Building a Better Engineering Education

Great article in the Wall Street Journal on Friday, April 24th about robot-building competitions and how they're exciting students into engineering careers. Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, is behind some of the best programs.

A Liberating Seminar for Students

Announcing
The Great Connections:
Mastering the Intellectual Tools that Transform
a College Education into Lifetime Success



The First College of the United States Seminar
for High School and College Students

Saturday, July 25-Sunday, August 2, 2009
CHICAGO

The Collegiate Way

A fabulous resource for students, parents, and educators, The Collegiate Way is the brainchild of Dr. Robert J. O'Hara. It details the factors and the means that make residential college life a superior educational experience. 

Charter School Funding Problems

As with vouchers, many pundits tout charter schools as the fix for public education. With vouchers, I worry that private schools will be homogenized and leveled to a public school standard, in the long run, because of government oversight and consequent regulation.

Charter schools can always face that problem, too, but they face a more imminent one with public funding. Read about it in Kevin Ferris's article in the Wall Street Journal reporting on the financial tenuousness of charter schools.

The Collectivist Argument: "Shut Up!"

Watch an insightful video on collectivist arguments by novelist Andrew Klavan.

(Hat tip to Jim Smith.)

How Wikipedia Fosters Reason and Objectivity

Last Wednesday, April 1st, I was the guest of Jimmy Wales at a MacArthur Foundation monthly President's Luncheon. This foundation, which gives out $1 million "genius awards," often to unsuspecting recipients, had invited Jimmy to tell them about Wikipedia.

As a result of that luncheon speech, I believe Wikipedia is the largest project in the world to foster rationality and objectivity, indirectly teaching people everywhere how to think better.

My friendship with Jimmy goes back to the '90's when he lived here in Chicago and belonged to my discussion club, the New Intellectual Forum. Money he earned on the Chicago options and futures exchanges enabled him to start Wikipedia.

Before the luncheon, MacArthur President Jonathan Fanton commented that it was the most well-attended President's luncheon he'd ever held - just about every staff member of MacArthur wanted to hear what Jimmy had to say. And it's not hard to understand why since just about everyone with a computer uses Wikipedia. Founded a mere 8 years ago, it is now the largest encyclopedia in history. According to a Nature study, it has a very high rate of accuracy.

Jimmy explained how Wikipedia works as a world-wide collaborative project, which can be edited by anybody able to access the Internet. Wikipedia's enormous reach so far includes over 2.8 million content pages in 253 languages. It's administered by a small paid staff of 25 people, and a large group of self-organized volunteers. You can read more about it here.

The organization's goal is to bring the sum of all human knowledge to every person on the planet with Internet access.

The results of this worldwide collaboration are astonishing and fascinating. For example:

• Slum children in Delhi learn from it to pass their 11th grade exams.
  
• The Dutch, a relatively small language group, have a high number of pages. Jimmy commented that he thinks it's because the Dutch love to argue - and that's why they have to be so tolerant!
  
• Rather than reduce the need for travel, Jimmy has to go all over the world to understand Wikipedia's collaborators and their contexts. And they love meeting each other in person.
  

Wikipedia's writers are encouraged to be exact and factual. When opposing sides edit the pages of a contentious issue, the result tends to be an objective account of the subject, not wild opinion or flaming commentary.

That's because of the structure which Jimmy and his executive collaborators incorporated into the system. He said "There could have been a different outcome if I hadn't insisted on a certain structure of reasonable, fact-based, civil interchange instead of anything goes."

He'd seen plenty of "anything goes" in the early days of the Internet on Usenet groups. Flaming arguers tended to take over discussions, pushing the reasonable people out. For some years, he hosted the Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy, precisely to encourage civil interchange.

These experiences seem to have informed his judgment in developing Wikipedia. The result now is engagement of millions of people across the planet in rational and objective discourse. Through Wikipedia, Jimmy is spreading the habits of Enlightenment thinking to people and places which may never of heard of Aristotle's logic.

In addition, Wikipedia empowers the individual rather than authority, and encourages peaceful collaboration and trade (of information). The requirements of their engagement with Wikipedia is guiding millions to habits of mind and interaction which are the bedrock foundation of civil, free societies.

What a way to go Jimmy!

Hyper-Empirical Language and Thinking

Linguistics researcher Daniel Everett talks about the Amazon Basin's Pirahã people's hyper-empirical language. Their grammar would likely be cumbersome when trying to express something complex, but, surely, it would reduce any tendency to think in floating abstractions!