Category: education

“Thinking Being Offloaded to AI Even in Elite Medical Programs”

Thinking Being Offloaded to AI Even in Elite Medical Programs “I can’t remember the last time I asked a medical student in tutorial group a question that was answered without looking at a screen.” And this: “We have a 1M master solution, we need to make a 50 mL of buffer that has that component …

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An idea for profs

Here’s an idea I’d implement if I were still teaching: Have your students grade each other’s papers, anonymously. First, they have to establish critieria and justify them, then they have to grade the paper they’re randomly assigned accordingly. You grade them according to how well they graded the other’s paper. Hopefully, this will counteract the …

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Freedom of Speech vs DEI initiatives

Margaret Munn – Defending Freedom of Speech in Canada: The Impact of DEI Initiatives

from Dale Spender’s Nattering on the Net  — quotes and notes

According to 19th C feminist scholar Matilda Joslyn Gage, 9 million women were executed or burned for having knowledge—i.e., for being witches (p163) Wow.  Did not know it was that many.   “Had women ever  contributed to the design of roads and vehicles, there is no doubt that the entire system would look very different.  …

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The Authority Gap, Mary Ann Sieghart – A MUST READ

As I was reading this book, I realized right away I wanted to post about it, so I started making a list of bits to mention, but very quickly there were just too many!!  So – A MUST READ.  This book is FULL of all the stats you ever wanted to support your personal experience: …

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College/University Students are Not Expected to Read

“A student who worked as a janitor at his college was sanctioned because he was seen reading a book called Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan … (The image on the cover was upsetting to the two people who reported him.) …” (The Coddling the American Mind, …

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Handing Over Our Thinking to Algorithms

I was struck by something Lukianoff and Haidt said in The Coddling of the American Mind when they describe the response to Rebecca Tuvel’s article (“In Defense of Transracialism”) in Hypatia: “It is striking  how many of the critics’ complaints refer not to Tuvel’s arguments but to her word choices” (p105).  At first, I thought, …

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Educating Women to Reduce Over-population. Right. They’re the problem.

So the other day I came across, yet again, mention of the idea that educating women would reduce over-population. (Right. They’re the problem.)  I find that questionable. If education makes the difference, then why aren’t we educating the men as well?  And if the men are already educated, then clearly education isn’t the solution: they’re …

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Sexism and Teaching: The Elephant in the Room

Back in 1996, I was fortunate enough to get a job teaching a few courses at a university: several sections of a non-credit remedial English language course, a section of critical thinking, and various applied ethics courses.  At the end of the second year, I was notified by the Dean that my student evaluations for …

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Visionary?

Reading about Nipissing University’s Students in Free Enterprise (NUSIFE), which is a group of students who undertake projects “intended to increase the public’s awareness of entrepreneurship and business-related subjects,” it occurs to me to wonder why such an endeavour is undertaken only by business students. Consider the projects listed below – and imagine… – “Global …

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