Slashdot Mirror
Teachers Know If You've Been E-Reading
RougeFemme writes with this story in the New York Times about one disconcerting aspect of the ongoing move to electronic textbooks: "Teachers at 9 colleges are testing technology from a Silicon Valley start-up that lets them know if you're skipping pages, highlighting text, taking notes — or, of course, not opening the book at all. '"It's Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent," said Tracy Hurley, the dean of the school of business at Texas A&M.' 'Major publishers in higher education have already been collecting data from millions of students who use their digital materials. But CourseSmart goes further by individually packaging for each professor information on all the students in a class — a bold effort that is already beginning to affect how teachers present material and how students respond to it, even as critics question how well it measures learning.'"
I don't want my professors knowing that I am totally using SparkNotes!
Why is it disconcerting?
I mean... yes, it can be mis-used. The data should be used to flag up pupils who may be struggling, but will also flag those who may already know the material, but just because data could be incorrectly used doesn't make it inherently worrying.
Does it?
F that.
I don't care about intent I care about ability. Intent can change unexpectedly.
"It's Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent"
Well, THAT makes it all ok...
Aren't all 'big brother' systems put into place "with good intent"?
Yes, it's Big Brother, and you reap what you sow.
-- C. S. Lewis
(who, on a side-note, also wrote a snazzy novel which more or less served as the blueprint for 1984
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Thereby forcing everyone to buy an ebook. All Hail
If they pass the test, who cares if they just learned from lectures, knew the material from beforehand, looked it up from another source, or other non-textbook methods of learning? The point is that, at the end of the class, the student can show they learned the material.
Because every student has a similar style of learning.
I am patenting Pageturner, proven to be the best way to spoof your e-book reading!
This software package turns pages while you drink a beer.
I haven't taken a note in my entire life, and I consider highlighting books to be sacrilege.
Taking notes is overrated. If your brain can't process the information, taking notes won't mean anything in the long run. It's just a exam-passing technique, but it won't help you understand better and certainly will not help you hold on to more knowledge beyond the date of the exam you are studying for.
Read the damn book. Then read some more on the subject, and by all means skip pages and passages if you consider them non-important or redundant. In the real world you will not have time to read 1500 pages of product documentation to understand an API. Learning to skip the irrelevant content and find the relevant information quickly is a fundamental skill.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Next up: an app which automatically turns the pages and shares highlighting. (If this is used for grading or implicitly incorporated into paper/project grading).
The prof has no interest in whether or not you read the book. He simply does not care! Don't read it, fail the class, he still gets paid.
This information is either completely pointless, or has some potential for increased profits form the publishers.
It will not be used to improve your education, facilitate your learning or alter the class in any student favorable way.
You use another medium, like taking notes on paper.
it's like the saying goes.. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions"
stop using 3-4 books and only using parts of them
If data can be collected someone will collected; once it is collected there is a strong "need" to use. This certainly can be used to help improve coursework; especially if aggregate data shows patterns where material can be improved. If there is correlation between scores and performance than it is worthwhile to see if their is causation as well and use that to help improve learning. OTOH, factoring that into grading would be problematic, since learning styles differ. I took an English Lit class in college and never opened the book and got an A. Why? I had read the book a few years ago and so was familiar enough with the text to discuss and analyze it. Of course, as one of my professors put it" I don't care if you come to class or do any work, we've already got your money. What you get from your investment is up to you."
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
This strikes me as yet another place where today's students, many already low in internal motivation, have that motivation replaced with a Big-Brother-esque all-knowing eye that knows when they haven't conformed. All this does is train the low-motivation students to become mindless robots who just respond to the stick when prodded. We're training away motivated learning and replacing it with a closed loop stimulus-response system where no real learning occurs.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
I wouldn't be *too* concerned about professors knowing my reading habits. On the other hand, I would probably just deny the program internet access.
I agree with you, but some people are very visual and cannot retain without seeing things. "Memorization by wrote" and all that...
RE learning to get to the heart of the matter is a skill that is not taught in schools these days, nor is critical thinking. Kids are largely not even taught anymore; they are "taught" to pass the standardized tests the state dreams up. Real-world skills like shop, etc., have been replaced with junk like "foo-foo" electives that do nothing but give kids a chance to surf their mobiles whilst the teacher rambles on about this and that.
Disclaimer: I work in education and I see the above firsthand on a daily basis. I'm also in Texas, which spends more money on sports than on actual education. Sadly, our kids leave school without knowing the proper use of a semicolon, how to critically think, and I daresay, most could likely not find Madagascar on a map despite the recent animated hit.
Sadly, American schools eschew CS and science training and are being overtaken by what we deem "third-world" countries like Vietnam. This below article is both frightening for Americans and great for the Vietnamese.
http://neil.fraser.name/news/2013/03/16/?ref=nf
Obligatory link.
It turns out this hypothetical scenario actually was too extreme, it was set much too far in the future...
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
There are two types of learners: One type tries to read a given book from front to back, perhaps several times, trying to learn everything that can be learned from it. The other type tries to learn what he wants to know and uses whatever information is at his disposal. People who use the former method become experts. People who use the latter method become problem solvers. It is important to understand that you don't choose the method to get the kind of person you want. The person chooses the method because they are the kind of person they are.
Education in 1900: you need to be able to do things.
Education in 1980: you need to be able to know how to do things.
Education in 2000: you need to memorize things.
Education in 2013: you need to have done the reading, been present, breathing and perhaps even conscious.
It's just a exam-passing technique, but it won't help you understand better and certainly will not help you hold on to more knowledge beyond the date of the exam you are studying for.
Maybe for you, but it sounds like you havent taken many notes, and it certainly sounds like you can only speak for yourself.
For me and many that I know, taking notes can be a way of summarizing and processing the information coming in. By restating what the teacher says in a different way, and by taking it down, one is re-committing it to memory in a more lasting way than passively sitting in the classroom.
IIRC its not even up for debate that "active" learning styles are on the whole more effective than passively listening to a lecture.
...what "Big Brother" policies HAVEN'T been motivated by some superficial 'good intent'?
Seriously?
Last time I checked, the pavement on the road to Hell was still the same as it always was.
-Styopa
..to tell how much their material sucks. I remember spending over $200 for an accounting book @ 1990's only to find that several examples and the answers therein were WRONG. How can you learn the material from a book if you can't trust the book to have the right answers?
Spend a hour or two working a problem just to go in to class the next day, "Oh yeah, the book is wrong!" ..not my most favorite class..
['"It's Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent," said Tracy Hurley, the dean of the school of business" at Texas A&M.]
One would think she would be aware that there can be no such thing as "Big Brother with a good intent."
I'm glad I'm older now; once upon a time ('70s, '80s, even '90s), I wanted to live as long as possible. But with what we have wrought in the last 15 years, I'm glad to be going to the grave.
On one hand, I think technology like this could really help education, particularly online education. It'd be great to be able to pull out students who are struggling because they're not doing the reading.
On the other hand, the article seems to imply that all of this data is being gathered and kept by the publishing companies and CourseSmart then does some simple processing and sells it back. That's not how it should be.
Hey, Texas A&M, this is good, valuable data that you're just letting them have. The Texas A&M system is big enough that you should be developing this system in-house and rolling it out across the system internally. The publishers will want the data anyway because it'll let them improve their textbooks, right? Make them pay you for it.
The Aggies can read!
The real: Teachers are rated based on how much time their students spend reading at home.
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Students in that article complained that the CourseSmart assessment software unfairly judged their "engagement level" as low if they took class notes on a different software package/editor or even if they took handwritten class notes which were not even considered by the software: At a recent session here of a management training class, Mr. Guardia addressed how to intervene efficiently with underperformers. The students watched a video of a print shop manager chewing out an employee without knowing the circumstances. The moral: The manager needed better data.
. . Then Mr. Guardia discussed with his students the analytics of their own reading, which he had e-mailed to them. The students suggested that once again better information was needed. Several said their score was being minimized because they took notes on paper.
. . Others complained there were software bug
And as to the question of whether these analytics mean anything, the software developer had this to say:
CourseSmart says the data it collects now is a beginning. "We'll ultimately show how the student traverses the book," Mr. Devine said. "There's a correlation and causality between engagement and success."Note the phrase "ultimately show", which means that this is still an experiment. And note the jumping to a conclusion about correlation and causation between engagement and success. While that conclusion may be warranted by other studies, and depending upon the definitions used for "engagement" and for "success" (you can always game the definitions too), the problem is that the monitoring systems way of numerically evaluating "engagement" may be all fucked up if you use handwritten notes or read auxillary works (other textbooks, older classes' texts, or even "outlines" of texts).
She recently was reprimanded for taking 29 minutes to move a load of boxes; the boxes were much heavier than usual, but the numbers didn't show that, she said..
The worst uses of these metrification analytics was highlighted in a Los Angeles Times article yesterday called "Monitoring upends balance of power at workplace, some say". That article had some examples of over-monitoring and over-detailed "supervising" with bad or partial numbers:
Or the example of how to read in what you want:
One major retailer, for instance, started measuring its employees, only to discover its most productive workers were part-timers who had been there less than a year. It then began to focus on hiring short-term part-timers, said Ed Frauenheim, a senior editor at Workforce Magazine.Shouldn't it have focussed on finding out the things that made those workers more productive, and wouldn't it have made more sense to have turned those very productive part-time employees into full time employees with better compensation? Having analytics just gives you/the teacher/the supervisor one extra checkbox to check-off as the supposedly valid reason for giving someone a bad evaluation / a bad or failing grade / a demotion or firing. It creates fake evidence or fake justification which can be fallen upon as a crutch or "just cause" for the action which the person in power may have already wanted to take.
Is our children learning?
This was the entire point of Freshman year - in return for your tuition (!!) among other things you got to get away from a daily "papers please" mentality of the lower grades, and then you were graded on the fewer metrics for that class, "however you (presumed honestly) got there". Cue the brilliant slackers types having to face their latent tendencies.
This just another sad factor showing that data leads to people getting a carnal lust to control people with.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
just take a quiz and know how much student understand.
Do you really think students will struggle to get used to touching the 'next page' button about every 1-5 minutes, while playing their computer games?
Teachers will only catch the odd unprepared student who honestly did not have time to study. The professional slackers however will walk free.
We should give students the responsibility. It is their life, their responsibility. Takes about 18-25 years on average to grow up. And this kind of thing just is not helping to achieve becoming an adult.
Cramming some stupid facts into their heads is only one of the task of schools. Making adults out of them is another. Sometimes those conflict. Deal with it.
Some aspects of education are more important than privacy?
And you can speak only for yourself. Each person's brain works differently.
In my case, I'm not strong on "I/O", so if I'm taking notes, I'm clogging up channels that would be better used to absorb the lecture in the first place.
I figured this out gradually during college. The first year, I took copious notes and filled thick notebooks. After realizing that the note taking was counterproductive for me, the last couple of years, I took essentially no notes. My GPA remained the same, but my stress level dropped.
For people like myself, "active" learning is best kept to lab experiments and writing papers.
From the 90's.. The teachers did not give a damn if you actually knew the material or not. They just want to make sure you do all the busywork assigned to you. Why check up on whether or not I did the homework when the class is so painfully slow paced that i ace every test without even opening the book. Then take off a zillion points because I did not do any homework (whats the point when I already know the material?). "It isn't fair that the jocks have to do all the homework to learn it."
Maybe I cheated, you say? Maybe I actually listened during the lectures. If you were capable of doing anything other than reading your pre-planned lectures, you would be able to tell when people are cheating.
Once I truly come to understand something, it has already been memorized. If your goal is to memorize something, then I think you've got your priorities wrong.
For me and many that I know, taking notes can be a way of summarizing and processing the information coming in.
In other words, everybody learns in a different way. All the more reason this Big Brother software is a bad idea. The worst possible thing would be to try to force everyone into a standard way of studying.
Teachers already have a good lead on who the slackers and achievers are in the lessons. I dont see why this is necessasary.
Its like the captain obvious of technology
Ah. Your anecdote contradicts all the research. I hasten to adjust my pedagogy!
I was always surprised at my classmates who never thought to actually read the texts with their coursework. The beauty is in the details, as they say. The details are often only found in the text. I firmly believe one needs to 1) go to class 2) pay attention 3) read the text 4) most importantly, bathe before step 1.
Students deserve academic freedom too. Maybe they're learning the subject via library books on their own time, and have no use for ebooks. The goal of the professor (at the end if the course) is to determine how much a student knows, not to enforce that the professor's method of learning was used.
I think this is more of a matter of the education level at which this is implemented: High School vs. Junior/Community college vs. University undergraduate. Except at the college level, where you need to be able to "push back" at administration to say why you gave a student a poor grade. If a student fails, they might have to take the class again. At a community college, this means more income for the college. Your comments about cheating upward is true for high-school, junior high-school, and middle school. (My god, are they going to do metrics and standardized tests for elementary school students next?) /. article was going to be about software used to assess high-school students, where sometimes teachers do need to babysit and handhold and push them to do the reading and assignments. I thought that in college, it was accepted that you "have to be a big boy / big girl now" and become responsible for your reading habits and study habits. If you don't get around to your homework in high-school, your teacher gets in your face. The college level experience is supposed to be different. Perhaps community college requires professors to be in the students' faces. I thought that research-level university professors were too busy with research to deign interacting with students at this level of detail. Maybe the grad students or TAs would have to deal with undergrad students this way.
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I thought that this
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Are students getting stupider? Are grad students being treated the way undergrads used to be? And are undergrads being treated and micromanaged the way way high-school students used to be? And does this mean that high-schoolers like me are being treated like Jr high or middle school kids of the past?
I bow to your anonymity, your cowardice, and the wisdom of your assertion unsupported by any references or citations. I believe the point of the GP poster was that the software's purported claim to measurement of engagement is inaccurate and unsupported.
To this bad idea, I say no thank you. Why don't we actually treat college students like adults.
Fast forward 25 years...
"Mr. President, we have here a log of your reading of your 'systems of government' textbook and you underlined all these passages about communism, would care to respond to the claim that your actually a communist?!?"
Nothing about this idea is evenly remotely good. It's so bad that who ever thought it up should be fired along with the manager who approved it.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
It will open the book for me, browse through all pages at random intervals, and highlight all sorts of words. That'll show 'em, you can't make me pass this class!
This is fucking bullshit, and why I don't e-read to begin with FUCK IT ALL!
I think that's all true, but originally in 1900 or so, students were expected to know how to do things: they had to have abilities, outside of special disciplines. Since that time, education has been moving more toward having them memorize steps through specific tasks, which makes them good cogs (true, true) but unable to act outside of that narrow framework. Students today lack the ability to go into an unknown situation and reason it out; what they have is the ability to, given a known situation, repeat a series of steps, with no real connection to the desired consequences of those steps.
The problem is Professors want you to read the book as enrichment, but don't actually teach from the book, or test from the book. My last few years of college I stopped buying the textbooks (as the professor would put one on hold at the Library) and found that not opening the book didn't reduce my grades. Now they can reduce your grade for not reading. This is similar to homework, which I found no link between that and understanding homework. I had classes where I performance with excellence on the testing, but the lack of my homework reduce my grade to unsatisfactory.
Most Colleges subscribe to the theory there is one way to learn, which is not true. I've been in classes where they berate the class for not taking notes. I've never take notes as I found they actually reduce learning for me. They way I learn is listening to lecture, walking around and thinking about them, and then a good night sleep. Most of the other methods of study lead me to temporary remembrance of the subject matter. I stand by my methods of learning as I find that I'm able to recall facts and apply them to subject matter I learned in High School and my peers who sometimes performed better than me on tests appear to have no memory of ever learning the topics.
...for an average CS student to write a script that opens every page of the ebook. Maybe 6, if he wants it to skip every page without pictures.
Some classes just have dry reading material. Some classes, you're required to take and have no interest in the subject. Having big brother watch you to make sure you do the required reading isn't the answer. The student can blankly stare at the pages long enough to "read" the words to promptly forget them. With a little effort from the teacher, a bit of interest can be developed and more will be learned and retained past the end of the page.
IIRC its not even up for debate that "active" learning styles are on the whole more effective than passively listening to a lecture.
Simply writing something down is not "active". Thinking about it is active. Writing notes takes time away from thinking.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I already patented it while you were drinking your beer.
'"It's Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent,"
Said every dictator, thug, and authoritarian ever...
Seriously, how can someone say this with a straight face? Oh, wait, I forget...this is a college campus.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I just had to write a fifteen page essay with well-research references (not wikipedia or purely internet based sources), so I'm still stuck in my weekend writing habit of including the citation (url link to L.A. Times) and short snippet in-line quotes from the source material ! Term-paper writing habits seem to carry over into every day activities and writing projects, even /. comments. I do notice that I've written "essay length" posts a bit in the last two days. That's probably also from the paper writing habit of putting my thoughts into a coherent and structured format. How very un-slash-dot-like, eh? :>)
All Cisco Academy instructors are already able to do this through netacad.com. Student logs reveal the amount of time that they spend on each page, including full time stamps. When a student chooses not to engage the curriculum, it is reflected in the log as well as in their test grades.
Also, Google Drive provides the same granularity for assignments that the students turn in. So if a student decides to play video games all day, who is ultimately responsible for their lack of progress?
For secondary instructors, it gives us something concrete to discuss with parents. For education to work, students, teachers, and administrators must be held accountable. This data addresses one of the shortcomings in NCLB.
Simply reading the text doesn't mean you understand it or can apply what you've learned. And what if it the teacher discovers that most of the class skipped a few pages? Will he put a question on the test that can only be answered if you've read that page? How will that help? And what if you're not a fast reader and simply can't get through dull-as-dishwater prose by some undeservedly famous author? Or what if you're a wicked fast reader but the teacher doesn't believe you and downgrades you because you didn't spend as much time reading as he thinks you should? And what if you read the book before? Do you get downgraded because you didn't read it again?
I'm sure they're all just sitting around saying they want more work to do, like seeing if students open their books or not. If a student doesn't want to follow along in class, the teacher isn't going to turn into a nanny and start investigating them.
I wasnt saying that "all note taking is active", i was saying that active styles are more effective and that for many (such as myself) the note-taking is a way of thinking about and engaging with the lecture.
Yes, it is possible to passively take notes, and for me it is not very helpful to do so. But (for me and for many I've talked to) taking notes while thinking on what the professor / speaker / preacher is saying is a strong way of thinking about, reflecting on, and committing to memory what is being said.
I had a professor that allowed cheat sheets on exams. The requirements were that it was a letter sized sheet maximum and hand written. Turns out it was an indirect way to force everyone to read the materials (books and provided lecture outlines), filter out the cruft, and write down the important bits. Students in his class learned and retained more material making cheat sheets then by taking traditional notes. If you give something that appears to be a reward or bonus (a cheat sheet), people tend to put more incentive into doing the work.
I wasn't particularly a fan of teachers that refused to give class notes/outlines to students, Many times it was the ONLY material that would be on the tests and copying stuff off those scribbles they drew on an overhead projector or chalk/dry erase board was painful. When it came time to study, those who didn't have the notes perfectly written down were in a bit of a bind.
'"It's Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent," Bahahahahaahaa......
Everyone is missing the real disadvantage of this technology. If your grades (indirectly or directly) become partially based off of doing the readings, then you have to subscribe to their system. You can't get your textbook from a friend, or second hand, or from another country. They can force you into whatever restrictive license they want, and they get to dictate the price.
Which become even worse when the book is some piece of crap thrown together by the professor teaching the course for a quick dime. Now you need to line their pockets in order to pass.
Textbooks are already priced ridiculously. This will not make it better.
So those college students that have read loads of other material on a particular subject get viewed as cheaters because they didn't read enough pages of the college's e-book yet still got an A?
You have to read ONLY what the college says you need to read, and read all of it or you're an oddball? WTF? The education system gets more and more lost as time goes on.
They're trying to pull an Apple and make textbook sales and use a walled garden, and to that I say "Fuck no." ...
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Ahhh, now I understand their true motivation. Good point. I emphatically agree with what you say.
The issue isn't what the teachers are doing with the data. That's a grease stain from the real horror here.
The issue is, as we go forward, ebook readers will be pretty much the only way kids read library books and any other words, for that matter. When the libraries slowly shut down the paper stacks, we will be looking at a system that as a matter of course tracks every word that a human child, or adult, later, will input into their skulls.
This means: tracking for seditious or suspicious writings. Personality analysis, broken down by year, type, and growth of particular concentration of interest. I'm not saying they will be correct analyses - but they don't have to be, as credit scores and polygraph use attests.
Our society shows, doubtlessly, that such metrics will be undertaken for "security" reasons. Mostly, really, it will be done "because power". Power is all the reason they will ever need. The ability to track not only location, associations, but the very thoughts you, as a kid and beyond, are reading and processing to make you, you.
Billions of paper books will still exist, of course, and smart people will read those to keep their reading habits off the radar, but for the most part, people will accept the monitoring. Watch what you say, watch what you do, and of course watch what you read. And you have nothing to worry about, naturally, if you don't read the wrong things, we will say.
This is hell.
I teach in college... ...and by there ignorant ass friends.
C- See me after class.
Slashdot seems to be mistaking April First stories for real content simply because the story stays online, and may only be noticed days later.
A few days ago, Slashdot dribbled the nonsense about American universities using software to automatically grade essay papers. Now we have the same thing in a different form. Let me help to explain the issue here...
Crooks peddle snakeoil to anyone they can, including blue-chip companies and universities. Many times in the past, crooked time-and-motion companies have sold 'solutions; like this to naive managers. One example was the fabled 'computer keyboard' monitor. The idea was that your boss could use software to monitor your keyboard 'usage' - forgetting the fact that it was child's play to install counter software that automatically appeared to be striking keys in an acceptable pattern use.
Here we have the same old con resurrected this time to 'measure' the use of an electronic document (ebook). Consider the same thing in the old 'analogue' classroom setting. Every pupil holding up their 'reading book'. Every pupil ensuring they turned the page at what seemed to be a plausible rate to the possible observing eyes of the teacher. Most of them, of course, are not reading a damned thing.
YOU CANNOT MEASURE SEMANTICS BY MEASURING SYNTAX. The act of page turning (or the electronic equivalent) is 'syntax'. The 'learning' from the words read is 'semantics'. No amount of syntactical analysis can tell you anything about the semantic information gained by the learner (even a failure to open the book tells you nothing for certain, since the learner nay have already gained its information elsewhere).
The fallacy of the usefulness of syntactical measures of an individuals semantic achievements lies in a profound misunderstanding of statistics. Individuals may teach about the group. The group never teaches about properties of the individual.
Thereby forcing everyone to buy an ebook. All Hail
...a more expensive eBook with monitoring attributes attached. Oh, and ya gotta pay (think of it as a tax) for instructor monitoring. It's to Keep America Safe.
Except that is not true if the adult child (yes, it is possible to be both, the definition of child is different from minor, dependent, etc.) gives permission.
If permission is given you are not only allowed, but usually required (by college/state policy) to discuss matters with the parents. In some cases there is good reason for this. For example, note that the latest research shows that the brain continues to show significant development and maturation into the mid or late twenties.
As a professor you do not know enough about the personal circumstances of the student (nor should you) to make the determination if involving parents. guardians, etc. is appropriate or not. And you do not have the right to determine this, the student and their family have that right and responsibility.
Note that discussions with parents should be handled carefully, in most cases you will want to consult with Department Chairs or Deans, Perhaps office of Student Services, and perhaps have a meeting in conjunction with those and other administrative officials.
You state a lot of things in a hostile and inappropriately condescending manner considering your lack of basic knowledge of the circumstances, requirements, and applicable policies and laws.
How it should be used: "This section here doesn't seem to provide value to our students"
How it will be used: "You read the book, but your page rate was excessive in parts, so the computer gave you a reading score of 87%."
You are clearly an entitled asshole. Obvious from your other posts where you claim to be upset you coudn't test out, then whine that you didn't want to take the harder class because it might hurt your precious GPA. Whaaa! Whaaa! Whaaa! all the way home.
I would have failed you, and would have had the right since attendance is mandatory. Don't like it? Go somewhere else. Note that in the real word "acing the work" without showing up to the workplace would usually get you fired, especially because it is impossible since interacting with other workers is in fact part of the job, for both tangible and intangible reasons. Same in the classroom, where discussion and interaction and questions benefit you and the other students, even if you are too self-absorbed to even imagine how this is possible.
I like the positive way of looking at this that you've chosen. However, I also mourn the loss of what college should have been, could have been, etc.
Do you also use lots of bold in your essays? Because that's a big part of what makes your post look "apk-ish".
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
So, how does the person(s) monitoring this know how *I* learn? Lots of learning and reading styles out there, this is just an effort to give them another meaningless metric to rate students on. Bah.
Organization? You must be joking..
'"It's Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent,"
...it's called grading the students on what they have learned. And I can't believe such an inane comment came from a dean. Of course, it is Texas, land of the dumbed-down and incorrect textbooks, so maybe we shouldn't be that surprised....
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
"It's Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent"
Isn't it always? Who or what defines "good"?
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
No, I copied that style from the A.P. news or the editorial commentary writer's techniques of quoting other documents or statements and bold-face highlighting a portion of it with the statement "[emphasis mine]" to point out that the bold-face was not in the original. It sort of matches my best-friend's speaking style, which I copy from time to time. It helps to show cadences in poetry or indicates deliberate mispronunciations like "putting the em-phaa-sis on the wrong syl-lahb-ull" on purpose. (when they really are correctly pronounced em-phu-sis and syll-a-bul (and correctly spelled "emphasis" and "syllable", just in case you thought I didna know that right spellin' thar, laddie)
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The bold highlights what I really want to quote and reply to; the rest of the un-bolded text maintains the context of the snippet I quoted. The snippet by itself without its surrounding context often does not carry the same connotation that the context helps to provide. I keep the bold out of my essay except as needed in the reference citations. I don't want to lose any "form" points (or any "content" points, either!) on my essay grades.
Education researchers will be able to gather huge amounts of data and we will be able to find optimal teaching and study methods much more easily. Wait, teachers are using this? Oh crap, here comes more heading unrelated to understanding.
I could get a B in most classes I took and barely open the textbook. But A lot of classes I took because they were required, but I had already learned a lot about the subject before. I bet /. is full of geeks who took a lot of classes, and discovered the textbook was an unnecessary joke. One of my friends with a PhD in Physics told me that he learned calculus by going back and reading books that were 50 or more years old; they were better than the textbooks in the 1970's he had.
There is an issue: does the student learn the subject , or learn the curricula. They aren't the same.
I taught for a few terms post grad level. A few students already knew the material inside in some of the classes. My quandry was the ones that didn't show up enough to pass the class.
end of rant
Taking notes is overrated. If your brain can't process the information, taking notes won't mean anything in the long run.
I'm not a big note taker, but taking notes isn't overrated. First of all it can help you process the information. JUST that alone is probably worth taking notes. But it also can help you review the material later. You are given a LOT of material in a short amount of time. Rereading the notes helps you remember the big points. And they are big points that you came up with, not someone else.
Back around 1970 [when electronics meant a transistor radio] I took a course from a professor who put supplemental reading on reserve in the library. On the day of the first hourly exam, he announced that he had been to the library and looked on the check-out cards to see who had done the reading, and that those who did not had forfeited any right to complain about or question their grades in his course.
I wonder about "speed reading" (without a computer). Does this "run afoul" too? I got the training in high school as part of "how you should read to be effective/efficient" with your studies. It would be a shame to penalize folks for that.
Most of my college books were never even opened. Sucked it all in from the classes. Then when I really had to study I was screwed. Toughest course I ever took.