Textbooks, with or without the bundled DVDs, are…”The Hummer of higher education.”
Judy Baker and Anya Kamenetz “The Real Cost of College Textbooks” NYTimes online.
Category: Books
Quote – Haruki Murakami
Still, some might read this book and say, “hey, I’m going to give running a try, and then discover they enjoy it. And of course that would be a beautiful thing. As the author of this book I’d be very pleased if that happened. But people have their own individual likes and dislikes. Some people are suited more for marathon running, some for gold, others for gambling. Whenever I see students in gym class all made to run a long distance, I feel sorry for them. Forcing people who have no desire to run, or who aren’t physically fit enough, is a kind of pointless torture. I always want to advise teachers not to force all junior and senior high school students to run the same course, but I doubt anybody’s going to listen to me. That’s what schools are like. The most important thing we ever learn at school is the fact that the most important things can’t be learned at school.
Haruki Murakami, What I talk about when I talk about Running (p. 45)
I ran like a 12 minute mile in high school (sad I know). I remember not being able to run even a 1/4 mile (once around the track), but that any student that ran it under 8 minutes got a free soda. No soda for me!
Maybe the PE teacher should have given me a diet soda…
Quote – Muhammad Yunus
Mr. Yunus states. “When we were in the caves we were all self-employed … finding our food, feeding ourselves. That’s where the human history began … As civilization came we suppressed it. We became labor because [they] stamped us, ‘You are labor.’ We forgot that we are entrepreneurs.”
From The Little Big Things, by Tom Peters
Quote – Tom Peters
people first, people second, people third, people ad infinitum
That’s the way I like to do business.
From The Little Big Things by Tom Peters
Quote – Anna Kamenetz
…a video version of the course supplemented with a set number of hours of live teaching support, either delivered remotely by a…grad student, or live and in person from a local instructor, for a charge somewhere between zero and several thousand dollars, with credit awarded by your local institution. The existence of such an option–call it MIT on Demand–might even enhance the MIT brand, as OCW already has.
A company called StraighterLine already offers and important version of this idea: accredited online college courses for $399 per course, which includes ten hours of one-on-one tutoring. But the course credit is granted by just four small, unknown, community and for-profit colleges. This approach is half a step away from really blowing things up. It would just take a few more prestigious institutions getting on board to change the way people feel about online, on-demand education.
Anna Kamenetz, DIY U (pg 128)
Quote – Mark Twain
The Post Office Department of the United States is an Ass.
Mark Twain, Who is Mark Twain
Quote – Mark Twain
Nothing has to be paid but the rest of the debt; and here I stand, nobly paying it—out of your pockets. That is the way with debts; they just dump along, from shoulder to shoulder, and you never know who has got to foot the bill at last.
Mark Twain, Who is Mark Twain?
Quote – Sun Tzu
Energy may be likened to the bending of a crossbow; decision, to the releasing of a trigger.
Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Quote – Bill Bryson
For a long time it puzzled me how something to expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a dangerously perfect match.
I am a Stranger Here Myself, page 168. In regards to a “complete home office solution”.
My dear programmer friends, please don’t take offense and hack my site, computer or phone. I love computers…and programmers. Without them I would literally be mopping and sweeping floors for a living.
Quote: 2001
That very word “newspaper,” of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics. The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the ever-changing flow of information from the news satellites.
The thoughts of Heyward Floyd in 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
Sounds a lot like the news today (except that we don’t have the Times Inc. tablet yet…) considering it was written back in 1968.