David Brooks on the Practical University – NYTimes.com

David Brooks considers the role of the university in today’s society in the United States, and how those responsibilities might be shared across online and face-to-face education.  A more reasonable response than the MOOCopalypse.  Recommended.

Are universities mostly sorting devices to separate smart and hard-working high school students from their less-able fellows so that employers can more easily identify them? Are universities factories for the dissemination of job skills? Are universities mostly boot camps for adulthood, where young people learn how to drink moderately, fornicate meaningfully and hand things in on time?My own stab at an answer would be that universities are places where young people acquire two sorts of knowledge, what the philosopher Michael Oakeshott called technical knowledge and practical knowledge.

via The Practical University – NYTimes.com.

Disappointing: NSF CE21 is Gone

From Farnham Jahanian’s email to the CISE-Announce list on the new NSF budget request from the President:

CISE continues its focus on STEM-C Partnerships (formerly, the Computing Education for the 21st Century (CE21) program) in order to increase the pool of students and teachers who develop and practice computational and data competencies in a variety of contexts and to prepare more students to pursue degrees in computing, computation, and data-intensive fields of study.

It might be that STEM-C will fund everything that CE21 funded (can’t find an announcement yet to see), but the departure of a program explicitly named “Computing Education” is a loss for those of us who are trying to grow the field of Computing Education Research.  If it’s not named, it’s easier to ignore.