Education – Page 35 – artdiamondblog.com

At Odds with Academic Culture, Wiki Programmer Adams Released Early and Released Often

(p. 67) Adams did something unexpected for the academic community, but common in open source culture–release early and release often. Within weeks of its launch, one of the biggest annoyances of Wikipedia was resolved directly by the software’s author. It was not because of monetary compensation or any formal request, but simply because the author was interested in solving it on his own time, and sharing it with others. It was the hacker ethos, and it had crossed from the domain of tech programmers into the world of encyclopedias.

Source:
Lih, Andrew. The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia. New York: Hyperion, 2009.

Wikipedia Works in Practice, Not in Theory

(p. 20) Jimmy walked into the offices of Chicago Options Associates in 1994 and met the CEO Michael Davis for a job interview. Davis had looked over Wales’s academic publication about options pricing.

“It was impressive looking,” says Wales wryly about the paper. “It was a very theoretical paper but it wasn’t very practical.” But Davis was sufficiently intrigued, as he wanted someone like Wales to pore over the firm’s financial models and help improve them. So he took on young Wales, who seemed to be sharp and had acumen for numbers. Little did either of them know they would have a long road ahead together, with Wikipedia in the future.
Wales’s first job was to go over the firm’s current pricing models. “What was really fascinating was that it was truly a step beyond what I’d seen in academia,” he recalls. “It was very practical, and didn’t have a real theoretical foundation.” Wales was intrigued that the firm traded on principles that worked in practice, not in theory. (This is something he would say about his future endeavor Wikipedia.) “Basically they just knew in the marketplace that the existing models were wrong.”

Source:
Lih, Andrew. The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia. New York: Hyperion, 2009.
(Note: italics in original.)

The Entrepreneurial Epistemology of Wikipedia

Source of book image: http://kellylowenstein.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/wikipedia-revolution1.jpg

Wikipedia is a very unexpected and disruptive institution. Amateurs have produced an encyclopedia that is bigger, deeper, more up-to-date, and arguably of at least equal accuracy, with the best professional encyclopedias, such as Britannica.
I learned a lot from Lih’s book. For instance I did not know that the founders of Wikipedia were admirers of Ayn Rand. And I did not know that the Oxford English Dictionary was constructed mainly by volunteer amateurs.
I also did not know anything about the information technology precursors and the back-history of the institutions that helped Wikipedia to work.
I learned much about the background, values, and choices of Wikipedia entrepreneur “Jimbo” Wales. (Jimbo Wales seems not to be perfect, but on balance to be one of the ‘good guys’ in the world—one of those entrepreneurs who can be admired for something beyond their particular entrepreneurial innovation.)
Lih’s book also does a good job of sketching the problems and tensions within Wikipedia.
I believe that Wikipedia is a key step in the development of faster and better institutions of knowledge generation and communication. I also believe that substantial further improvements can and will be made.
Most importantly, I think that you can only go so far with volunteers–ways must be found to reward and compensate.
In the meantime, much can be learned from Lih. In the next few weeks, I will be quoting a few passages that I found especially illuminating.

Book discussed:
Lih, Andrew. The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia. New York: Hyperion, 2009.

Determination, Not Education, Is Key to Success at McDonald’s

(p. 189) McDonald’s is a real melting pot.

The key element in these individual success stories and of McDonald’s itself, is not knack or education, it’s determination. This is expressed very well in my favorite homily:

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”

Source:
Kroc, Ray. Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s. Chicago: Henry Regnary Company, 1977.

Paul Johnson’s Defense of Winston Churchill

British historian Paul Johnson. Source of caricature: online version of the WSJ conversation quoted and cited below.

(p. D6) Now, at 81 and after years of producing enormous, compulsively readable history books, Mr. Johnson has just written what, at 192 pages, is probably the shortest biography of Winston Churchill ever published.
. . .
He gives credit to his success as a historian to his simultaneous and successful career in journalism. “You learn all sorts of tools as a journalist that come in extremely useful when you’re writing history,” he tells me as we sit in the drawing room of the West London house he shares with his wife, Marigold, “and one is the ability to condense quite complicated events into a few short sentences without being either inaccurate or boring. And of course a lot of the best historians were also journalists.”
. . .
The book includes refutations of many of the negative myths that have grown up around Churchill. For instance, that he was drunk for much of World War II. “He appeared to drink much more than he did,” Mr. Johnson insists. “He used to sip his drinks very, very slowly, and he always watered his whisky and brandy.”
Mr. Johnson certainly does not agree with the often-echoed criticism made by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin that Churchill had every gift except judgment: “He made occasional errors of judgment because he made so many judgments–some of them were bound to be wrong! . . . On the whole, his judgment was proved to be right. He was right before the First World War in backing a more decent civilized society when he and Lloyd George created the elements of old-age pensions and things like that. He was right about the need to face up to Hitler and he was right about the Cold War that the Russians had to be resisted and we had to rearm.”
He is convinced that “Churchill was more than half American . . . all of his real qualities generally come from his mother’s side.” And despite Mr. Johnson’s own Oxford education (he was there with Margaret Thatcher), he believes that Churchill benefited from never having gone to college: “He never learned any of the bad intellectual habits you can pick up at university, and it explains the extraordinary freshness with which he came to all sorts of things, especially English literature.”

For the full conversation, see:
JONATHAN FOREMAN. “A Cultural Conversation with Paul Johnson; Winston Churchill, Distilled.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., DECEMBER 10, 2009): D6.
(Note: the online version of the interview is dated DECEMBER 11, 2009.)
(Note: ellipses within paragraphs were in the original; ellipses between paragraphs were added.)

The reference to Johnson’s biography of Churchill, is:
Johnson, Paul M. Churchill. New York: Viking Adult, 2009.

Steve Perry’s Passion for Better Education

Source of book image: http://www.renegadebook.com/Man%20Up!.jpg

I have seen Steve Perry interviewed on education issues a couple of times on CNN, and have been impressed. He makes a credible case for vouchers.
I have not read either of the books pictured in this entry, but have put them on my “to read” list.

The books are:
Perry, Steve. Man Up! Nobody Is Coming to Save Us. Renegade Books, 2006.
Perry, Steve. Raggedy Schools: The Untold Truth. Renegade Books, 2009.

Source of book image: http://www.raggedyschools.com/images/bookstore_photo.jpg

Despite Importance of Economic Historians, History Departments Hire Fewer Economic Historians

Source of graph: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. C7) Over the last three decades the number of history faculty members at four-year institutions has more than doubled to 20,000-plus, said Robert B. Townsend, assistant director for research at the American Historical Association. Yet the growth has been predominantly in the newer specializations, spurring those in diplomatic, military, legal and economic history to complain they are being squeezed out.

In 1975, for example, three-quarters of college history departments employed at least one diplomatic historian; in 2005 fewer than half did. The number of departments with an economic historian fell to 31.7 percent from 54.7 percent. By contrast the biggest gains were in women’s history, which now has a representative in four out of five history departments.

For the full story, see:
PATRICIA COHEN. “Great Caesar’s Ghost! Are Traditional History Courses Vanishing?” The New York Times (Thurs., June 11, 2009): C1 & C7.
(Note: the online version is dated Weds., June 10.)

Walt Disney: “I Don’t Care About Critics”

(p. 286) “He is shy with reporters.” Edith Efron wrote for TV Guide in 1965. “His eyes are dull and preoccupied, his affability mechanical and heavy-handed. He gabs away slowly and randomly in inarticulate, Midwestern speech that would be appropriate to a rural general store. His shirt is open, his tie crooked. One almost expects to see over-all straps on his shoulders and wisps of hay in his hair. . . . If one has the patience to persist, however, tossing questions like yellow flares into the folksy fog, the fog lifts, a remote twinkle appears in the preoccupied eves, and the man emerges.”

Here again, as in other interviews from the 1960s, Disney permitted himself to sound bitter and resentful when he said anything of substance: “These avant-garde artists are adolescents. It’s only a little noisy element that’s going that way, that’s creating this sick art. . . . There is no cynicism in me and there is none allowed in our work. . . . I don’t like snobs. You find some of intelligentsia, they become snobs. They think they’re above everybody else. They’re not. More education doesn’t mean more common sense. These ideas they have about art are crazy. . . . I don’t care about critics. Critics take themselves too seriously. They think the only way to be noticed and to be the smart guy is to pick and find fault with things. It’s the public I’m making pictures for.”

Source:
Barrier, Michael. The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney. 1 ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007.
(Note: ellipses and italics in original.)

Disney Learned Quickly (Despite Lack of Formal Education), and Impatiently Expected Others to Learn Quickly Too

The story below is very reminiscent of a story that Michael Lewis tells in The New, New Thing about how entrepreneur Jim Clark learned to fly.
Possible lesson: impatience and quick learning may not be traits of all high level entrepreneurs, but they appear to have been traits of at least two.

(p. 213) Seventeen years later, Broggie told Richard Hubler that teaching Disney how to run a lathe and drill press and other machinery was difficult “because he was impatient. So I’d make what we call a set-up in a lathe and turn out a piece and say, ‘Well, that’s how you do it.’ He would see part of it and he was impatient, so he would want to turn the wheels–and then something would happen. A piece might fly out of the chuck and he’d say, ‘God-damn it. why didn’t you tell me it was going to do this?’ Well, you don’t tell him, you know? It was a thing of–well–you learn it. He said one day, . . . ‘You know, it does me some good sometimes to come down here to find out I don’t know all about everything.’ . . . How would you sharpen the drill if it was going to drill brass or steel? There’s a difference. And he learned it. You only had to show him once and he got the picture.”

This was a characteristic that other people in the studio noticed. “He had a terrific memory,” Marc Davis said. “He learned very quickly. . . . You only had to explain a thing once to him and he knew how to do it. Other people are not the same. I think this is a problem he had in respect to everybody . . . his tremendous memory and his tremendous capacity for learning. He wasn’t book learned but he was the most fantastically well educated man in his own way. . . . He understood the mechanics of everything. . . . Everything was a new toy. And this also made him a very impatient man. He was as impatient as could be with whoever he worked with.”
Disney’s lack of formal education manifested itself sometimes in jibes at his college-educated employees, but more often in the odd lapses–the mispronounced words, the grammatical slips–that can mark an autodidact. “For a guy who only went to the eighth grade,” Ollie Johnston said, “Walt educated himself beautifully. His vocabulary was good. I only heard him get sore (p. 214) about a big word once in a story meeting. Everyone was sitting around talking and Ted Sears said, ‘Well, I think that’s a little too strident.’ Walt said, ‘What the hell are you trying to say, Ted?’ He hadn’t heard that word before.

Source:
Barrier, Michael. The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney. 1 ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007.
(Note: ellipses in original.)

For a similar story about Jim Clark, see:
Lewis, Michael. The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.

Support Grows for School Vouchers in D.C.

“Students from Bridges Academy in Washington, D.C., at a Capitol Hill rally last month in support of the city’s Opportunity Scholarship Program, which gives students from low-income families scholarships for private schools.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A2) The District of Columbia’s embattled school-voucher program, which lawmakers appeared to have killed earlier this year, looks like it could still survive.

Congress voted in March not to fund the program, which provides certificates to pay for recipients’ private-school tuition, after the current school year. But after months of pro-voucher rallies, a television-advertising campaign and statements of support by local political leaders, backers say they are more confident about its prospects. Even some Democrats, many of whom have opposed voucher efforts, have been supportive.
. . .
Many parents whose children receive vouchers say they are satisfied with the private schools they attend. During the 2008-2009 school year, about 61,700 students nationwide received vouchers, up 9% from the previous school year, according to the Alliance for School Choice, a pro-voucher advocacy group.
. . .
Created as a five-year pilot project by a Republican-controlled Congress in early 2004, the Opportunity Scholarship Program is the nation’s only federally funded voucher program. It is open to students who live in the long-struggling Washington school district and whose families have incomes at or below 185% of the federal poverty level — about $40,000 for a family of four. Recipients are chosen by lottery, although preference is given to those attending traditional schools deemed to be in need of improvement under federal law.
Joe Kelley entered his oldest son, Rashawn, in the first Opportunity Scholarship Program lottery in 2004, fearful about violence at the public middle school. Rashawn, now 17, received a voucher, and so have his three sisters. All attend a small, private Christian academy where they have been earning A’s and B’s. “It’s a lot of worry off of me,” said Mr. Kelley, a retired cook and youth counselor.
In an evaluation released in March, researchers found that in reading skills, voucher recipients overall were approximately 3.1 months ahead of eligible students who didn’t receive scholarships. But there was no difference in math skills, and voucher recipients from the worst-performing public schools got no boost in either subject.

For the full story, see:
ROBERT TOMSHO. “D.C. School Vouchers Have a Brighter Outlook in Congress.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., October 19, 2009): A2.
(Note: ellipses added.)

55% of Nebraskans Favor School Vouchers

The Friedman Foundation mentioned in the passage below, was founded by Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman who is often credited with creating the idea of education vouchers in his classic book Capitalism and Freedom.
Capitalism and Freedom was based on a series of lectures that Friedman delivered at Wabash College at the invitation of my much-missed mentor Ben Rogge. (Before teaching me economics in Indiana, Rogge was a native Nebraskan who earned his bachelor’s degree from Hastings College.)

(p. 4B) A majority of Nebraskans are open to school-choice reforms such as school vouchers and tax-credit scholarships, according to a survey made public Thursday by a national school-choice group.

“It really appears Nebraska is ready to start talking about school-choice reform options,” said Paul DiPerna, director of partner services for the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, which commissioned the survey.
The group partnered with the Nebraska Catholic Conference and other state and national groups to conduct the telephone survey of 1,200 likely voters.
Fifty-five percent of those surveyed said they favored school vouchers and supported a tax-credit scholarship system, which would give tax credits to individuals and businesses that contribute money to nonprofit organizations that distribute private school scholarships.

For the full story, see:
Dejka, Joe. “Support for school choice tax plan seen; An Indianapolis organization says its survey shows Nebraskans would back a pending bill.” Omaha World-Herald (Fri., Sept. 18, 2009): 4B.