Curated content

Khan Academy ponders what it can teach the higher education establishment

Khan Academy’s explicit goal is to teach people fundamental concepts. But in the process, it hopes to break new ground by changing how educators think about teaching, how psychologists think about learning, how employers think about credentialing, and how everybody thinks about the price of a good education.

“I think too much conversation about Khan Academy is about cute little videos," Khan said in an interview last week. “Most of our resources, almost two-thirds of [the staff], are engineers working on the exercises and analytics platform. That, I think, is what we’re most excited about.”

Eating your cultural vegetables

I feel guilty to be still reaching, as an adult, for culture that remains stubbornly above my grasp. My guilt isn’t unique, even if my particular aspirational viewing is my own. (Surely there are die-hard Hou Hsiao-hsien fans out there who grit their teeth every time a new Pixar movie comes out.) And my cultural guilt has only intensified as Twitter reminds me hourly that my colleagues and friends are finding deep satisfaction in reading “The Pale King” or attending “Gatz” or watching “Le Quattro Volte.”

Unpaid bills land some debtors behind bars

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan thinks more can be done. It's illegal in Illinois for people to be sent to jail because they're in debt. But Madigan thinks some creditors are abusing the law.

"You wouldn't be in that predicament if you didn't have debt," Madigan says, "But for being in debt, you wouldn't be in prison. And that essentially equates to being thrown in jail, debtors prison."

She says courts need to be certain they have correct information to serve notices. Madigan also says judges need to be properly educated in these proceedings to prevent a debtor from needlessly going to jail.

Rats free trapped friends, hint at universal empathy

In a study published Dec. 7 in Science, Mason and University of Chicago psychologists Jean Decety and Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal describe their rat empathy-testing apparatus: An enclosure into which pairs of rats were placed, with one roaming free and the other restrained inside a plastic tube. It could only be opened from the outside, which is exactly what the free rats did — again and again and again, seemingly in response to their trapped companions’ distress.

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