clark Kerr. The Plan lived a full and vibrant life, passing quietly in its sleep on June 30, in a Shakespearean twist of tragedy, dying from a wound inflicted by the signature of its creator's son, Governor Jerry Brown and the passage of the California State Budget.

In more than a half century of a full life, the Master Plan saw the great expansion of access to higher education for multiple generations of Californians. Serving as a model of higher education internationally, the Master Plan attracted industry, academic talent and students from around the world. During its time, 47 University of California faculty members received a Nobel Prize, 2.5 million students graduated from the California State University system and Community Colleges educated fully three-quarters of California's GI Bill Veterans.

In its early years, the Plan represented a new promise to millions of Californians who had never dreamed of a college education. This access provided a steady stream of intellectual capital to grow the Silicon Valley, the Southern California medical device industry and the agriculture science intensive Central Valley, serving the people of California well. Later in life the Plan suffered a number of budget ailments, once in the mid-1990s and twice in the last ten years of life. Ultimately, the final budget reductions proved too tough to overcome, crushing the last breaths of life out of it, with nearly $2 billion in cuts to the once golden plan.

The loss of the Master Plan will leave a major void in the State of California. It is expected that the State will experience a shortage of 1 million college graduates by 2025. Without the Master Plan, students will now experience sharp increases in tuition as well as reductions to access and quality of instruction. The loss of dependable funding for the three systems of higher education is expected to put new strains on the criminal justice and social welfare systems. A 2005 study by the University of California, Berkeley demonstrated that for every state dollar invested in higher education, California saves three dollars in corrections and state social services.

Clark Kerr, one of the creators of the California Master Plan, was quoted shortly after its creation as saying,

The Master Plan has been called 'The California Dream'... We were not dreaming the California Dream... we were more trying to escape the nightmare that was otherwise facing us.

It appears now that California sits at the precipice of that nightmare.

The California Master Plan is survived by 10 University of California campuses, 23 California State Universities and 109 California Community Colleges. The State of California kindly requests in lieu of flowers and in remembrance of fifty-plus years of service to the people of California, donations be made to local scholarship funds.

slow advance into the realm of higher education for The New York Times

2011-07-04T06:17:00.000-07:00

‘TIMES’ TICKS ON
The New York Times Company plans to continue its slow advance into the realm of higher education this fall. It announced today that it is teaming up with the University of Southern California to offer continuing education programs to try to tap a growing market of adults looking to pick up new skills. The new programs will comprise sequences of online courses taught by USC faculty through the Times Company’s online learning platform. While the programs will not count toward any degree, they represent the media company’s first foray into multicourse online sequences intended to confer a coherent body of knowledge. And that is yet another step toward full-fledged degree programs, which are coming, according to Felice Nudelman, the company’s executive director of education. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.

教育人行道: On Education/ 東海大學哀歌: Tunghai University: An Elegy

Webinar: Updates on Carnegie's work in developmental math

WEBINAR RESOURCES

Webinar: Updates on Carnegie's work in developmental math

中國的教育更像一棵畸形的盆景

Struggling pupils 等待台灣教育失效的分析

Struggling pupils don't catch up, data shows

Compare schools in your area

HEADLINE SCORES

how much the quality of individual teachers matters over the long term.

Japanese strategy for improving teachers is catching on in Chicago

Japanese strategy for improving teachers is catching on in Chicago

平板電腦的內文

倪明選談"學術界經驗"

"工程經濟學""系統學/分析"

Phi Delta Kappa /Phi , Tau , Phi /Sigma Xi/Phi Beta Kappa

Harvard Educational Review (1930-)《北京大学教育评论》（季刊2003-）

发 刊 词

良師價無窮Big Study Links Good Teachers to Lasting Gain

Big Study Links Good Teachers to Lasting Gain

By ANNIE LOWREY

Published: January 6, 2012

Steve Hebert for The New York Times

Multimedia

感謝有您 邁向2012

東海300師生抗議工廠長期廢氣凌虐

一個天堂變地獄的故事:東海300師生抗議工廠長期廢氣凌虐

工廠廢氣染黑聖誕 東海300師生抗議

戴明博士的新經濟學的教育改革

"缺腿的小熊算是熊嗎? ".可運作的定義 operational definition

中世紀大學./臺大開放式課程

Les universités au Moyen Age [Broché]

醜化校園

Online Learning, Personalized

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Grading the Digital School

By SOMINI SENGUPTA 10:49 PM ET

MBA教育再思考 : 十字路口的工商管理教育

Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads/ MBA教育再思考

HBS Press Book

Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads

New Calculation: Math in Preschool

New Calculation: Math in Preschool

Chicago Teachers Add Principles of Arithmetic to Early-Childhood Education, Laying Base for Higher-Level Skills Later On

By STEPHANIE BANCHERO

Earlier

大學文憑失色......

Stanford University Online High School

Online High Schools Attracting Elite Names

By ALAN SCHWARZ

Published: November 19, 2011

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Readers’ Comments

網路之得失/記我今年(2011) 的一些小事

The Evolution of Higher Education

Q. and A. | The Academy

The Evolution of Higher Education

By TAMAR LEWIN

Published: November 4, 2011

Michael Schwarz

說禪/寺

我有明珠一顆──聽星雲大師說禪

2010年4月

當教授作假 性親 剝削.....時/「四不」十大基本素養

美國的老師薪水太高? Conservative Think Tanks: Teachers Are Overpaid

教育的浪費

蘋論：要求候選人誠實

不要再開空頭支票

A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute

Grading the Digital School

A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute

By MATT RICHTEL

Published: October 22, 2011

Grading the Digital School

Multimedia

Related

Bits Blog: Technology, Schools and a Big Black Bug (October 22, 2011)

Times Topics: Education and Schools | Computers and the Internet

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Readers’ Comments

发刊词

感謝有您邁向2012

工廠廢氣染黑聖誕　東海300師生抗議

當教授作假性親剝削.....時/「四不」十大基本素養

世界上很少有這種大學: 董事會和校友會對幹…

「台北書院」揭牌林谷芳接首任山長

台灣每年博士生畢業人數3700多市場過份飽和

書法已死你們要一輩子記住