Abelard to Apple

Abelard to Apple
Author: Richard A. Demillo
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2011-08-26
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0262297612

How institutions of higher learning can rescue themselves from irrelevance and marginalization in the age of iTunes U and YouTube EDU. The vast majority of American college students attend two thousand or so private and public institutions that might be described as the Middle—reputable educational institutions, but not considered equal to the elite and entrenched upper echelon of the Ivy League and other prestigious schools. Richard DeMillo has a warning for these colleges and universities in the Middle: If you do not change, you are heading for irrelevance and marginalization. In Abelard to Apple, DeMillo argues that these institutions, clinging precariously to a centuries-old model of higher education, are ignoring the social, historical, and economic forces at work in today's world. In the age of iTunes, open source software, and for-profit online universities, there are new rules for higher education. DeMillo, who has spent years in both academia and in industry, explains how higher education arrived at its current parlous state and offers a road map for the twenty-first century. He describes the evolving model for higher education, from European universities based on a medieval model to American land-grant colleges to Apple's iTunes U and MIT's OpenCourseWare. He offers ten rules to help colleges reinvent themselves (including “Don't romanticize your weaknesses”) and argues for a focus on teaching undergraduates. DeMillo's message—for colleges and universities, students, alumni, parents, employers, and politicians—is that any college or university can change course if it defines a compelling value proposition (one not based in “institutional envy” of Harvard and Berkeley) and imagines an institution that delivers it.

The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily

The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily
Author: Laura Creedle
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2017
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0544932056

Lily, who has attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and Abelard, who has Asperger's, meet in detention and discover a mutual affinity for love letters--and, despite their differences, each other.

Revolution in Higher Education

Revolution in Higher Education
Author: Richard A. Demillo
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2017-03-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0262533618

A report from the front lines of higher education and technology that chronicles efforts to transform teaching, learning, and opportunity. Colleges and universities have become increasingly costly, and, except for a handful of highly selective, elite institutions, unresponsive to twenty-first-century needs. But for the past few years, technology-fueled innovation has begun to transform higher education, introducing new ways to disseminate knowledge and better ways to learn—all at lower cost. In this impassioned account, Richard DeMillo tells the behind-the-scenes story of these pioneering efforts and offers a roadmap for transforming higher education. Building on his earlier book, Abelard to Apple, DeMillo argues that the current system of higher education is clearly unsustainable. Colleges and universities are in financial crisis. Tuition rises inexorably. Graduates of reputable schools often fail to learn basic skills, and many cannot find suitable jobs. Meanwhile, student-loan default rates have soared while the elite Ivy and near-Ivy schools seem remote and irrelevant. Where are the revolutionaries who can save higher education? DeMillo's heroes are a small band of innovators who are bringing the revolution in technology to colleges and universities. DeMillo chronicles, among other things, the invention of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) by professors at Stanford and MIT; Salman Khan's Khan Academy; the use of technology by struggling historically black colleges and universities to make learning more accessible; and the latest research on learning and the brain. He describes the revolution's goals and the entrenched hierarchical system it aims to overthrow; and he reframes the nature of the contract between society and its universities. The new institutions of a transformed higher education promise to demonstrate not only that education has value but also that it has values—virtues for the common good.

Disrupt This!

Disrupt This!
Author: Karen J. Head
Publisher: University Press of New England
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2017-07-04
Genre: Education
ISBN: 151260092X

In this smart and incisive work, Karen J. Head describes her experience teaching a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and the attendant pressure on professors, especially those in the humanities, to embrace new technologies in the STEM era. And yet, as she argues, MOOCs are just the latest example of the near-religious faith that some universities have in the promise of technological advances. As a teacher of rhetoric, Head is well versed at sniffing out the sophistry embedded in the tech jargon increasingly rife in the academy. Disrupt This! is a broader-based critique of the promises of technological "disruption" and the impact of Silicon Valley thinking on an unsuspecting, ill-prepared, and often gullible university community grasping for relevance, while remaining in thrall to the technologists.

Abelard and Heloise

Abelard and Heloise
Author: Ludwig Feuerbach
Publisher: Gegensatz Press
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2014-09-22
Genre: Humor
ISBN: 1933237864

Feuerbach's early bivalent thrust: an indictment of philistinism and bourgeois culture and simultaneously a commendation of the life of literacy and erudition.

Abelard's Love

Abelard's Love
Author: Luise Rinser
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 184
Release: 1998-01-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780803239142

The doomed romance of Abelard, a 12th century French teacher of philosophy and his pupil, Heloise, which led to his castration and her confinement in a convent. The relationship is recounted in the form of letters, written to Heloise by their son, Astrolabe.

Forbidden Fruit

Forbidden Fruit
Author: Heloise
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 88
Release: 2007-08-02
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0141964340

The illicit relationship between Peter Abelard, a medieval philosopher, and his young pupil Heloise is one of history’s most legendary and tragic love affairs. From reckless ecstasy to public scandal and cruel separation, their eloquent and intimate letters tell the story of their passionate, doomed romance. United by the theme of love, the writings in the Great Loves series span over two thousand years and vastly different worlds. Readers will be introduced to love’s endlessly fascinating possibilities and extremities: romantic love, platonic love, erotic love, gay love, virginal love, adulterous love, parental love, filial love, nostalgic love, unrequited love, illicit love, not to mention lost love, twisted and obsessional love....

Building the Intentional University

Building the Intentional University
Author: Stephen M. Kosslyn
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2018-08-28
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0262536196

How to rebuild higher education from the ground up for the twenty-first century. Higher education is in crisis. It is too expensive, ineffective, and impractical for many of the world's students. But how would you reinvent it for the twenty-first century—how would you build it from the ground up? Many have speculated about changing higher education, but Minerva has actually created a new kind of university program. Its founders raised the funding, assembled the team, devised the curriculum and pedagogy, recruited the students, hired the faculty, and implemented a bold vision of a new and improved higher education. This book explains that vision and how it is being realized. The Minerva curriculum focuses on “practical knowledge” (knowledge students can use to adapt to a changing world); its pedagogy is based on scientific research on learning; it uses a novel technology platform to deliver small seminars in real time; and it offers a hybrid residential model where students live together, rotating through seven cities around the world. Minerva equips students with the cognitive tools they need to succeed in the world after graduation, building the core competencies of critical thinking, creative thinking, effective communication, and effective interaction. The book offers readers both the story of this grand and sweeping idea and a blueprint for transforming higher education.

The Mundane Matter of the Mental Language

The Mundane Matter of the Mental Language
Author: J. Christopher Maloney
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 1989
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780521370318

Offering an explanation of the fundamental nature of thought, this book posits the idea that thinking involves the processing of mental representations that take the form of sentences in a covert language encoded in the mind. The theory relies on traditional categories of psychology, including such notions as belief and desire. It also draws upon and thus inherits some of the problems of artificial intelligence which it attempts to answer, including what bestows meaning or content upon a thought and what distinguishes genuine from simulated thought.

Robot-Proof, revised and updated edition

Robot-Proof, revised and updated edition
Author: Joseph E. Aoun
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2024-10-15
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0262549859

A fresh look at a “robot-proof” education in the new age of generative AI. In 2017, Robot-Proof, the first edition, foresaw the advent of the AI economy and called for a new model of higher education designed to help human beings flourish alongside smart machines. That economy has arrived. Creative tasks that, seven years ago, seemed resistant to automation can now be performed with a simple prompt. As a result, we must now learn not only to be conversant with these technologies, but also to comprehend and deploy their outputs. In this revised and updated edition, Joseph Aoun rethinks the university’s mission for a world transformed by AI, advocating for the lifelong endeavor of a “robot-proof” education. Aoun puts forth a framework for a new curriculum, humanics, which integrates technological, data, and human literacies in an experiential setting, and he renews the call for universities to embrace lifelong learning through a social compact with government, employers, and learners themselves. Drawing on the latest developments and debates around generative AI, Robot-Proof is a blueprint for the university as a force for human reinvention in an era of technological change—an era in which we must constantly renegotiate the shifting boundaries between artificial intelligence and the capacities that remain uniquely human.