Considering the remarkable technological progress and the spread of social media in the last few years, it can be challenging to teach and involve students when using an old-fashioned lecture style. Shelving overhead projectors and boring PowerPoint slides, some professors have converted to “education 2.0”, integrating new tools and applications into their class format.

The Ecuadorian Journalist Albertina Navas wrote about her experience of teaching economics to non-economics students at the University of the Americas – UDLA (Quito) in the article La economía se hace más divertida con herramientas 2.0 (Economics gets more funny with 2.0 tools) posted on the blog Clases de Periodismo, a virtual school for journalist students from Latin America. To help familiarize her students with complicated economics definitions and formulas and to achieve active learning, she used digital tools such as Twitter, blogs, Pinterest, podcasts, YouTube, Google Docs, and goear, a service to stream and upload MP3s. Leaving space for creativity, students gave proof of enjoying the class and produced some interesting outcomes, like the video El rap de la inflación (The Inflation Rap) or this infographic about history of economics thought. Read more

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Of all available internet resources in economics, podcasts often remain the most overlooked. Yet it’s a great way not only to enrich your knowledge, but also to look at an already familiar matter from a different perspective. Normally, podcasts are issued in the style of lectures, talks, interviews or just short commentaries, and cover either current economic issues or pure academic topics.

Previously we published a list of free online courses from renowned universities that have both open-access lectures and podcasts of public events (like LSE). Below you will find a list of economics podcasts, some of which were mentioned by Tim Harold in his blog last year.

The featured resources are mostly produced by think tanks, research institutes, economics bloggers or media. They represent different schools of economic thought and vary in length and style.  Read more

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“I write to you from a disgraced profession” were the words of James K. Galbraith, the son of one of the most successful bestsellers of books on economic and financial matters. “Economic theory… failed miserably to understand the forces behind the financial crisis.”

For those of us who know or have studied mainstream economics theory, this sounds pretty much correct: despite the thousands of pages of economic theory we studied in our undergraduate programs, we had essentially no idea what the heck was going on when the crash belatedly arrived. What baffles most is that senior economists – including those who were teaching the undergrads – did not seem to have much of an idea either. Respect for economists collapsed parallel to world economic activity and one startling but clear observation dawned upon many: the market did not fit the description made of it in the textbooks!

That, to say the least, must be a problem. Mainstream economic theory assumes this and that to reach its conclusions about whatever the subject at hand might be. Included in those assumptions are quite a few quirks about the market(s) that seem to defy reality. Those assumptions are that the markets are “efficient”, where the e-word does not seem to mean the same thing as in everyday life,  and that there are no cheaters, which the Ponzis and Maddoffs of the world and the “Lie-bor” scandal have taught us, again, is not the case. Also, everybody is “rational” or at least “rational up to (fixed) boundaries” but, again, rational in economics does not mean the same thing as in everyday life. Isn’t that a problem on its own that one has to keep different definitions of words in mind depending on whether one is on the subject of economics or speaking to one’s spouse? Read more

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