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Code.org Documentary Serving Multiple Agendas?
theodp writes "'Someday, and that day may never come,' Don Corleone says famously in The Godfather, 'I'll call upon you to do a service for me.' Back in 2010, filmmaker Lesley Chilcott produced Waiting for 'Superman', a controversial documentary that analyzed the failures of the American public education system, and presented charter schools as a glimmer of hope, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-backed KIPP Los Angeles Prep. Gates himself was a 'Superman' cast member, lamenting how U.S. public schools are producing 'American Idiots' of no use to high tech firms like Microsoft, forcing them to 'go half-way around the world to recruit the engineers and programmers they needed.' So some found it strange that when Chilcott teamed up with Gates again three years later to make Code.org's documentary short What Most Schools Don't Teach, kids from KIPP Empower Academy were called upon to demonstrate that U.S. schoolchildren are still clueless about what computer programmers do. In a nice coincidence, the film went viral just as leaders of Google, Microsoft, and Facebook pressed President Obama and Congress on immigration reform, citing a dearth of U.S. programming talent. And speaking of coincidences, the lone teacher in the Code.org film (James, Teacher@Mount View Elementary), whose classroom was tapped by Code.org as a model for the nation's schools, is Seattle teacher Jamie Ewing, who took top honors in Microsoft's Partners in Learning (PiL) U.S. Forum last summer, earning him a spot on PiL's 'Team USA' and the chance to showcase his project at the Microsoft PiL Global Forum in Prague in November (82-page Conference Guide). Ironically, had Ewing stuck to teaching the kids Scratch programming, as he's shown doing in the Code.org documentary, Microsoft wouldn't have seen fit to send him to its blowout at 'absolutely amazingly beautiful' Prague Castle. Innovative teaching, at least according to Microsoft's rules, 'must include the use of one or more Microsoft technologies.' Fortunately, Ewing's project — described in his MSDN guest blog post — called for using PowerPoint and Skype. For the curious, here's Microsoft PiL's vision of what a classroom should be."
The near excessive use of hypertext in this article is precisely how HTML was envisioned to be.
It's beautiful. /sniff
And yet people freely share their information. For Zuckerberg, we aren't the customers, we're the product
For your information, Bill Gates and Zuckerburg have nothing to do with Google
Can you translate this to English, Spanish, American or some language humans speak? I'm pretty sure it's valid HTML, but WTF?
i have a kid in a NYC public school. one of the best elementary schools in the city. i also talk to people who have kids in other schools or work in other schools.
the curriculum is the same. the kids are not.
in my school the kindergarten kids at a minimum know the alphabet on the first day of kindergarten. most of the kids in my son's class already know how to read simple books when they come in to kindergarten. by the end of kindergarten all the kids in my son's school are expected to read Scholastic Level F books
i have talked to people and there are first graders in some schools who don't know the alphabet.
if you want smart kids, make them smart. some days my five year old only watches documentaries on netflix and no cartoons.
What a crapton of links in an article.... i have no idea what the point was either.
i guess i'll just go with the standard WE HATE MICROSOFT.
Just to show you that the concept of corporate interests in American education are nothing new, or even out of the ordinary, or even not an inherent part of the system itself: The Underground History of American Education
How could anyone find it surprising that a corporation is promoting use of it's own products. Please. Actually, Microsoft's got a couple of good products that I've used and been happy with. One's Microsoft Lync which we use at work to do messaging, desktop sharing etc. I just wished there was a linux client for the thing. It would make my life much better.
I'm Linux/Unix guy for a living but I do admit Microsoft makes some reasonable products. I wish the corporate lock-in was not as bad as it is and I wish they published docs documenting all their file formats for interoperability. They have made some strides in the last couple of years.
To keep my mind off of women and focused on the project, I routinely used my a VM to start up my Windows XP partition and watch porn. Without this vital service of being able to hand all kinds of fucked up flash and take some viruses for the team, I would never have completed my ambitious projects.
It seems inappropriate to call the person who gave the most money to charity in the history of the world self-serving.
20 years ago, MS went around the globe, giving out computers as "charity", today they are going back around the globe to import these now ground children who were raised on nothing but microsoft to be their new tech workers. There is something sick about this.
Not only do they complain less, they are OK with far less pay, and far les independent thinking.
If they start teaching code in high school, EVERYONE will consider themselves a programmer, and the market will completely dry up.
Lots of words, so the point is what exactly? That people that know each other usually work together? what's your point?
none
it's up to us.
we're the ones who will provide the protocols that would permit the sorts of activities mentioned here to take place in a non-proprietary manner. sure, companies like microsoft seek to dominate their markets, and view lock-in one of the available tools. that's because we let them. we as a society have set up companies to be driven entirely by profit, and have not arranged our legal system to distinguish between proprietary and open systems.
look at tcp/ip, the single most successful open standard in the universe. it didn't just spring fully formed and without peers - there was lots of competition. it won because a few of the companies (and educational institutions and even government) found ways to make it into a world-scale protocol. companies get it if you say "interop is a non-negotiable precondition to purchase". government rightly gets involved not only as significant sales targets themselves, but also when they say (or should), that any utility-type monopolies granted must conform to non-proprietary standards.
imagine if mobile data service was non-proprietary: your phone simply negotiated a 5 minute service contract with the set of carriers it could detect at the moment, wherever you happen to be. (voice and text would simply layer over data, of course.) yes, that sort of thing is obvious to any techie as The Right Way, but it's our fault that the public has gone along the proprietary route: we need to speak up.
business tries to get away with whatever it can - that's just economic darwinism. we just need to set the rules.
Some of us believe that the way he got the money was inappropriate.
To highlight: if I gave some money I stole to charity would I be criminal or admirable?
emt 377 emt 4
Zuckerberg is just a lucky moron.
Gates was lucky but he's also a really smart guy.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Depends...is your name Robin Hood?
It seems inappropriate to call the person who gave the most money to charity in the history of the world self-serving.
Yes, to his own charity that invests primarily (if not entirely) in American companies and American markets. It also is used to fund Paul Allen's and VC's pet projects. It's to the point where they're throwing money away in order to boost their friend's revenues not really caring about the end results.
... good luck finding any lasting positive impacts though. I'd call it more of a trust fund for fat cats that may or may not have some positive side effects for the third world. I guarantee you it will have big positive gains for big pharma and Bill's friends.
But yeah, if holding the money and spending it on only American companies is what you call "gave the most money to charity in the history o the world" then yeah
Whats the point of this political post? Is it to attack that guy named Ewing? Or just to crank up the links-per-article stats? Is it a /. editor making a friend?
Hivemind harvest in progress..
OMG, he made a product that most people liked and bought it
There was once a band in the UK named PiL (even spelled the same way) whose lead singer once sang "No future, no future for you". I take it that Microsoft's vision of education is somewhat more optimistic.
Just lay out your accusations directly so we can see if they're merited by the evidence. The last part of the summary seems to kind of get to the point by implying that MS's contribution and involvement with these recent PSA causes were a way to market their products. Can we get some clarification?
It seems to me that people with strong opinions will tend to do things that are consistent with those opinions. People whose opinions differ might see that consistency of action over time as an organized conspiracy.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
So it's only "real" charity when it's given to internationals?
Innovative teaching, at least according to Microsoft's rules, 'must include the use of one or more Microsoft technologies.'
This is no surprise, whether it's a requirement of theirs or not, it sure seems to be standard practice. It causes big problems though, people running the program, like those in charge of the department of computer science at my school, come to push MS products for everything and pigeon hole students into the MS technologies. It's amazing just how many students there are that have used MS all their lives, but are still inept at using even the Windows command line, FSM forbid that you present them with anything else. Innovative teaching of technology in grade school - university should involve a variety of technologies and platforms, especially in secondary education.
--There are two kinds of people in this world. I don't like either of them.
So it's only "real" charity when there's no strings attached?
FTFY. Nice try but the problem here is that Bill donates to a "third party" that is really working to further his and his friend's interests and always will. Their lip service is something like their primary interest is to eradicate malaria but it turns out all their buddies get rich selling nets and vaccines to third world countries. The Gates Foundation "gives" money but all that money comes right back to their friends. The Foundation gets the write off. The friends get the revenue (independent of how shitty or great their product is). The small time businesses in the third world that were trying to sell these things get wiped off the map. And the problems largely persist indefinitely with companies buying international PR while generating revenue for other companies. Smile and pat yourself on the back, at the end of the day you're not really accomplishing anything but moving money to look good to Wall Street and the UN.
Here's an interesting question: how much money did the B&G foundation lose when the American housing and financial markets plummeted?
If you call that strictly donating to charity, you have some pretty screwed up standards of charity.
Yes, you too can afford a keyboard with a fully functional shift key:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16823109232
The kids in the public education system might turn out to be pretty decent Jeopardy players; that is, if they don't forget everything they 'learned' a year after graduating from high school...
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Gates was lucky but he's also a really smart guy.
Really? Whenever I read stuff about Microsoft's early years, it seems like Paul Allen was the smart guy.
You know, the guy Gates and Ballmer forced out in the 80s when he had cancer?
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
That is not all he did, and it is hard to believe you are unaware.
emt 377 emt 4
OMG, he made a product that most people liked and bought it
Yeah. People like it SO MUCH that they had to implement various forms of vendor lock-in. You know, because no one would ever want to use a competitor's products anyway.
Depends...is your name Robin Hood?
Or Pablo Escobar?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Depends...is your name Robin Hood?
No, señor, it's Carlos.
Mexican drug lords are often viewed as heroes because of how they bestow largess on the poor.
It seems inappropriate to call the person who gave the most money to charity in the history of the world self-serving.
In the Red-Blue bipolar imaginary Fun World, perhaps.
In the real world, you can be both, either, or neither. Nothing requires that one be dependent on the other.
You are aware Gates was a dropout right?
He made his business based on family connections at IBM.
Programming is not on the radar; nor should it be.
I see seniors who can't form complete sentences. I've seen kids who can barely use mice at all. Almost all of them will hit capslock to capitalize a single letter and then press it again to turn it off. Almost all of them cheat incessantly with cellphones or Googling answers or both.
Our problems are a lack of parents, a lack of social training (etiquette), rampant poverty, and unrelenting predation by the usual educational corporate behemoths.
available to work for $20,000 per year.
Sure the H1B's are making similar salaries but the thousands of programmers they interface with overseas are making $15,000 per year.
The good news?
Inflation is running over 25%.
I understand and agree that brilliant genius level programmers are rare and there won't be enough available in the U.S. But that's not a matter of schooling and training.
I worked directly with Infosys programmers from 2000-2013. In 2003, they were mostly masters degree candidates working in bachelor degree jobs. Today, they are mostly sub bachelor's degree candidates working in bachelor's degree jobs. The good 2003 programmers are all managers and executives now in infosys for the most part.
That level of programmer is available in the U.S.
The challenge is this: It is bloody hard to hire people. We spent 16 interviews over 5 months to get 2 positions filled. A company dedicated to IT can turn "on" 2 programmers almost instantly and it can also turn them "off" almost instantly (with no unemployment benefits). So a company like Infosys is like electric or gas or any other utility.
The problem being that infosys discriminates terribly. One hint, they require your high school graduation date on your resume. And that's just the start.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
My name is Inigo Montoya.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Think Mr Lydon might have an issue with his comapny name being used in this manner...
PiL
Nobody likes a poor thief.
Particularly when the price structure of things in the USA is geared towards those making $100K+ a year. "American idiots" have seen their 60 year old engineer parents fired for not other reason than the fact that they made too much money. "American idiots" have seen their jobs outsourced. Even if theirs has not, the threat is always there. "American Idiots" wonder, correctly, if the wonders of globalization will one day make any advanced degree they pursue worth about as much as the average janitorial salary.
While business media "journalists" will always be paid to spin something else, it is always about the money, and as we get older, it's about the job security, and the possibility that your benefits can be cut by the parent company arbitrarily.
It seems inappropriate to call the person who gave the most money to charity in the history of the world self-serving.
Satan is willing to trade some short-lived perceived benefit for the mere pittance that is your soul too. William Gates Jr. was successful in the computer industry solely due to opportune timing and familial connections within India Business Machines, formerly known as International Business Machines, formerly known as The Company that Sold Tabulating Machines to Nazi Germany for the Purpose of Counting Jews and other Undesirables Before the Ovens.
It seems they've been complaining about 'the dearth' for long enough now that if they were actually serious about solving the problem, those who were in pre-school when the complaining started would have Bachelor and Master degrees in CS by now...
They've been operating on a shoestring budget since as long as I can remember. Shit wages make for shit teachers. Stop paying Administration with 6-digit salaries and distribute the difference among the staff and things will improve. Gates is a two-faced jackwagon blaming a systematically hamstrug public educational system that all his buddies want privatized.
Oh, and the reason Corporations go overseas for outsourcing is the H1B visa money, not talent. They couldn't give two shits about talent as long as someone is there to answer the support line.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
The equation involves luck, effort, and smarts.
Dark Reflection
No, seriously, charity is literally the definitional opposite of self-serving behavior. I understand that Gates was not the nicest man when it came to running a business, but he's said, and is on course to, divest his entire wealth into a charity with the intent of intelligently benefiting all mankind by the time he dies. I would love to hear a definition of "self-serving" that seriously allows for that.
Do they teach proper capitalization in your son's kindergarten?
Suck my dick.
From what I hear in the news, they do teach that in public schools.
You might want to ease up on the rum; you go by 'Dread Pirate Robberts' nowadays and don't want to let that secret slip.
Gates wrote a reasonable amount of Microsoft BASIC, which was the product that put the company on the map. He also used family connections to sell it to IBM, along with an operating system that they hadn't yet written, which implies a reasonable amount of sales skill, if not necessarily implying intelligence. He also designed and implemented the FAT filesystem in PC DOS (which later became MS DOS). Oh, and he published a paper on the optimal algorithm for flipping pancakes (which sounds silly, but is actually used in a number networking tasks). He's definitely intelligent.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Actually, they missed all of that while watching ESPN and Fox News.
He dropped out of college, but because he decided to found Microsoft. He did not get kicked out, and he didn't get to Harvard by being an idiot.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Exactly. Why does being evil imply being stupid? Has he never heard of evil geniuses?
Gates bought CP/M? Kildall must be spinning in his grave.
No, seriously, charity is literally the definitional opposite of self-serving behavior. I understand that Gates was not the nicest man when it came to running a business, but he's said, and is on course to, divest his entire wealth into a charity with the intent of intelligently benefiting all mankind by the time he dies. I would love to hear a definition of "self-serving" that seriously allows for that.
He did things that were self-serving. He also did things that were not self-serving. Do you think he took no action in his life other than founding a charity? Where do you think the money came from?
I remember reading that he completed Harvard's Math 55, which isn't a small feat even for smartest freshmen.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
They have acting skills second to none. In Brussels and in Washington, people like Bill Gates and various Wall Street bankers can swear in the most solemn tones to tell nothing but the truth, then look people straight in the eye and plead penury and desperation. Please, please, oh member of the Senate, have a heart, give us just a scrap, maybe another 200K visas. Or a tiny, pitiful trillion dollar bailout for our wee little global investment bank. I don't know what else I can do, I am at my wits end , woe is me, so desperate is my company ...
This is how the game is played at the top levels. Lying with flair and conviction. I can imagine Gates after his testimony to get more visas a few years back, doing a fist bump with one his corporate legal minions. "Nicely played, sir!"
So Microsofts competitors(apple, IBM, and so on) never tried to do vender lock in?
The reason it worked is because everyone was already buying it. He did some shady business practices but he was put in a place where he could pull it off by consumers. Just like Apple and Google are now. We just scrutinize Microsoft because they are the biggest.
Why do we have to choose. You can be both admirable and criminal. One is a legal definition, and the other an opinion on the man's morality. There are people who aren't stuck in second grade morality that know morality can be a complex determination that can vary from one person to the next.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
re: From what I hear in the news, they do teach that in public schools.
and in Sunday School, too, if the priests' exploits are to be believed!
Owning most of the most successful software company in history?
The problem is that it's hard to find American students who are bright enough to become good programmers, but dumb enough to believe they should try and make a living at it.
He got into Harvard because he came from a rich family ... the usual connections.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Rockerfeller employed private armies who murdered striking workers and their supporters. There's a decent argument that he gave to charity for the same reason ancient kings had gigantic monuments erected to themselves.
There is so much wrong with this summary, I don't even know where to begin:
- Did the poster just learn about hyperlinks? The posting looks like the time my 3 year old got into my wife's makeup
- Did we need hyperlinks to items like Don Careleone's quote? The venue of the Partner's in learning conference? A picture of James Ewing standing in front of a trifold?
- ti;dr; too incoherent, didn't read. The posting seems to be a bunch of ramblings attempting to draw connections between the Gates foundation, Code.org and immigration reform. It reads like the worst of conspiracy theories...detailing a bunch of information in a sequence that makes it appear to be connected, but without actually providing any connections
- Extraneous information much? What does the letter that sent to Obama have to do with anything? Why the link to what Microsoft's PiL's classroom should look like? What does the Godfather quote have to do with anything?
Worst Slashdot Article Ever (so far this week).
"like when Gates bought CP/M..."
Um....No. Just plain No.
Remind me of all the murders Gates is responsible for. I get we don't like Microsoft much.
Exactly. Why does being evil imply being stupid? Has he never heard of evil geniuses?
It's not that evil is implying stupidity, but rather than accusations of stupidity and evilness are easy ad hominem attacks on people that are not liked. It's like how the government can both be incredibly incompetent and diabolically all controlling at the same time.
Nice about the "second grade morality".
Yes, you can be both. The part about stealing then donating was meant to show the issue by taking it out of the complex determination arena.
emt 377 emt 4
We were talking about "the person who gave the most money to charity in the history of the world", which, in adjusted dollars, seems to be Rockefeller. In any case, I didn't say that Gates had anyone killed, I was simply pointing out a good example of how it's possible for someone to simultaneously donate a large amount to charity and also be self-serving.
Yes, he was smart enough to realize that he was in the right place, at the right time, with a skill set and personality that were better suited to entrepreneurialism, at that point, than the opportunities academia might have afforded over time. And, it's a good thing Microsoft was able to buy QDOS from Tim Paterson when it did, or we might not be having this trivial exchange.
One of my schoolmates went to Harvard, and he couldn't even get into the gifted program in school. So it wasn't a high IQ that got him there. He had OK grades but wasn't stellar.
I think you are massively over estimating the correlation between being intelligent and high grades/gifted programs at schools.
Depends...is your name Robin Hood?
It depends more on whom you stole it from.
So are you trolling, or are you suggesting that Bill Gates benefited from racial quotas?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I'm sure his family connections helped. Nevertheless, he was objectively very bright. He was nearly perfect on his SATs and he wrote a "pancake" sorting algorithm that went unchallenged as "fastest" for 30 years.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
WTH? Those links don't say the things you say they do.
The worst indictment I see following those links to their original source is that the Gates foundation buys stock in arguably unethical companies (oil and gas companies primarily). I see nothing in those links about Paul Allen, or about "boosing their friend's revenues".
Oh, and BTW....slashdot is not a great source for meaningful sources of information. If you want to link, link to the original sources of your claims.
Janitors make better money for the little experience required. It is stable and not out sourced; it is necessary. Same with garbage, mechanics, and other frowned upon jobs. Real estate, Sales, Small Business are ok because they can make a lot of money despite them not needing education or brains.
Education adds less value every year and it is always measured in salary when security and stress are equally important factors.
Truth is, that the 'thinking' jobs are going to be not worth the cost, we will outsource them to places with cheaper education and lower costs of living. Even if college is made free, for the sake of keeping our "thinking" jobs so we can have an economy; why would people want to do all that when they can make a little less as a janitor but have stability and low stress?
As far as quality students, that is largely another situation. Previously, certain demographics went for the education and they proved to be highly valuable employees, the pay somewhat reflected that. Then everybody else wanted that pay and incorrectly formulated that the education is what caused the higher pay. Now we have a large number of educated people that are hard to distinguish from the ones who made it desirable in the 1st place. Not to say it doesn't improve people, but it isn't the sole reason why college education was desirable. Its almost just an HR filter for applicants today (in which case tell the kids, get an easy cheap degree.)
The whole economy is slowly imploding, this system never was sustainable and things are going to get worse - it all ties together in an incredibly complex web of "life" even if it is a partially artificial one.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
schoolchildren are still clueless about what computer programmers do
Considering what I see in my day-to-day affairs, the vast majority of programmers are still clueless about what they do.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
That's fair. And my hyperbole wasn't entirely warranted.
I do believe that he is smart but to get into Harvard you need to have money and connections and that is how he got in.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Gates is not Darth Vader, Adolf Hitler or Genghis Khan. He has done - and doubtless will continue to do many very admirable things.
However, he has also done some really slimy things, both personally and via his minions at Microsoft. Hopefully no one died, but definitely some things that I don't respect him for.
In short, he's a human being. Not all saint, not all sinner. Most of us won't be able to do things on as grand a scale as he has, but we're not all that different.
As a practical matter, you also need to be smart. It is an edge case to be a complete moron attending Harvard.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
George Bush got into Yale with more money than smarts.
no because Digital research blew off IBM when they came calling about CP/M
Yes...all those poor small time businesses in the third world that were working to eradicate HIV or polio.
Those mom-and-pop water sanitation plant workers, and family planning councilors losing their jobs and forced to live on the street. How very sad.
Please...sell your crazy somewhere else. We're all full up here.
http://archive.org/details/indiansoftwa
Here's the computer chronicles video on software outsourcing in the late 80's
http://archive.org/details/indiansoftwa
It's like how the government can both be incredibly incompetent and diabolically all controlling at the same time.
Often with the same person claiming both in the same post. Always interesting to see someone who's a candidate for an olympic gold medal in mental gymnastics (even if I wouldn't want to actually talk to them).
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
a) Yale is not Harvard. Incidentally, he also had his MBA from Harvard so I'm not sure why you mentioned Yale.
b) He is exactly the kind of edge case I was talking about.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
if i couldn't see your user ID i'd have to say "you must be new here"... but evidently not :o/ /. is a website for mostly 3rd rate wannabes. There are some very good, insightful and informative posts but they are by far and away the minority.
this site really does suck.
Well considering their products and practices suck, what's to like?
Bill Gates charity donations could easily be a tax dodge.
"like when Gates stole CP/M..."
Um....No. Just plain No.
Fixed that for them...