User talk:Pat Conheady

Law Pages
I hope you'll consider moving your law pages to the main content area where they can be found in a search, as soon as you feel they would be useful to others. Thanks for your contributions. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 00:49, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

I like something you said on your user page
Abraham Lincoln never went to law school[1][2]. Nor did he pay $150 for a prescribed textbook or find himself unable to sell a textbook because a new edition with 1% of the content changed has been published. The current model of legal education in Australia results in costs of over $100,000 to educate one lawyer. Is the solution to tweak the way that $100,000 is paid for? Or is there a better way to educate lawyers?

One of the things on my "bucket" list is to understand why Commons is so careful about copyright law. I once posted the results of a Google search in an article about how society looks at global warming and Commons deleted. But, that is my bucket list, so don't waste your time trying to explain it to me.

The real reason I am writing is the quote from your user page shown above. I like to tell people about my mother's student loan problem circa 1941: She had to borrow money each semester for tuition, and had to work as a movie usher part time to pay it back by the end of the semester or the university wouldn't loan her more money. And this was a four year university (UC Berkeley)! Could you imagine a student doing that now?

Anyhow, in my fields (physics,astronomy,math), I believe what's missing are online exams. Openstax is quickly developing open access textbooks. Education is all about accreditation, and accreditation needs exams. While I appreciate and respect modern constructivism, it is one of the reasons education is so expensive. For many, studying old-fashioned materials is sufficient. Having students write on Wikiversity is not "expensive" if what they do helps teach others, and some of my better students seem to enjoy creating exam questions. I am up to my ears in other stuff at work at the moment, but I hope to make Quizbank more user friendly ASAP. You will have a hard time using it in its present state. But expect an invitation from me within a year or so. If we allow people to drive 3,000 killing machines we call cars based on simple standardized tests, I see no reason why a significant part of college education can't use the same methods. (The preceding unsigned comment was added by Guy vandegrift (talk • contribs) )


 * Thanks for stopping by my talk page . It's interesting that you say that education is all about accreditation. The modern conception of education, which is focused on creating workers for the economy, certainly is all about accreditation; as with the labelling on free range eggs, employers need to know what they're buying. Accreditation is everything, and then the selection of courses, textbooks, the conduct of lectures, etc, all becomes a means to that end. It is, however, possible to conceive of education for its own sake, in particular for general knowledge and civic engagement as opposed to more practical applications. Anyway I am digressing and navel-gazing a bit; even if I am studying for my own benefit rather than just to be a cog in the machine, there are many topics for which I would still like an accreditation process to let me know whether I have learned it properly.
 * As a consumer of legal services, I want a lawyer who is accredited as having learned the law. I don't really care whether their exam was marked by a person or a machine! Please keep me in the loop regarding Quizbank.
 * --Pat Conheady (discuss • contribs) 07:04, 19 May 2017 (UTC)