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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
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.
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.
It seems inappropriate to call the person who gave the most money to charity in the history of the world self-serving.
I don't know about that. Everyone on /. seems to be a fuckin' critic, yet critics still have jobs.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
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.
Depends...is your name Robin Hood?
OMG, he made a product that most people liked and bought it
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.
He's saying that a lot of this "U.S. schools are awful, just awful" stuff is propaganda, funded by U.S. tech firms in an effort to import more H1B-visa indentured servants to save money.
Your political party doesn't care about your rights and only represents corporate interests.
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.
Then get another job... Seriously. If what you do is so simple that any idiot can do it, then you should be worried. Don't piss on people trying to make their lives better because you are too lazy to stay competitive.
Agreed. Pointless post. Code.org is probably irrelevant anyway as people who want to code will learn how anyway, and most other people probably don't care.
Besides coding is only the tip of the iceberg. There is a huge difference between teaching a kid how to code in school and actually writing quality code, understanding relational databases, coding for real-time transaction processing, understanding source control, having the patience to sit in front of a monitor for 8-10 hours a day, etc, etc.
Most of the people I took coding classes ( Basic on Apple II's ) with in high-school aren't even coding or in IT at all now. In fact, some of the people I went to college with have even left the field.
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
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.
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.
"US schools are awful" is mostly being said by people who have friends investing or running charter schools. Follow the money.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
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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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
"like when Gates bought CP/M..."
Um....No. Just plain No.
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.