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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
Fuck Bill Gates and Fuck Zuckerberg. These two self-serving cleptomaniacs are no fucking idols and should take responsibility for the fucking god damn surveillance monster they created and help propagate.
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
It burns my eyes. And ze goggles do nothing!
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.
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.
Do they teach proper capitalization in your son's kindergarten?
Suck my dick.
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..
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
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.
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!
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.
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 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.
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Actually, they missed all of that while watching ESPN and Fox News.
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!"
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.
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).
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.
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
http://archive.org/details/indiansoftwa
Here's the computer chronicles video on software outsourcing in the late 80's
http://archive.org/details/indiansoftwa