Jonathan Wilde, who runs Catallarchy.net, emails with news of this story in the Washington Times about a blog called Truck and Barter. The reason he does that is because the article is about a favourite subject of mine, namely the use of blogging as an educational technique, for the blogger.
And as you would expect, Kevin Brancato reacts to this favourable media response, here.
The Washington Times doesn't care to just reproduce email answers to questions, but Brancato has no such hesitations! Here are his clutch of selected Q&As, which I found more interesting than the Times article:
Does keeping up a blog help with a student's writing skills?It has certainly helped mine. In fact, "help" is too weak of a word; people tell me that I now write like a blogger. As a undergraduate math major, far more time was spent solving equations than writing clear convincing prose. I knew that if I wanted write well, I'd have to work hard at it. My demanding and sophisticated readers provide both a tremendous impulse and a large reward for churning out original and interesting material.
ability to interpret data?Keeping up a blog has sharpened and quickened my data analyses, but more importantly, it has made me question how data are used by many professional journalists and policy wonks. I find that the most interesting questions don't have authoritative answers--especially in economics. For most issues, the story that needs to be told is usually far more complex than the one fed to us by big media.
or does blogging reinforce bad grammatical habits given the freedoms of the 'net'
When a student submits a finished essay, only a professor will read and criticize his work. But a blog post invites criticism from anybody. As with any poor habit, bad grammar can be reinforced by the lack of self-criticism or indifference to the criticism of others. But good grammar is essential if a blogger wants readers – and other bloggers – to take him seriously.
I have yet to see a serious blogger whose use and understanding of grammar has become worse over time.
Would you have a couple of minutes to share your thoughts on the topic and how blogging may have impacted your growth as a student?
Besides making writing easier, Truck and Barter greatly expanded the range of economic issues that I deal with. Since starting the blog, I've looked into and posted about hundreds of issues that otherwise I never would have examined in detail. Some of these are very political, like income inequality in the U.S.. Others were just fascinating, like the market for digital disposable cameras. Still others are largely ignored by a popular press focused on bad news, like the dramatic improvement in the quality of healthcare over the past 50 years. Econoblogging has forced me to observe how economies really work, which has made me question deeply the relevance and accuracy of standard economic theory.
That confirms all my prejudices in favour of blogging as an educational technique. You write and think better because of all those readers, and even your grammar improves. You study more and you study better. Having to write sharpens your mind.
The Washington Times also mentions this weblog which is all about the use of weblogs to educate.
So Jonathan Wilde, thanks. All education relevant emails are welcome, but this one was especially helpful.
I have been prioritising Samizdata, so please forgive the slimness of postings here of late.
One thing I just put up there is of definite relevance to this blog, which is this short but informative review of Judith Rich Harris' book The Nurture Assumption.
What this says is that children turn out the way they do because of their peer group, rather than because of how they are raised by their own parents.
Come to think of it, this is something that distraught parents have been yelling at the tops of their voices for years, and once someone says it, the evidence for it jumps out at you from all around. Anxiously virtuous West Indian mums doing their anxiously virtuous best, and ending up with a weapon-wielding gang member. Fifties parents giving birth to a generation of sixties children, who in their turn raised the Punk Generation. Obvious really.
Incoming email from Debbie Hepplewhite of the Reading Reform Foundation:
Hello again Brian! A Happy New Year to you!
Likewise. And to everyone here, now I come to think of it.
I have posted some comments about one of the government National Literacy Strategy programmes designed as an 'intervention' programme for Year 1 children who are not making the greatest progress in their reading.This programme is called the 'Early Literacy Support' (ELS) programme and parents should be very concerned.
When you look at the reality of the detailed instructions intended for Year 1 teachers and designated literacy teaching assistants, it is clear to see that the programme bears no resemblance to a phonics programme. …
… I posted the details about the ELS programme on the messageboard of the Reading Reform Foundation website.
Now messageboards are the Brazilian jungle to me. The Internet only came alive for me when a great light shone down from heaven upon me, a chorus of heavenly nerds sang, and I found blogging. However, the messageboard Debbie refers to is, I presume, this. And the comments she posted that she refers to in the email are, I'm guessing again, these.
Excerpt:
The RRF has called for the withdrawal of this entire National Literacy Strategy early intervention programme. It is designed to be delivered by teaching assistants to identified children in the second term of their first year.The programme is absolutely appalling. To anyone who knows about synthetic phonics teaching it is absolutely flawed from beginning to end.
I am feeling compelled to write about it again and to press harder for its withdrawal. Whoever wrote this programme arguably knows nothing about the early teaching of reading and writing and it is certainly and absolutely not commensurate with the research on reading. We cannot tell who is the author as we are given no information about the authorship.
It is worthy of a full enquiry and it typifies the methods of learning to read which the 'searchlights reading model' promotes directly and indirectly.
To date, the RRF has had no direct response, nor indeed any response, to it's call for the withdrawal of this programme.
Grammarians would quibble about that "it's" there, but I'm sure I've perpetrated far worse here many times.
To be more serious, this sounds like extremely bad news. I just hope that when the havoc caused is duly noted, it will not be blamed on phonics by unscrupulous look-and-sayers But, I fear that it will be.
The University funding crisis should interest me, but it doesn't. As Mark Holland (and I seem to be back in the land of Blogger archiving misery now, so let me tell you now that what follows is the entire posting I'm referring to) puts it:
At least in the part of the blogoshere I visit I haven't seen much comment about University top up fees. I think I know the reason. It's so bloody boring. The same goes for foundation hospitals.
He forces himself to philosophise a bit:
In an ideal, for me anyway, world the state wouldn't be involved in education or healthcare. Any steps any government, but especially a Labour one, could or would make in reform would only be a small step as far as I was concerned. But as Mao Tse Tung said, "A journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step". Blimey, if Mao had the parlimentary Labour party as his followers he'd have never have left base.
Well quite, which would be because it's a journey most of them are determined not to make. That's all Mark can manage on the subject.
However, in the Telegraph today, there is some strong stuff from Tony King, my old Professor of Government at Essex (and he he reveals in this piece that he is still there and still that). I remember him as a plain speaking lecturer, and ever since I have always read or listened to whatever he has had to say whenever I encountered it. In that respect he hasn't changed either.
"Universities are underfunded." That phrase falls trippingly off the tongue of every university vice-chancellor, but what does it mean in practical terms? The truth is that most people outside universities have no idea how far the whole of British higher education has been degraded in recent years, and the reason they have no idea is that every teacher at every British university – from the vice-chancellor down – is engaged in a conspiracy of silence. They have no desire to engage in such a conspiracy but they have no choice, because to say publicly what is wrong at their own university is to run the risk of damaging that university, even though conditions may be worse elsewhere.So we cover up. We moan, but we refrain from revealing a fraction of what we know. British higher education has become highly competitive. Most of us are loyal to our own university. We do not wish to harm it, let alone give a competitive advantage to other institutions. We therefore remain silent – and the public are thereby deceived. Britain's universities still have areas of tremendous strength but they increasingly resemble those elegant mansions in the American South that one sees in films, with imposing facades in front but decay and ruin concealed behind.
I am one of the lucky few. I am a refugee from Oxford, having decided in the mid-1960s that Oxford was too inward-looking, insufficiently "hungry". I moved to the new University of Essex and have been there ever since. I am happy there, surrounded by first-rate colleagues, and have no intention of moving. Essex is proving more successful in maintaining standards than many universities, including more famous ones. But across the system all is not well, and it is time somebody said so. The statistics are gloomy but convey little. It is what is happening on the ground that is really disturbing.
That certainly made me want to finish the piece. I did, and as usual with King, was not disappointed. This paragraph is particularly depressing:
But there is also a third pressure, just as insidious as the pressure to teach more and more students. It is the growing pressure of what we euphemistically call "administration" but which Americans, more graphically, call "crud" – the junk-work equivalent of junk mail: assessments, audits, feedback, the full apparatus of "accountability", data protection, students' rights, fear of lawsuits – the familiar litany that affects every institution in Britain, universities not least. People used to suggest that teaching and research were opposed. Now the enemy of both teaching and research is bureaucratic regulation and harassment. I used to spend about five per cent of my time on administration. I reckon I now spend 30-40 per cent. Again, it is the students who are short-changed.
Which, by the way, together with all the other pressures on King and his colleagues, means that the success that Essex has had in "maintaining standards" has only been relative.
This is an interesting link, to a clutch of pieces complaining about the state of Japanese education. I don't know what the Daily Yomiuri is, but if these pieces are anything to go by, they have much the same worries about education in Japan as we do in England.
Children and young people in Japan increasingly lack an awareness of the concept of public spirit, a bond that connects people. This situation is worrying to many.The academic abilities of our children have declined, and their zeal for study, both in school and out, is the lowest among the developed nations.
Bullying and truancy are still serious problems in schools. An emerging issue is the number of young people who do not work, either through disinclination or through an inability to find jobs.
They worry that their children are being stuffed with too many facts. So they relax. The children then misbehave or just arse about, and they now want to screw the lid back on.
Also, the government must inculcate patriotism into the next generation. The law must be changed!
In connection with the patriotism debate, there's also this observation:
Many Japanese believe that the historical period in Japan from the Meiji Restoration to our defeat in World War II was a terrible one. This is a result of the War Guilt Information Program carried out by the General Headquarters of Allied Powers during the postwar occupation period. The psychological damage resulting from that program lingers today.
Is it psychologically damaging to feel bad about the ghastly truth? Doesn't that just mean that your powers of moral criticism are in full working order? Would it be more healthy to imagine that nothing bad happened, so that they you would feel entirely good about your country?
One of the things I particularly like about the Internet is how you just never know who in the world – literally who in the world - might end up reading what you put. But this stuff reads like it was written for a strictly local Japanese readership. But was it? Question: did this material originate in English, or was it translated, and if so in what crcumstances, and for what purpose?
It's interesting what can turn up when I type "Education" into google, which I do from time to time. This was a particularly intriguing titbit.
