Comments on: Two Cups Short of a Full Service https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2011/04/19/two-cups-short-of-a-full-service/ Culture, Politics, Academia and Other Shiny Objects Fri, 22 Apr 2011 00:33:13 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.15 By: frothymaltybeverage https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2011/04/19/two-cups-short-of-a-full-service/comment-page-1/#comment-7628 Fri, 22 Apr 2011 00:33:13 +0000 http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=1544#comment-7628 This reminds me of my own experiences as a scientist involved in cancer research. Most advances in the field are tiny incremental steps won only after years of tedious work and hundreds of dead ends. The collective sum of our increasing knowledge is leading to better treatments, but for various biological reasons there will never be a real effective cure for cancer. Everyone in the field knows this. However, when speaking to lay audiences the researcher will often not so subtly imply that his or her research may be the elusive magic cure- pending the crossing of a few technological hurdles in future years (usually it is left unsaid that these are Everest sized hurdles, such as finding a way to make your drug kill the cancer cells and not the patient.)

Of course, no one wants to explain to all those people out running the “race for the cure” the complicated nature of the disease and our limited ability to treat it, and none of them want to hear it.

]]> By: Western Dave https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2011/04/19/two-cups-short-of-a-full-service/comment-page-1/#comment-7627 Wed, 20 Apr 2011 13:32:45 +0000 http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=1544#comment-7627 In my experience (strictly K-12 education), scaling up rarely works well. Specific projects that are successful in one context get scaled up but often essential elements of local culture that make it work get left out and teachers aren’t given the freedom to adapt to their local cultures.

]]> By: Timothy Burke https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2011/04/19/two-cups-short-of-a-full-service/comment-page-1/#comment-7626 Wed, 20 Apr 2011 10:36:21 +0000 http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=1544#comment-7626 On the bigger question, I think you find a way to make what you’re doing available as a model, which every development project ought to do anyway–be as transparent as possible, create an information trail that is less about promoting the project for donors and more about a day-to-day documentation of how the project is going, what went wrong and what went right, etc. I should be able, if I’m curious or thinking of doing something similar, to look online at that kind of detailed information footprint of a specific project as it happens, not just in some carefully massaged report published a few years later shot through with World Bank-ese. If that was the standard, then ‘scaling up’ would always be a possibility: other projects could look at something that was working, done modestly, and try to reproduce it in whole or in part.

]]> By: Timothy Burke https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2011/04/19/two-cups-short-of-a-full-service/comment-page-1/#comment-7625 Wed, 20 Apr 2011 10:31:31 +0000 http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=1544#comment-7625 Oops, right–will fix.

]]> By: Doug https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2011/04/19/two-cups-short-of-a-full-service/comment-page-1/#comment-7624 Wed, 20 Apr 2011 09:47:48 +0000 http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=1544#comment-7624 Nitwise: It’s double-entry bookkeeping, isn’t it? Or maybe two-column?

I’d seen a little of this tempest, but hadn’t realized the author of the print piece was Krakauer. Yowza.

Query: Once you (individually) see small, focused and modest that works, do you (collectively) try to scale up?

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