“Harvard’s involvement follows M.I.T.’s announcement in December that it was starting an open online learning project, MITx. Its first course, Circuits and Electronics, began in March, enrolling about 120,000 students, some 10,000 of whom made it through the recent midterm exam.”
Category: issues
UK Culture Minister Says Ministry Is Not Being Abolished
“Minister for the arts Ed Vaizey has accused Labour’s shadow culture secretary Harriet Harman of ‘concocting’ a rumour that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport is set to be abolished.”
NY University Needs To Grow. But This?
“Nothing about this plan speaks to the way the university will nurture the city just as the city nurtures it. There’s no physical expression of the future of education, which is in flux thanks to online learning and collaborative research that is dissolving ossified departmental boundaries.”
The Stardom Problem
“The impulse to idolize is as old as the gods, of course. Jesus was a superstar some time before Andrew Lloyd Webber came around. What’s abnormal about the phenomenon of stardom is the condition of being a star, of living as the object of desire of, and the subject of scrutiny by, countless strangers. Stardom is normal for everyone but stars.”
A Debate On Stabilizing Arts Funding
What can we do to stabilize funding for the arts? Can we learn from other countries’ examples? A New York Times debate…
Big Box Content Producers Say Piracy Costs US $58 Billion/Year. But The Truth?
“Given the scale of the problem, one might expect the movie business to have rock-solid numbers on what piracy costs them. But the closer one looks, the more dubious the figures seem.”
Arts Council England Spending Down Six Percent
“Arts Council England spent more than £588 million of public money in support of the arts in 2010/11 – down from £625 million in 2009/10 – according to its newly published annual report.”
Adjusting Israel’s National Anthem To Not Exclude Israeli Arabs
The first line of “HaTikva” reads (in English translation), “As long as deep within him a Jew’s soul stirs …” In the wake of a silent protest by an Israeli Arab justice of the country’s Supreme Court, The Forward teamed up with singer Neshama Carlebach (daughter of the late Rabbi Shlomo) to offer – with just a few tweaks of the lyrics – a version of the anthem that doesn’t exclude 20% of Israel’s population.
The Source Of The New York State Reading Exam’s Notorious Pineapple Question
Last month, the eighth-graders of the Empire State were presented with a reading comprehension question about a hare who was challenged to a race by – not a tortoise, but a pineapple. (The hare won.) The originator of the tale, children’s author Daniel Pinkwater speaks out on the controversy. (He thinks the story works better with an eggplant.)
Can The Suburbs Be Saved?
Herein lies the great complication of suburbia. Its myth – of wealth, whiteness, a steady-job in the big city, and a space to call your own – keeps getting in the way of the big-picture: the thousands in need of change. If architects are to “save” the suburbs, and redesign them based on their multiple realities, they’ll have to start by separating themselves from the myth. By bursting the ‘burbs’s bubble.