Unscientific America — today

The topic for the last part of Patt Morrison’s radio show (KPCC, 89.3) today (2:30 p.m.) is Scientific Illiteracy:

Unscientific America

Despite the fact that the United States leads the world in scientific breakthroughs most American citizens can not name a living scientific role model. Why has our nation fallen so behind in science and does it really matter? According to Chris Mooney it does. Patt sits down with the co-author of “Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.”

Guest: Chris Mooney, co-author of “Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.”

Listen to the program (any time) here.

Mooney lectures. Listen at least to the first few minutes.

Students sharing course notes online

In this morning’s Inside Higher Ed:

Taking Notes Beyond the Classroom

In 2001, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced an OpenCourseWare system that would post videos and other course materials for virtually all MIT classes online for the world to see, thereby starting to break down the traditional barriers to higher education.

Eight years later, we may be seeing the student response.

The development of free note sharing Web sites, where students upload their class notes to share with their peers, has begun to create an open stockpile of downloadable information that some say is further leveling the academic playing field. With an influx of note sharing sites – from the innocuous sounding GradeGuru to the most "college" sounding isleptthroughclass.com (soon to be relaunched as Wise Campus) – many of them advocate the spread and collaborative use of knowledge beyond the classroom and university.
…
The possibilities are great for "open educational resources," like note sharing, said Steve Carson [of] MIT Open Courseware, but one must differentiate between sharing information from credentialed teachers at accredited institutions and sharing student notes that are not verified or fact-checked. Note sharing could lead to issues of questionable factuality similar to those that arise with the user-updated Wikipedia.

And because of the controversial nature of sharing notes, these Web sites have raised eyebrows across academia, especially with regard to professors' intellectual property. Some, too, have expressed the concern that these websites blur the line between cheating and doing one's own work, which could be seen as propagating laziness among students. And some professors worry that these sites could devolve into gossipy commentary on the course….