@anecdotal@UofUHumanities I am sure the Balzac quote in the preface of The Godfather will give them pause: "Behind every great fortune, there is a crime."
@afneil@CBSNews For many newspeople working at CBS,I suspect there is a fantasy of speaking "truth to power" in the tradition of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. Pelley is engaging in cosplay. A peacock trying to appear as an eagle.
@C_Hendrick I think writing education should be primarily undertaken in grades 6-12. I've taught college composition for years and I think more intensive writing education before college rather makes more sense than the current model--at least as it is practiced in the U.S.A.
We hear a lot about the science of reading but is there a science of writing? There are a lot of bad ideas in this space but one idea that wider reading will, by itself, turn into good writing or that it's "caught not taught" is among the most widely held-beliefs in English teaching, but also very damaging because it excuses us from teaching writing explicitly.
The "caught not taught" absorption idea is to writing what whole language was to reading. The reading wars were a fight over whether decoding is caught or taught; the writing version of that fight is the same argument with the productive skill substituted for the receptive one.
Another important element is that writing ability is just assumed at secondary level and not taught explicitly. This is a mistake.
https://t.co/Z3yUx0NFth
@anecdotal@zenahitz@SethLargo We dance around the fact that students complete school work because the coercive incentive of a low grade. We rarely offer assignments that might seem compelling for other reasons.
NEW: a report from Vanderbilt and WashU just dropped, taking on the "state of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences," a big topic among critics of higher ed.
Read along w/ me 🧵
Interesting report (covered also in the @chronicle today) that basically brackets off the problems in public higher ed. Yes, things are worrying in elite privates. But they are not a canary for the publics. If anything the elites are lagging.
https://t.co/MXyVHTR2jT
@TheHopeAxis@anecdotal@TheAnnaGat I would be curious about any thoughts you might have about Jennifer Frey's "defense of the humanities" article in the NYT. Personally, I wasn't clear who the audience for her piece was. 🫤
In a new Stanford study, law professors by far preferred Gemini 2.5 Pro's responses over those written by their peers when they were unaware of who wrote the answers.
Keeping Up with the Sturgeons continues
After escaping Gordon Brown’s Cave of Despair, Nicola and Peter cross the Scottish border and flee to the familiar comfort of London’s Savoy Hotel.
But they weren’t counting on The Proclaimers.
{satire}
Nicola Sturgeon faced heavy scrutiny over the weekend over her apparent blindness to that motorhome. Matters worsened when she and her husband somehow ended up trapped in Gordon Brown’s cave of eternal despair.
Spare a thought for the Scots. It can’t be easy.
{satire}
Why did I save this clip? Must have had a hunch it wouldn’t age well. Andrew Wilson sings the praises of Nicola Sturgeon on BBC Newsnight, 23rd February 2021. Peter Murrell took delivery of the motorhome on 22nd February 2021.
The most fascinating book I have read in a long time. It occurs to me that LLMs might actually be the strangest realisation of Wilson's whole project: ie the kind of cross-disciplinary jumping he wanted,but arrived at by chewing through text rather than by the gene-culture biology he was talking about. So interesting.