Microsoft Seeks 1-Click(er) Patent

theodp writes "Assuming things go patent reformer Microsoft's way, answering multiple choice, true/false, or yes/no questions in a classroom could soon constitute patent infringement. Microsoft's just-published patent application for its Adaptive Clicker Technique describes how 'multiple different types of clickers' can be used by students to answer questions posed by teachers. The interaction provided by its 'invention', explains Microsoft, 'increases attention and enhances learning.' Microsoft's Interactive Classroom Add-In for Office (video) provides polling features that allow students to 'answer and respond through their individual OneNote notebooks, hand-held clickers, or computers, and the results display in the [PowerPoint] presentation.' So, did Bill Gates mention to Oprah that the education revolution will be patented?"

Comments

gates institute

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Gates is in education to direct money. The latest study from the gates institute is that adolescent perform better on tests if they like their teachers. This is exactly what some in education want to hear as it minimizes objective measurements like experience, education, and certification and maximizes non-objective measures like "relationship". Although the study attempts to relate adolescent random emotions to thing like classroom control, the reality is that ineffective teacher can often maintains control by matching the workload to the students expectation, while the effective teacher often sacrifices some classroom control to maximize the workload and learning of the students. It is also true that students that are going to do well on tests are also those that have good classroom habits, and require little or no external control.

Of couse as Gates is able to keep his money, he is able to direct it towards personal projects. One seems to be destroying the profession of teaching and replacing it with an elite corps of of recently post-adolescents that are paid in forgiveness of student loans rather than a professional rate of pay. This of course will minimize taxes, and consequently minimize the chances that we will have a strict inheritance tax. Gates, of course has no concern that urban public education will be decimated as he, and the foreseeable generations of his offspring, will never have to be educated in such an environment.