Sunday Sep 7 2008
All times are London time
I gave a talk to a group of economics lecturers recently about how to make economics interesting. The video has gone up on YouTube, for those who are interested. I think the talk went quite well.
About Tim Harford
I write leaders for the FT and two columns for FT Magazine: "The Undercover Economist", about economics in everyday life, and "Dear Economist", in which readers' questions are answered, tongue-in-cheek, with the latest economic theory. To find out about my books, "The Undercover Economist" and my new book "The Logic of Life", or about my radio series, More or Less, see timharford.com.
Hi Tim,
As a recent Economics graduate, I have particularly enjoyed your column in the Weekend FT. I’ve just seen your video on how to make economics interesting. I find many Economics units at the undergraduate level aren’t practical enough. Luckily at Bristol University I had one particularly devoted lecturer (Gervas Huxley) who structured a Current Economic Problems course to analyse policy issues like education in the UK, european integration, income inequality etc. As it happens your FT column on secondary education came out just before finals, allowing me to quote the Sacerdote paper on peer effects - thanks!
I think really this is the best approach at teaching economics - getting students to understand the key, simplistic arguments in popular issues by studying relevant papers. Surely arguing coherently is only possible having fully engaged with the economics. I encourage you to make contact with more lecturers across the UK. Furthermore I think your writing would be invaluable for A-Level students thinking about reading Economics at university.
Best wishes,
Posted by: Robert Habib | November 2nd, 2007 at 12:04 am | Report this commentRobert
[…] had author Tim Harford as a conference keynote, we put video segments of his talk in YT. Harford linked the videos from his blog, and within days we had thousands of hits, in addition to the thousands of direct downloads from […]
Posted by: Where are all the YouTube educators? « The Ancient Geeks | February 26th, 2008 at 12:27 pm | Report this comment