"The Soul of Invention" (on Adam Smith, technological redundancy and MOOCs)

RELATED ARTICLES

The Soul of Invention - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Highe... http://chronicle.com.proxy.wm.edu/article/The-Soul-of-Invention/138017/

1 of 8 4/20/2014 3:20 PM


2 of 8 4/20/2014 3:20 PM


3 of 8 4/20/2014 3:20 PM


4 of 8 4/20/2014 3:20 PM


5 of 8 4/20/2014 3:20 PM


6 of 8 4/20/2014 3:20 PM

8 Comments

• •

tqn269 •

Great article. I grew up near Bathurst and Dupont, in the shadow of the

abandoned Mono-Lino Typesetting building. Still abandoned today. At that

intersection in Toronto, retooling has looked unlikely for some time.

• •

jsummer •

One interesting refrain that I read here, and in many other places advocating for

a liberal arts education, is that it is through liberal arts that students learn critical

thinking. First, I should state that I am a huge advocate of a breadth of

education, encouraging all my advisees in engineering to take art, sociology,

psychology, economics, literature, history, and language classes in their

undergraduate lives - even if these classes do not count towards graduation.

However, I believe that learning critical thinking is not solely the purview of the

liberal arts colleges. In engineering, we are constantly challenged with

understanding the underlying problem. This means questioning the status quo,

challenging assumptions, considering potentials. We are creating what does

not exist by considering many options (again, many of which do not yet exist),

integrating them, and then justifying them with both standard tests and new

tests (which do not yet exist). This design process requires critical thinking,

which is at the central core of engineering as a profession. Perhaps it would be

worthwhile for liberal arts students to take a few engineering design courses to

learn critical thinking from a different perspective. This, in turn, would broaden

their experiences in the same manner that taking liberal arts classes broaden

engineering students educational lives.

• •

srne4467 •

JSummer, I totally agree, and didn't mean to suggest that crit thinking

didn't happen in engineering. Though my undergrad degree was in

history, one of the best classes I took was a "programming the 6502"

with a physicist where we designed our own operating system and

worked up from there.

Scott Nelson

lharasim •

I enjoyed this article and found that the author made many good and interesting

points. His critique of MOOCs touches on what I think is one of the core

challenges or contradictions of MOOCs: They are very very poor teaching

approaches. They may (or not) make money for the institution by scaling up the

number of students in a course, but MOOCs significantly dumb down the

process of education.

Having 10,000 or 100,000 students in a class is is just plain foolish and greedy

on the part of the institution and a bad idea for professors and students.

Professors will be made redundant, students will be faced with watching 1000s

of hours of one-way video instruction, and the curricula across the nation will

become standardized.

Moreover, MOOCs with the video-based classroom and AI testing do not and

cannot support knowledge building, invention or innovation. The race to survive

in the Knowledge Age is for companies of all sizes to hire people who can

contribute to innovativeness and hence competitive advantage.

MOOCs will undermine that process. Students who learn only by watching


7 of 8 4/20/2014 3:20 PM


8 of 8 4/20/2014 3:20 PM

"The Soul of Invention" (on Adam Smith, technological redundancy and MOOCs)

Documents

Transcript of "The Soul of Invention" (on Adam Smith, technological redundancy and MOOCs)