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Bill Gates On Educating the World
theodp writes During February, Bill Gates is playing Perry White at The Verge, expounding on the big bets the Gates Foundation is making to improve the world over the next 15 years. One of those bets is that online classrooms can help the world catch up. Gates' vision of universal online education extends to those who struggle with basic literacy and currently lack online access, far beyond the reach of MOOCs like Coursera, EdX, and Udacity, which have enjoyed their greatest success with higher-level courses aimed at the middle class. "Gates' vision — a wave of smartphones that can act as ubiquitous, cheap computers — is central to solving this problem," explains The Verge's Adi Robertson. "And unfortunately, we're not there yet." But eventually, Gates is betting that a world-class education will only be a few taps away for anyone in the world. And that's when things get really interesting. "Before a child even starts primary school," Bill and Melinda Gates wrote in their Foundation's 2015 letter, "she will be able to use her mom's smartphone to learn her numbers and letters, giving her a big head start. Software will be able to see when she's having trouble with the material and adjust for her pace. She will collaborate with teachers and other students in a much richer way. If she is learning a language, she'll be able to speak out loud and the software will give her feedback on her pronunciation."
All's fine as long as they are using Microsoft products.
But what will it be used to do? I can think of all the times I have used computers in school.
None of them taught me anything. A complete and utter waste of time. Even the Battlechess and Simcity games.
The worst was an IMF edx MOOC that required Excel. Lucky I was able to do the assignments on a borrowed computer that had it.
it will blue screen and another generation will grow up resenting Bill Gates and his fucking trash.
Clippy is going mobile.
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"Before a child even starts primary school," Bill and Melinda Gates wrote in their Foundation's 2015 letter, "she will be able to use her mom's smartphone to learn her numbers and letters, giving her a big head start.
Big Bird and Miss Piggy would like a word with you ... :-)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The desktop cleanup wizard can help you clean up your desktop. ---- What does Bill Gates have to teach the world after this?
I don't think the people who come up with these schemes have ever sat a child in front of a computer, and watched while they tried to learn something from it.
The kind of information children can get that way is not much different than what you can get from reading a book. (Yes, I know the computer has sound and animation.) And for younger children, it's less than they can get by reading a book with their parents.
I would like to see published controlled studies that demonstrate that online classrooms can do as well as classrooms with a teacher.
Or that classrooms with a teacher plus Internet connections are better than classrooms with a teacher alone.
And they should be judged by the standard skills that good teachers are teaching students, not by their skills at answering computerized multiple-choice questions.
One good skill is learning how to tell whether a new innovation will work.
Naturally not "he" and "dad".
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Bill Gates was very successful at separating people from their money for software. He was not successful at creating much from scratch, but that's another story.
Given his propensity toward bad technical decision, I doubt his ability to craft a reasonable, effective not desirable education plan.
Why thank you Rob Limo for that advertisement.
The purpose of my program is to create FUD and demand for my products. You all can help me out with a story about SystemD. Make it real emotional with no facts at all and I will include it for my educational program to prevent these poor African children from using Raspery Pie. We have a competitor out anyway that will knock its socks out! For a mere $1249 more it will include a cell phone attached desktop too!
http://saveie6.com/
Bill is a marketer, businessman, and, of late, a philanthropist ... but he knows blessed little about education. "Not all who excess in business are wise" - Ethics of the Fathers, 2:6.
Bill Gates and Microsoft have been around for a very long time. The only real metric we have about them is that Bill Gates is either the richest or second richest person in the world. Depending upon metrics used. That we know.
From that we can surmise that what Bill Gates and Microsft do excedingly well is take money from people and put it in their own pockets.
Since somewhere in the 90s Bill Gates has touted solving poverty with computers. All that has materialized is a transfer of wealth from many to one.
Just remember: poverty is the fruit of wealth.
Somewhere around 20,000 children die every day from poverty. That's a 9/11 (3,000) every few hours and a holocaust (6 million) every year.
But poverty isn't an impossible problem. Some countries have very little poverty: in such countries it's relatively easy to find a decent job that pays enough to live simply but comfortably. But then other countries have most of their population trapped in desperate poverty. In such countries, there's typically a a relatively small group of (extremely rich) people lording it over everyone else as a (mostly hereditary) dictatorship that is focused on government policies that keep itself in power and exploit everyone else.
So what does this have to do with the USA? Well, these dictatorships that are exploiting their own people often have close ties to certain rich and influential families in the USA. And these families use their influence on the US government to have the US government support the dictatorships. Sometimes the support is fairly limited - allowing the dictatorship to purchase military equipment to oppress their population and stay in power. Other times the US government provides more direct financial and military assistance to keep the dictatorship in power. The general term for such situations in banana republics.
In the USA, it is often said that freedom and democracy are fundamental human rights. And rights are supposed to be universal and irrevocable - not just for Americans. When Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, talked about the USA being founded on the principle of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, he meant ordinary people - not members of a small hereditary ruling class. Often you hear American politicians talk about promoting American interests in other countries when what they really mean is promoting the interests of a small number of rich and powerful Americans at the expense of ordinary people in other countries. This is a betrayal of one of the most fundamental American values: democracy.
So, getting back on topic, yes, education is important and, yes, online education has tremendous potential. But what's also needed is for countries like the USA to stop doing the banana republic thing - stop helping hereditary dictatorships keep their populations trapped in desperate poverty.
Bill Gates needs to practice the Prime Directive. Primitives and barbarians should be left to die by their own hands.
Gates is becoming (has already become?) the new Ross Perot -- crazy rich guy who thinks, along with many other people who should know better, that because he made a lot of money He Has All The Answers.
If we're stupid enough to follow him down this absurd path, we deserve what we get.
Have any of you people bubbling over how brilliant the man is read "The Road Ahead"? Seriously, read it and THEN come back here and tell me the guy is a visionary.
Every problem looks like a nail.
Bill Gates has a computer. He has spent his life looking for uses for it.
He should check the tool boxes for other tools.
The first world education has failed to produce enough people capable of discerning truth from fiction and in many cases even barely capable to detect bullshit. Sure, some people can still do it some of the time. But very few can do it consistently. A tiny minority of Americans understood that Saddam was never involved in 911 AND that he had no weapons of mass destruction in his disposal. Tiny minority of Russians understand that their president and government in general is destroying their economy with centralization of power. For that matter only a tiny minority of Americans understand that also. Tiny minority of people understand that without strong morality (protection against theft) in the area of private property rights the economy doesn't have a long lived and prosperous future. Tiny minority of people understand that governments as a general concept guarantee violence and immorality of theft and murder in the modern global society.
What can western style education do to create free thinking people truly capable of changing their own plight in the world? Education cannot be a government's job to create free people.
You can't handle the truth.
Teach them to respect the law, just like Bill Gates
hmm... "Details of which have been lost over time"... hmm...
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
And that child shall summon a Lyft ride, and the Lyft driver shall call the mother and discover, much to his chagrin, that the mother will cancel the ride he's already traveled 7 miles across town to pick up.
We all have fun poking at Mr. Gates, warranted or not. And, we can all believe that the 31.6 billion dollars his foundation has GRANTED since inception internationally is not much of a personal sacrifice in relative terms. But a least he's taking a shot. Surely, figuring out how to grant money effectively is more than a full time job. Regardless of one's opinion of the effectiveness of his benevolent ventures, there's more than just a financial commitment here.
I find it honourable and surely it has majorly affected recipients in a positive manner. Undoubtedly, he has made life changing or saving differences in this world. If you had the ability to do anything, anywhere, anytime, had the ability to make multiple errors, sans ANY change (personal, financial, etc), how long would it be before you would just disappear from any public exposure?
If you plant seeds in every place in the world, some of them will produce fruit and some will fail. I see the motivation as benevolent and don't believe condemnation here is deserved or warranted.
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Some good sanitation might help. Otherwise all the newly educated will die of dysentary.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
http://www.fastcoexist.com/3041841/change-generation/4-things-you-probably-know-about-poverty-that-bill-and-melinda-gates-dont
This is a great article on how although what Bill and Melinda are doing is honorable, it is also ill-conceived and shows fundamental lack of understanding of the underlying issues of these regions.
They have already been doing work on that, just have a look at Bill's blog.
http://www.gatesnotes.com/Deve...
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*This is the cute bunny virus, please copy this into your sig so it can spread
"Gates' vision - a wave of smartphones that can act as ubiquitous, cheap computers"
The sterility of the 'vision' is quite staggering in its banality. I guess that's the reason Microsoft (and Intel) helping the OLPC project didn't turn out so well:
One Laptop Per Child - Production Delays Caused By Microsoft, Intel?
Intel: doing the dirty on OLPC
Education Government Incentive program
"We recognize the critical importance of helping emerging markets build healthy and legal PC ecosystems and clearly the answer is having Windows be a core component."
"Until all the details of the program have been developed, it is important that we have a way to address large PC purchases that involve low-cost/no-cost competitors in the education (and Government) sectors, especially in emerging markets."
...if Bill Gates actually believes any of what he's spouting about education. I can understand if he believes it because he's simply ignorant and high on his own billionaire hubris. So why's he spending millions on trying to disestablish public education in the US and Canada?
Read a few comment sections and you'll soon realise that giving people access to all human knowledge doesn't actually grant them the ability or desire to process it properly. The internet has proven a fertile ground for a new wave of urban legends, conspiracy theories, junk science and agressive political views.
too bad the talking head never had, and still doesn't have, anything useful to say. Meaning that all that philantropy will ultimately achieve very little, far less than it could have, and all that'll be left is the warm fuzzy feeling for the oh-so-philantropic source of the money. Blood money, really, "earned" by exploiting a monopoly. That money could have instead been spent on this sort of thing years earlier, effectively putting the state of the art back as many years.
See Silicon Snake Oil and High Tech Heretic...
I presume he means "help sub-70 IQ Africans to somehow magically change their DNA so they are as intelligent as white people"...
Why can't they make their OWN clean drinking water? Why do other races have to help these people? What will they do for us? Not only will they do nothing for us, they ruin our lives when they invade our countries - sorry - 'immigrate' into them...
Oh wait, that's convicted monopolist out to screw the world, again.
"Before a child even starts primary school," -- so, that's kindergarten.
"she will be able to use her mom's smartphone to learn her numbers and letters, giving her a big head start." -- we call that parents talking to their children.
"Software will be able to see when she's having trouble with the material and adjust for her pace." -- we call that parenting.
"She will collaborate with teachers and other students in a much richer way." -- richer than the human teacher being right there in the room? Explain that one to me, then you can replace hookers with software too.
"If she is learning a language, she'll be able to speak out loud and the software will give her feedback on her pronunciation." -- we call that conversing with humans.
So this whole concept is not to bring education to the world. Instead it's to bring childhood development problems due to lack of parenting to the world. Excellent.
They will need training; engineers for example; capital equipment, reliable energy, and other infrastructure costing probably hundreds of billons. Some of the training can be done on the web. But for Civil Engineering projects there is still no real substitute for 'boots on the ground' or hands on experience for a well trained cadre of engineers and technicians.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Yes I saw that. But it is not large enough. We will probably need hundreds of billions of dollars over 10 or more years.
This has already been done in fact, decentralized water purification, a number of times and failed. Centralized purification and delivery is the most reliable and efficient way to get drinking water to the masses.
Citaton:
http://www.emas-international....
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Some of us were hung for shooting law enforcement trying to defend ourselves.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I am the creator of the educational software GCompris. While it would be hard to prove but it may really help children. At least many users reported us positive feedbacks over the years.
The Borg Foundation probably contributes a pittance compared to the taxpayers of western nations. It's more image reform to recover from their various legal shenanigans than anything else.
Some US states base their future prison needs on 3rd grade literacy rates. Just reading with a child twice a week, for 20 minutes or so, can make a dramatic difference in outcome. Once a person can read, their interests rapidly take control.
Unfortunately, most children will never see anything except a single book -- a religious text, a primitive human training manual, written 1400-3300 years ago. Widespread, low cost handheld computing devices might give them a chance to expand their library.