Blurts

I encountered this post with what I see as shocking data on the production of PhDs. One in eight of the PhDs granted in the U.S. are produced by just five institutions.

Why is this an issue? Because PhDs are crucial to the knowledge generation of academe and the job market for this select group of individuals is quite limited. By dominating the production segment of training, a small number of institutions are threatening the productivity of other institutions. Without a record of employment, few will become willing to commit the time and work required to earn an advanced research degree.

Academic research depends on advanced students to man/woman the research labs of academics. At the advanced level, training and education are based on what is essentially an apprenticeship model. There is a great deal of labor in research activity and great benefits to the general public of having the diversity of research academic institutions produce in comparison to business and industry. The competitive nature of institution to institution attraction of external money – the grant money on which the research factory of higher education runs depends on reputation and existing infrastructure – means the rich get richer and less numerous.

Google’s Ngram viewer allows the production of a graphic representation of the frequency with which words or phrases appear within the content Google can access by date. It can be used as a way to explore trends. Here are a couple of examples.

I have become interested in the concept of a “second brain”. The concept refers to the uses technology can serve in externalizing and extending brain functions such as storage and retrieval. Efforts are even being made to extend such obvious uses to the identification of associations. Recently, the phrase appears in several book titles.

It is hard to resist Googling yourself. Ngram appears to indicate that I am past my prime. I guess this makes sense because after my retirement from academia my name would appear less frequently in print. 

I would think various trends could be proposed and investigated with this tool. 

Grammarly is a great tool for writing and the free version works great. It is available as a standalone application or a browser extension. The basic version should be on all learner computers and some educators may see value in paying for a premium version.

It is very easy to use. The defaults work great, but you can also control basic settings for areas of your writing you want to emphasize.

The damage done to educational progress can now be calculated using the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The exam has been used since the 1970s to measure the math and reading achievement of 9 year older learners. The pandemic resulted in the largest decline in both areas since the beginning of the use of this test. 

Here are some of the findings.The impact can be interpreted as about 3 weeks of learning time for each point of decline. 

• Students lost 5 points in reading and 7 points in math compared to 2020.
• Students initially performing at a lower level were most adversely impacted. In math, the top 10% lost 3 points and the rest of the learners lost 12 points.

• The decline was more damaging for black than for white students. (13 points vs. 5 points)
• More recent testing indicates that returning to face to face instruction has stopped the decline.

In the accounts reviewed, the specific reasons accounting for the declines were offered only as speculation. Some clues would seem available in the findings that preexisting race and achievement differences were predictive. Because the tactics employed in distance learning may be related to tactics adapted to future applications, understanding the limitations quantified as a consequence of the pandemic will be important to understand. Were the methods flawed or were the engagement with the methods most responsible? For example, if expecting students to learn from educator generated video is less effective, then ongoing tactics such as are employed in flipping the classroom would become suspect. 

NYTimes

CNN

Wall Street Journal

Time

Journey North allows citizen scientists to participate in tracking migrations. Some of the organisms tracked are familiar to all and this makes participation in studying and participation in the study of migrations a great topic for K12 science classes.

The monarch butterfly should be familiar to students who live in many parts of the country. The species receives lots of attention because there have been concerns about population numbers related to the destruction of habitat suited to be a food source. This reality can lead discussion of many scientific issues. Since monarchs can be observed close up in gardens and ditches, finding them is a reasonable task. Often students also collect the caterpillars at certain times of the year a watch the caterpillar go through the metamorphosis process to become a butterfly.

I took this photo a few days ago walking near my home when I saw several monarchs on this particular flower. Monarchs begin to assemble in groups before migration. The Journey North has lots of information about this species.

I have explored ChromeOS Plex and written about in previous posts. I downloaded the OS to a thumb drive and tried it out on an old Windows machine and an old Macbook Air I own. After spending a few minutes to make certain the computer seemed to work like a Chromebook I moved on. My explorations were safe because I was running the machine from the thumb drive and I had not messed with the actual computers.

For those unfamiliar with ChromeOS Plex, it is an operating system created to be installed as a version of Chrome on older machines offering users a way to safely continue using these machines. As operating systems are reworked to become more powerful, take advantage of newer hardware, and be safer, the software cannot always be made backwardly compatible. At some point, the OSs for Windows, Macs, and Chromebooks are considered aged out. ChromeOS Plex offers a way to continue to use this equipment in a relatively safe way as the OS works in a similar manner to that installed on current Chromebooks.

I am now in a situation that makes the real use of ChromeOS Plex practical. We are soon to travel in Europe and I want a small and less expensive laptop I can carry to write and upload photos. I maintain a travel blog when we travel and I also take many photos. I had an old MacBook Air that is perfect for this situation. You may know that Apple devices were recently shown to be vulnerable to hackers and owners were warned to update their operating systems. I tried to do this and found I could not update because the old MacBook had such a small memory that the newest MacOS would not install. My efforts to install the new OS ended up filling the storage to the point other uses were no longer possible. Using Plex now seemed worth the permanent change and so I installed it. I have explained how to do this in my earlier exploration of Plex, but here is a more detailed description if this sounds like something you would do.

I am writing this post using my old Air with Chromebook Flex installed. A few early observations. Not everything works and there are other challenges that are the result of differences you may not anticipate. I use a password manager that allows me to apply multiple complex passwords. ChromeOS Plex uses your Google login to launch the computer. This means I have to constantly look up the complex password for Google my password manager would normally automatically access once I logged into my other devices. Remembering this lengthy string of random symbols would not be practical. I use my phone to access the password each time I want to use this old computer and won’t change to a simple password for Google applications because I have too much of value invested in Google services. For some reason, I also cannot launch the password manager once I have the new OS launched. I can save passwords to the browser once launched, but this is really the situation I use a password manager to avoid. My solution has been to consider the applications I plan to use on my trip. I have done what is necessary to store passwords for these applications and limit my vulnerability to these applications.

I don’t want to overstate the challenges I have encountered. Starting from scratch in a setting like a school these challenges would not exist at a serious level.