Four-minute sunrise [rowing]

I keep taking the same picture, or at least one that's closely equivalent, over and over again, but I just can't seem to help myself.



These colors only lasted for about 4 minutes total, so I felt fortunate to be in the right place at the right moment, a spot where I could pull out the camera.

Educational attainment and the digital dark ages [work]

Mondays seem like a good time for some half-baked thoughts, in the name of procrastinating on manuscript-writing.

I might actually keep this brief. We'll see. (...a few minutes later, it's clear I won't...)

I recently finally read a Chronicles of Higher Education article entitled, Is this the end of reading?, which is about changes (decreases) in literacy and critical thinking skills among incoming college students, and the consequences for higher education in the United States.

The whole thing got me thinking about an idea that has rattled around in my head for a very long time, the Digital Dark Ages. The idea is just that any net intellectual expansion or benefits of the digital world will eventually asymptote and we'll eventually reach a point where broader intellectual progress will stall out just because of the nature of the online information landscape.

I don't fully trust this idea, so I guess it's basically a brain-worm that's difficult to dispel.

It did occur to me recently to think about the bigger picture for the Dark Ages; it's a term used to describe conditions in Western Europe, which therefore means it's geographically limited and other places and continents did not go through the same set of experiences.

Similarly, there are a multitude of reasons to look and think beyond the context of the United States when grappling with educational preparedness and attainment in the U.S. Academics can often lose sight of things such as thinking about the percentage of the population that actually goes to college, because of course we operate from inside the institution. I looked up educational attainment in the US recently. Here's what Wikipedia has to report on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States

Since the 1940's, the percentage of people in the US aged 25 and older who have earned a college degree has increased, from around 5% to 35% at present.

Here's a source on international educational attainment, focused on OECD countries:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cac

There is still a very substantial fraction of people who have not earned a college degree. To me this really matters when it comes to thinking about forms of collective-decision making; I do still think society is best served by an educated populace, but I also think we have to factor in that not all of the populace in this country has had access to equal educational opportunities. And along with that, some countries have done and continue to do better by their people on this front, while other countries haven't but may more strongly aspire to do better.

Anyway, for a little while there, I was fixated on some of the commentary in the Chronicle article, about how maybe this is a new transition into some sort of new hybrid oral-written culture.

But now I'm skeptical of this notion, based on thinking about the bigger picture. What if, instead, we worked to take the approach that this reluctance to read is tied to the fragmentation of modern life, and instead just try to foster more environments to reduce the fragmentation? This is a bit akin to what the mindful sport performance exercises are designed to accomplish: they are structured to help a person develop better body awareness and focus. I can recognize that the specific challenges of this specific period in time may be tied to a unique combination of things that have happened in primary education in this country, but I sure hope this isn't a completely intractable problem.

In any case, for me a lot of this thinking is related to curriculum development and assessment in the program I teach in. Perhaps some disciplines have longstanding and well-defined learning outcomes, maybe even established on a national level, and figuring out where to set the bar is straightforward. For my context, these things aren't quite so clear, because we want to set a higher bar for our students. I continue to feel strongly about what I want students to attain in the courses I teach, and the evidence in front of me suggests they generally can.

And maybe by trying to work through some of these ideas here, I will now be less distracted by them and more able to focus on other academic writing tasks. Maybe.