Next week, the sponsors for the glitzy, crazzzy SXSW will include alcoholic and energy drinks. But SXSWedu is kind of the old schoolmarm cousin. Notice no beer amongst the sponsors----------------->Fab was not there, but Chevron had a big booth with a faux chalkboard with Fab's name on it. So big oil companies like Fab. Who doesn't like Fab?
Here's a photo of 2,000 people watching Sara Goldrick-Rab talk. But it seemed like everything she said has already been said at CM and RYS over the years, hasn't it?
There was a session in which about half of the attendees simultaneously stuck their phones up in the air to take photos of the speaker's powerpoint slide. Maybe about 40 of 80 total people in the room did that.
One of the best parts of the week was when I stumbled upon four Minerva students preparing for a session they had apparently organized. I approached them because they just seemed like the most interesting people in the lobby. And then I discovered that they were part of that rare species. (Only a few hundred people in the history of the world have ever been Minerva students.) Here's a photo of the two little cards they gave me:
I asked them what was the worst part about Minerva, and one of them replied that there was too much to do ("but in a good way").
I asked if the software they use for attending class ever malfunctions, and they replied that it does occasionally. They have a name for it: "tech days." But they said the "tech days" are essentially the equivalent of "snow days" at some other schools.
They genuinely seemed content with Minerva. So I said, "But how can you know it's such a great school, if you've never attended another college?" And one of them pointed out that he had attended another college, and that he transferred in to Minerva and is glad he did. And he said he wasn't the only one who had transferred in.
They seemed like really decent, smart people, and they were so welcoming. So, is Minerva "the future of college"? Perhaps we'll know in twenty-five years.
That's it. Please forgive the imperfectness of this report. I didn't get any sleep last night. Horses need sleep.
Your Real Gosh-darned Moderator,
Zooze the Horse
I like Sara G-R, but I had to mute her on Twitter after the election - she went off the rails - literally 1000 tweets a day. I was pissed too - but I couldn't see what any other pissed off academics had to say because she was tweeting every few seconds. Maybe she's calmed down. I should try un-muting her.
ReplyDeleteI miss the chem conferences of my glory-days. They were more fun than ed. stuff. I'm really more of an ed. person than a scientist - but those conferences... ah, to be young again.
(I remember meeting Watson before he was too old to hide being racist, at a conference that had nothing to do with molecular biology. He was just there because he'd heard it was "a good time". Lol - my college friends were backpacking across Europe feeling guilty thinking I was curing cancer or something - and I was in a grungy bar buying a beer for the guy who scooped Rosalind Franklin. Or more accurately, I participated in the long line of groupies trying to buy a drink for the guy....")
I heard her speak (pre-election), and she was excellent.
DeleteI think I also follow her on twitter, but since I don't actually follow twitter, I didn't notice the post-election flood of tweets.
In any case, her work strikes me as valuable, and I intend to read her book (haven't done so yet).
(Also -- cool Watson story)
Must say Minerva looks pretty interesting, based on a brief pootle around the 'net.
ReplyDeleteGreat to see a conference report again. Thanks, Zooze!
Thanks for the update, Zooze!
ReplyDeleteFrom the article: "Minerva is not a MOOC provider. Its courses are not massive (they’re capped at 19 students), open (Minerva is overtly elitist and selective), or online, at least not in the same way Coursera’s are. Lectures are banned. All Minerva classes take the form of seminars conducted on the platform I tested."
I daresay if you choose the best students in the world and then cap your course size at 19, you'll have great outcomes no matter what else you do.
Indeed. They could probably communicate with each other by snail mail or smoke signals, and the results would still be good.
DeleteIn addition, note that, although there aren't face to face classes, there are residence halls, so the students are interacting.
Sounds a bit like Phillips Exeter (or another Harkness-method school) online -- expensive but/and also effective.
I'm intrigued by the emphasis on debate in the Minerva model, which reminds me of another method I've been reading up on: Reacting to the Past.
ReplyDelete