Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 611.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
[1] From: "Tim Reuter" <T.Reuter@soton.ac.uk> (20)
Subject: Re: 14.0609 what DO degrees mean?
[2] From: "Osher Doctorow" <osher@ix.netcom.com> (40)
Subject: Re: Skills Training vs Higher Level Humanist Computing
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 07:00:11 +0000
From: "Tim Reuter" <T.Reuter@soton.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: 14.0609 what DO degrees mean?
Willard's experience is general, not singular. North American Humanists
may be both amused and horrified to find how far a reductionist
skills-based approach has now invaded UK higher education. It goes a lot
further than the odd MSc programme, as a visit to www.qaa.ac.uk will
reveal. In essence our (pay)masters have used their financial hegemony to
create an ideological hegemony which has reversed the previous view. Once
upon a time we saw degree programmes as an immersion in a discipline or
set of disciplines, as a result of which, incidentally, all sorts of life
skills (not only employability-related skills) were acquired. Now we are
invited (indeed required) to describe our programmes in terms of the
skills they inculcate -- this is core, while the acquisition of
disciplinary understanding is merely the surrounding pulp (and presumably,
in the medium term, discardable).
----------------
Tim Reuter
Department of History, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ
tel. 023 80 594868; fax 023 80 593458; email tr@soton.ac.uk
Home Page: http://www.soton.ac.uk/~tr/tr.html
History Department: http://www.soton.ac.uk/~history/
Wessex Medieval Centre: http://www.soton.ac.uk/~wmc/
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 07:00:41 +0000
From: "Osher Doctorow" <osher@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Re: Skills Training vs Higher Level Humanist Computing
From: Osher Doctorow, Ph.D. osher@ix.netcom.com, Tues. Jan. 23, 2001 3PM
WM around 12Noon asked some excellent questions, and I have a few comments
if not answers.
I intermittently go from mathematics/statistics/physics consulting to
teaching at college and/or high school ("advanced") levels and back, and in
teaching I am almost inevitably evaluated poorly by students who want skills
training rather than college/university type educations in terms of higher
standards. This is part of the reason for my lack of a permanent academic
position at the age of 62, although when I was younger lack of an "outgoing"
personality also played a major part as well as a Western USA socioculture
which values extrovert and skills training type characteristics. It is
partly understandable if not tolerable in the Western USA because
universities here were built in the 20th century mostly, unlike the Eastern
USA and most of Europe and so on, and they have much to learn about
learning, teaching, and research as well as general priorities. I have
never seen such bureaucratic structures as I have found in some major
Western USA universities, where Parkinson's Law and Peter's Principle apply
almost word for word.
To cut out the intermediate steps, I think that sociocultures get what they
what they want in a sense. The Western USA is very young and seems to want
to be very young. I had thought that British socioculture was much older,
and technically it is, but from WM says, I think that some people there also
do not want to grow up. It is easier to learn recipes than to think. It is
easier to use astrology than to use science. In the USA, in my opinion the
danger is so advanced that only something like massive hypnosis of children
by their parents (to get them motivated to learn) will change things much in
the near future. In the absence of that, I have been urging people to adopt
multiple alternative axioms systems (evnen on the internet), so that for
example skills oriented people would also keep an open mind about using
their brains, but that is a very, very slow process and will not be
completed in any of our lifetimes or our children's or grandchildren's
lifetimes (I think). In humanities computing, the dangers in addition come
from the skills required to do computing and the skills required to do
reading and writing and art - which sometimes are not counterbalanced by
equal requirements for inventive/innovative/creative skills using higher
cognitive abilities. People already inside bureaucracies might be able to
urge the changing of those priorities, but California's failure to improve
much despite their importing Nobel Prize winners from the East leads me to
question the chances of success in the near future.
Osher Doctorow
Doctorow Consultants, Ventura College, West Los Angeles College, etc.
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