Chris Mayer’s Post

Fodder Friday: Adding Depth to the Value of Liberal Arts Education In continuation of my earlier post (https://lnkd.in/emwieEat), let's look at some key questions that underpin our industry. * What constitutes a fact? * What defines data? * What constitutes an insight? These inquiries lie at the core of our #mrx industry, shaping a global market valued at $118.8 billion (ESOMAR). Yet, should we consider revisiting these fundamentals, or is this so obvious that we dilute the impact? Why Revisit The Basics: 1). Universality: These concepts transcend industries and professions, influencing diverse aspects of life. Indeed, our public discourse often hinges on interpretations of these fundamental principles. 2). Progress: Embracing a Humanities (i.e., Liberal Arts) perspective in academia can empower students to grasp these concepts more comprehensively and apply them to their lives. This broader understanding should be essential regardless of one's profession, be it management, finance, law, or beyond. 3). Academic Integration Lifts All Boats: Academia plays a pivotal role in imparting these critical concepts. For an industry that wastes about 40% of their ad spending (https://lnkd.in/eGgfJf58), the ability to accurately connect facts and data is paramount for success. The short article below is worth it. I'm keen to hear others' perspectives on the necessity of such foundational work. Is it perceived as pedantic and condescending, or is there genuine merit in resetting these basics for our future professionals? PS: The data-fact-insight meme inside the article sums up well the distinctions :). Insights Association Insights Career Network Dr. Michele D'Amico Karen Morgan #mrxjobs #marketing #advertisingresearch #liberalarts

There are two main ways of civilization, commonly known as “eastern” and “western”. - “Eastern” acknowledges the complexity of the world and inability to formalize and transfer human #experience. - “Western” on the other hand is built on top of rationality. Rationality comes from the Latin ratio, meaning “cause”, “explanation”, but also “relation”,—division into parts, analysis. Of course, the #rational (reasoning, non-intuitive, non “Eastern”) type of thinking equally helps synthesis, the composition of parts to whole. Historically Western culture gave more importance to logic-based “analytics”, formalization and modeling. One can observe the results of this “Western” way of civilization development, which gave us modern science, engineering, management, and the securities market as an infrastructure for entrepreneurship.[1] Unfortunately, rational, #logical thinking or any other applicable types of thinking as well as their limitations in practice are not explicitly #taught in schools and universities. Today the dominant opinion among teachers is that “good” thinking can be acquired by teaching #STEM: science, technology, engineering, mathematics. Unfortunately, the assumption that teaching STEM will indirectly teach thinking is not justified.[2] Each kind of thinking should be “taught” directly. For example, if we want to teach logic, then we should teach it directly, not through computer science and geometry, like in school courses where logic is only used to write logical expressions during programming classes or when writing proofs for theorems during geometry classes. Our course is written to fulfil this gap, but not fully—it teaches systems thinking directly, but does not touch other common kinds of thinking. [1] More about the advantages of rationality over Eastern reliance on intuition and for “direct knowledge”, see A. Levenchuk’s texts “On Articulate and Holography in Sociology”: ailev — LiveJournal and "On Intuition and Flair", https://lnkd.in/eECnNvXU [2] Lei Bao et al. have shown that reasoning and training in thinking based on a set of concepts are not the same, [0807.2061] Learning of Content Knowledge and Development of Scientific Reasoning Ability: A Cross Culture Comparison. Studying physics turns out to be not so “brain-straightening”—A historically held belief among educators and researchers is that training in physics, which has a beautiful structure of logical and mathematical relations, would in general improve students’ abilities in conducting reasoning that is intellectually challenging. However, the result from this study suggests that training in physics content knowledge in the traditional format alone is not enough to improve students’ general reasoning abilities). *An excerpt from Systems Thinking course

So there I was, facing this big question: Why do US colleges make everyone take science classes, even if they're majoring in something totally different? At first, I thought it was just about making sure everyone knows some basic science and can think clearly... but what does that actually mean? Then I found this really cool quote from Carl Sagan that made it click. He basically said that if we only teach people scientific facts without showing them how science actually works, how will they ever be able to tell the difference between real science and fake science? And you know what? He nailed it. Science isn't just about memorizing a bunch of random facts – it's more like a toolkit for understanding the world. It's about asking questions, testing ideas, and looking at evidence to figure out what's actually true. Like, it's not just about knowing stuff – it's about understanding how we figured that stuff out in the first place. Science is really just clear thinking, when you get down to it. When someone's "science literate," they get how scientific reasoning works. They can look at evidence and draw solid conclusions. They can tell when an argument makes sense and when it doesn't. Plus, they understand how our brains can sometimes trick us into believing things that aren't true. Here's the good part: science classes could be perfect for teaching these skills. Like, they could help us make better choices and not fall for all the fake news and misinformation that's everywhere these days. But here's the problem: most intro science classes just make you memorize facts. And let's be real – we forget facts, and we can always look them up anyway. Plus, what's considered a "fact" in science can actually change as we learn more. Science is always evolving, throwing out bad ideas and building on good ones. If we don't teach people how science actually works, how are they supposed to know what to believe? Instead of cramming their heads full of facts, we need to give students (and everyone, really) the tools to think critically and understand science. That's what's going to help them deal with today's world – and whatever comes next.

Without academic integrity, there can be no demonstrable learning (at least in an academic setting). Academic integrity is 1) a contract between an institution and society and 2) a contract between an individual seeking to teach and an individual seeking to learn. As this erodes further, everyone pays the price both literally and figuratively. Academe is, once again and unfortunately, moving backwards while doing nothing to reverse trends undermining its very existence. One needs to merely look up "Retraction Watch" to see how this trend plays out as fraud in academic papers, upon which the continuing evolution of science ostensibly depends.

I’m incredibly proud of this text, as it represents collaborative research with students who demonstrated remarkable courage, humor, and wisdom ♥ 🤖 It highlights how seemingly good educational goals can become oppressive when translated into technical solutions. 🌚 It shows that speculative methods can reveal the hidden oppression within widely accepted educational ideals. 👾 It emphasizes that for speculative methods to reach their full critical potential, they must embrace an ironic phase to avoid falling into uncritical acceptance or techno-solutionism. ⬇ https://lnkd.in/d4_22YDr

Professors and students, what are your thoughts on the decline of reading among higher education students? "[I]n interviews with current college students, only one—a freshman who said he is assigned only about five pages each week—told Inside Higher Ed that they typically complete their reading assignments. Some skim, some use artificial intelligence to create summaries and some rely on old-fashioned human-written summaries, such as SparkNotes, to stay on top of the material. "Researchers have long observed that a small—and declining—number of students actually complete their assigned readings; a study of reading quizzes taken in a psychology class between 1981 and 1997 showed a decreasing number of students doing so even then. More recently, in a 2021 study of hospitality students, over 70 percent said they don’t read the texts their professors assign. "Few professors would argue with that data. Faculty frequently note how much less willing their Gen Z students are to read for class than earlier generations; in a discussion on X over the summer, faculty complained that students seem unequipped to read even 100 pages per week per class—which used to be the norm in many disciplines, especially the humanities." https://lnkd.in/euxtCN7X #highereducation #universities #reading #genz #humanities #ai

I've always believed that Digital Humanities, my field, has been an orphan in the post-secondary system. It could easily find a home in the Humanities (where it typically resides), computer science, or math/stats. We could have a discussion about where it, and other similar fields, belong (of course, referencing GenAI) and how university admin has chosen to position these classes for everything from content to new student recruitment. A more fruitful discussion, however, likely revolves around the anachronistic notion that fields of study - and the degrees associated with them - must necessarily be restricted to a specific field. Of course, this isn't an academia only problem, since, ostensibly, employers look for degrees in hiring practices, but that only exacerbates the issue, as well as fostering resentment about academic "territory," budgets, and department scope. This is a long way of saying "there has to be a better way," but instituting one - whatever it ultimately looks like - is a challenge, especially considering the adherence to traditional practices in academia, no matter how opaque or outmoded.

#publishorperish A PhD and 7 years of research made Jason Polak aware of the artificial research environment created by universities, as he criticises in an article published in Medium. "Yes, #academia operates largely as a business. Their aim is to attract as many students as possible for the sake of money. And the primary ways they do this is through advertising their strength in various research fields. (...) Because of the business-first mandate of universities, many of these fields are artificially maintained on life-support because they have the property that they are good at generating research papers and research activity, even past the point of being remotely interesting. (...) The point is, unfortunately, some fields of knowledge are becoming so narrow that the only people who are interested in them are a handful of researchers whose primary job is to generate more research and attract more people to do so. That’s totally dishonest, and way past the point of natural #curiosity." "The sad thing is that #education takes a back seat to this process. Education is no longer about learning, or about making someone a better person through discovering the universe. It’s about churning out more generalizations and papers. Students take a back seat, and are used as lab monkeys or as human calculators to investigate fields that they would never really delve into except for the push of the senior researcher whose prestige is dependent on grants that are awarded by colleagues whose own motivations are also furthering highly specialized research. If a student’s curiosity leads them somewhere else, sorry! They are only permitted down paths that lead to the money and to another line on a curriculum vitae."

“I am not here to argue that majoring in science, technology, engineering or math is not a smart choice. . . . However, choosing a STEM major — while dismissing the value of a humanities major — is an incomplete path forward for the future of our planet and our species. AI platforms are too complex to be reduced to a simple good-evil dichotomy. It is up to our institutions, government and higher education administrators to decide how best to utilize new tools to advance and promote human harmony and democratize education access. There is a balance here, but it will take a lot of compromise between ethical regulations and inevitable technological progress. Ideally, the next generation of students will be well-versed in both quantitative and qualitative skills, being able to advance society through writing, mathematics, coding and reading. While our future is not, one thing is for certain: We still need thoughtful humans to comb through the mess we have made for ourselves.” #humanities #englishmajor #AI https://lnkd.in/g9KwdSBp

Day 4: Entry 1 USING TECHNOLOGY TO ADVANCE ACADEMIC RESEARCH In the past, students go to libraries to search for books for their academic research. The process is tedious and time-consuming because the students have to spend hours searching for the right resource book for the given research and also spend hours going through them. I remember thirteen years ago when I had to do my university project. I went from library to library looking for resource books to use. It was indeed time-consuming and stressful. But today, one can sit in the comfort of his home and search for answers to any academic research on his laptop or mobile phone. With the advancement of technology, academic research has been made easy for students. With the introduction of AI, students can now research any topic from the comfort of their homes and get accurate answers. The importance of using technology to advance academic research can not be overemphasized in today's world. It has made academic research easier, faster and more accurate. © Mercy Martey Michael, 2024 #tebebaschoolofwritingchallenge #tebebapublishers #31dayswritingchallenge