h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>>BUT within the university system those high fliers will not all be high fliers.

Which is my point. You seem to be suggesting that we assess people according to where they fit in the population distribution - eg that success should be measured by being better than the other 90% of people.

According to your criterion - indeed, by definition, not everyone can be a high flyer. But I don't see how an expanding university population indicates a deterioration in the mean quality of students. Surely it means that the mean has improved so that a higher proportion are educated to university entrance standard?

>>The point is, given the distribution of intellect within society is not a flat line - put bluntly there a lot more average intelligence people than geniuses - increasing the size of the population will increase the amount of mediocre more than the amount of the geniuses.

This is the nub of it. Do the mediocre remain mediocre? Or does education make a difference? And if not...why are we spending money on it?

I'm confused now. We seem to be talking at complete cross purposes here.

"You seem to be suggesting that we assess people according to where they fit in the population distribution "

No, no, no! What I am saying (not suggesting but stating as fact) is that the academic ability of a given general human population will be very like a bell curve with more middle people and less extremes.

Are we agreed on this?

"eg that success should be measured by being better than the other 90% of people."
Woah - I never mentioned success, which is a many faceted subjective thing anyway. I'm talking (as I thought we all were) about academic ability. How able our students are to learn - lazy students, hard working students, high fliers who are almost by definition the more able students and mediocre students who are by definition the less able (but not necessarily less hard working - indeed there's always the extremely able student who does naff all for 4 yrs then gets a 1st (in the days before course work anyway!)). Lets get away from arbitrary societal constructs like success and intelligence though.

What I'm saying is that the top n% of able students in university (not the general population of students pre-university) is numerically less than the bottom n% of students in university.

Increase the population and you get numerically more bottom n% than you do top n%

Does that make sense to you?

"Do the mediocre remain mediocre? Or does education make a difference? And if not...why are we spending money on it?"
Of course they do, it's an innate ability. One can learn to use it more efficiently using certain learning and concentration techniques, but the ability to learn, to apply oneself is part of the make up of the person.

Does education maked a difference? That depends on whether education is used to teach how to use our abilities to their best, or whether it concentrates on teaching facts and figures and so forth and leaves the student to figure out how best to apply their abilities to the task.
We spend money on it so that people of all different abilities can learn stuff that they may find useful later on.

Being educated != being intelligent != having a high ability to learn/apply oneself.

Although there is a large degree of coincidence between the three categories and they do have an effect on each other, it is not a primary correlation.

>>I'm confused now. We seem to be talking at complete cross purposes here.

Very probably.

I'll leave it at a rant against the fashion for denegrating young people.

fair enough

A couple of months ago I ehard R4's John Harrumphreys harrumphing about 'These Mickey Mouse degree courses in things like computer games'. That example in particular was just plain ignorant.

Not knowing the contents of said degree I wouldn't like to say. But if it leads to working for a vary big Easily Acronymed games company then I'd argue against it purely on the grounds of humanity.

Tis interesting though from one of the links earlier how the subject divide has shifted. And how the male/female subject divide continues to shift as well.

I'm not a games player myself...but I know there are many successful, small 'new media' companies in Scotland doing all sorts of things Harrumphries doesn't understand. I'm thinking in particular of the well-rspected course at Abertay.
http://www.abertay.ac.uk/Courses/CDetails.cfm?CID=185

Don't get me wrong, it is an area of huge development and complexity in computing, the modelling of virtual realities is quite something to name but one area.

Thing is, many people still see it as quite a glamourous job, and whilst there is still room for the likes of the TombRaider creators (who epitomised the big bucks glamour of games writting) it's become more and more just any other industry with targets and budgets and goals and accountants in charge. It makes it more predictable and the quality more consistent, but you lose out on the individual passion that can create the one offs that take the world by storm.
It's an inevitable progression (and matches that of IT as a whole) and doesn;t mean it is necessarily bad as a choice, it just isn;t the gold plated geek fest lifestyle many think it is.

damn, going off at a tangent again!

I'm still not convinced of the degree worthiness of media studies and some of the other new subjects (lets not even mention homeopathy) but the students of such courses do seem to have a good track record of getting jobs. So universities will offer them cos students want them.

I agree...education should be more than merely training people to work for The Man. How many people do, say, chemical engineering just for the fun of it. My own degree was (sadly) 'vocational'. Fortunately my education didn't end with university.

Meeja Studies...yeah...an easy target. On the other hand, what other vehicle is there for studying and dissecting a rich and important part of our culture? We've entered the TV age, surely, and academia is slowly beginning to catch up. Or should something like (the wonderful) The Sopranos sit within Eng Lit?

btw...Did you hear about the homeopath who forgot to take his medicine and died of an overdose?

love it!

"On the other hand, what other vehicle is there for studying and dissecting a rich and important part of our culture?"

Sociology? Or the social/soft side of psychology?
There's aspects of computing that investigate it too - things like AI and a-life.

I can see no reason why eng lang and eng lit should stick with the written word. After all, a lot of the eng lit I did (and somehow got a B in at gcse, gawd knows!) was, after all, studying plays. So why not if the writting is up to par? If shakespeares populist plays can be eng lit I see no reason why Blade Runner can't.

p.s. you seen the thing Randi (and I think Ben Goldacre as well) do where they give a talk whilst continually consuming homeopathic sleeping pills. Strangely he doesn;t fall asleep at any point, despite consuming large quantities thereof.

Maybe they should have tried fewer.

No...not sociology - that's about studying societies. Nor psychology - that's about minds. They both have some relevance to the study of media, to the same extent that they do to the study of literature.

I know what they are both the study of - and psychology is not just the study of minds in isolation but also within the environments they are found in. Quite an important part of psychology. And indeed it isn't just the study of the mind, but covers the entire nervous system and various other parts of the body since there is such a close tie between them.

What I meant by those two though was that media is a part of society, the media we get is a funciton of the society we have. How it works, what it produces, what gets made all those sorts of things.

To study media in a particular society you have to understand the society since the media is a function thereof.

Well, yes, and excuse the simplistic definition of psychology.

All I meant was that there's an awful lot that could potentially come under the umbrella of 'meeja studies'
- analytical, criticism, 'textual analysis' type stuff (cf Eng Lit)
- media and society
- The mechanics of media production
- media business and economics.

There are obviously a lot of overlaps with other subjects. W***pedia has an interesting (but probably not comprehensive) list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_studies

Whether or not it's a soft option probably depends on how well it's taught...but I'd happily defend it as a valid subject.

And getting back to The Youth Of Today...My ten year old children are already being taught how to make presentations. Dumbing down? (compared to essays) Or an important skill that wasn't taught in my day?

ta for the links and stuff above - interesting!

"how to make presentations"
definitly a good skill to get into early. Post school/college the number of places I had to make presentations went up quite a lot (although now it's gone down again).
A lot of the job selection panels want you to do a presentation. A key part of uni education is the ability to give a presentation.
It's a key skill which people seem to think matters and are prepared to judge your ability in other areas on. I had no such training and it took me quite a while to learn.

Actually it annoys the hell out me, because without such training the person who comes across well is the self confident extrovert who may be all front and no substance, whereas the introverted knowledgable candidate will come across badly. It doesn;t really tell you anything about the candidates suitability for the role (unless the role consists majorly of giving presentations) or their knowledge. So giving those who do not come to such things with an innate ability a chance to catch up is a good thing.

I guess the nearest we had was public speaking, but that was more for the oxbridge stream and school favourites.

And yet Powerpoint etc. is often cited as an example of 'dumbing down'.

In my day, even when writing essays we simply weren't taught to deliver information or arguments in a properly structured - let alone interesting - way.

So if are yound people are picking up such new and useful skills, why are folk bothered about trivial things like spelling?

you're leaping all over the show here aren't you?

Powerpoint != Presentation.
That's the argument for it being dumbing down. Too many people think that slapping some text on a funky coloured background and adding some clipart equates to giving a presentation. My personal opinion is that the more that goes on in the slides, the less is going on in the mind of the presenter. It's a distraction and proper presentations don't need it. There are times to have pie charts, graphs, outline points etc. But the more is on the screen, the less people will be listening to what you say.

Trivial? Spelling?
You're just playing devil's avacado now aren't you?
Spelling, grammar, phrasing all that is of importance in many, many places. But not on H2G2 forums Go to a job interview with a presentation with spelling mistakes and see how well you do.

Of course I'm playing Devil's Avocado! . I like to get jerk chains.

You're right - Presentation doesn't equal Powerpoint. But my children are being taught to use visual aids in their presentations - something I was never taught - and to all intents and purposes, this means Powerpoint (even to Linux s like me who use OpenOffice Presentation). And, indeed, there can be good and bad Powerpoint. *However*...I maintain that the skill of organising one's thoughts properly into slides and bullet points is a valuable one. Myself...I'm regarded as the local 'Go To Guy' on report writing. When people are struggling, I encourage them to write some slides first...and then turn the slides into sections and the bullets into paragraphs.

(I'm also the 'Go To Guy' on presentations. I believe in minimal bullets and not reading what's on the slide. And if anyone ever advises you 'Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, and tell them what you've told them'...slap them!)

Spelling...*definitely* an overrated virtue. Machines can do it for us. Granted, marks should be deducted for not bothering to check for squiggly red underlines.

Remember the days when slides were on acetates, which you'd inevitably drop just before your presentation. My pet hate was always people who revealed the text line by line, keeping the rest hidden under a sheet of paper. (cf crappy Powerpoint animations). I was cured of this atrocious habit myself when a Texan in the audience shouted 'What the godamm hell are you trying to hide?!'

But I digress.

God? Who's he?