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I once held an informal poll among the undergrads and concluded that almost all of them chose courses they could get high marks in, and almost all of them would opt to get a high mark than to focus on learning

I think that is an obvious statement. If you take classes that you think that you will enjoy the subject matter, you are more likely to spend more time studying it, which means you are far more likely to do well in it.

Cheating happened lots in my school, but I'm glad to say that I was able to graduate without cheating, as it has helped me greatly. It's much harder to cheat in the industry!

But still, doing research on the Net is next to useless.

Really? Maybe you should look at some WebQuests. The well-developed ones give opposing viewpoints, and let the student decide where his/her own opinions lie. Let's not let the kiddies think anything outside what the mainstream textbooks tell us!

The accuracy and validity of anything on the Web must be questioned...

Absolutely. Questioning (a.k.a. skepticism) is something we should be teaching our students, don't you think?

In a time when schools are removing libraries to make room for computer labs,...

Source? Certainly some oversized libraries have had sections rearranged to make room for a computer lab, but I know of nowhere where any books have been made inaccessible by "making rooms for computer labs", much less of a school "removing a library".

What would you trust more, the Oxford English Dictionary, or Encarta.com?

No more straw men, please! (And besides, you're comparing a dictionary to an encyclopedia.) Which do you trust more, Any of these textbooks (which purport to be conveyors of fact), or This variety of internet resources?

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You are correct that machines may never acquire many of the facets of human intelligence (then again, they may). However, the Singularity can also happen when human intelligence is augmented through technology. The concerns expressed are about what will happen to the (non-augmented) human civilization when this superior intelligence comes to be.

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Point 3: Can this traffic really compare to the traffic when Unreal was released???

While Unreal caused quite a stir, I don't think it did as much damage as Quake 1 did. I was a student at San Diego State University (living in the dorms), and when Quake 1 was released, it slowed down the campus network to a crawl. Quake 1 totally clogged the bandwidth (both the internal network & external T1/T3 (don't remeber which they had at the time)) and the school was forced to block all of the Quake 1 ports!

They later upgraded the networks, and everyone was happy again...

There actually was such a project, called DLT (Distributed Language Translation). You can find a write up of it here or here in Esperanto. The intermediate language used was indeed a variant of Esperanto.

Good Point. At the university that I attended, all of the students claimed: "D stands for Diploma!"

It's kinda hard to explain how Vinge acts & sounds like as a professor (it has been a year since I've taken a class with him), but I'll give it a shot. He has a deep voice, and he doesn't change the pitch of it much. Occasionally, he shows a hint of a studder, but it has never become annoying (IMHO)

The course I took from him was a systems programming class. He was a standard (at least at SDSU) lecture style professor, but he did encourage student feedback. He also liked to interact with his students via office hours & email (I had sent him several emails at 2AM, and received a reply by 3AM) He was always very prepared for class, and it was well known that he spent hours preparing for each of his classes beforehand.

He was an open source advocate, and encouraged the students to copyleft their assignments (see assignment #1 toward bottom of the page) Also, when the class was discussing compilers, a student raised a question (I don't exactly remember what it was) and Vinge gave an answer to the question. Vinge could tell that the student wasn't totally satisfied with his answer, so during the next class session, he brought in a segment of the gcc code & showed the class how the GNU people tackled the issue. He then went on to explain how that was one of the benefits of open source software.

Remember that Vinge teaches Computer Science.

Unfortunatley, that is no longer the case. He retired from SDSU last spring. I had the honor of taking a class with him, and he was a wonderful professor. Although he will be sorely missed at SDSU, he did leave to pursue writing books full time!

Vernor Vinge has recently retired from his position as a Mathematical and Computer Sciences professor at San Diego State University.

Now he can write full time.

There are many great ways that technology can supplement the K-12 curriculum.

Ever hear of a WebQuest? It's a good way for teachers to use the vast amount of information available on the Internet, while still keeping things structured and not wasting time on having the students find information themselves.

I remember my class producing some sort of newsletter when I was in 6th grade, using Quark on Apple IIe's. How is this bad? I enjoyed learning about desktop publishing. I'm sure some of my less technical classmates gained useful computer skills. Since the whole thing was connected to the subject we were studying at the time, it was relevant to the curriculum.

"Theodore Roszak, a history professor (where? Podunk Community College?) and author of The Cult of Information," says "The idea that they should be swimming in a sea of information is idiotic." what? huh? Let me get this straight. This guy teaches history (which is basically memorizing facts) but he doesn't want kids exposed to information?

There are plenty of good educational websites that aren't just a "sea of information." Many companies base their reputation on providing high quality educational content. Never mind that this was a pretty poor article. Was it news, or opinion? It's not labeled. Note to journalists: You can't start off by stating facts like "A growing number of experts are recommending that young children not be allowed on computers for any reason at all" and descend into diatribe such as:

But teachers and administrators, education's front-line, are seemingly smitten by the new technology. This is unfortunate, because as has been the case with every other fad embraced by public education over the last 40 years, research into computer education and its effect on child development or the learning process is, at best, lacking. Worse, much of the existing research raises lots of red flags.

I just got an announcement from SDSU that Mike Robertson (MP3.com CEO) will be speaking at San Diego State on Monday. If you want to see the announcement, its at: my web page

This was sent out for students looking to interview, but if I were interested in working for them this lawsuit is the first thing that I would be asking about!

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