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Rupert Murdoch Won't Be Teaching Your Children To Code After All
theodp writes: Plans for Rupert Murdoch & Co. to teach your children to code just hit a bump in the road. Murdoch's News Corp. last week announced it plans to exit the education business as it announced a $371 million write-down of the investment in its Amplify education unit, which aimed to reinvent education via digital tools, tablets and curriculum reinforced with snazzy graphics. The news may help to explain why Amplify MOOC, the entity that offered online AP Computer Science A to high school students, was re-dubbed Edhesive ("online education that sticks") a couple of months ago. Tech-backed Code.org, whose $1+ million "Gold Supporters" include the James and Kathryn Murdoch-led Quadrivium Foundation, announced a partnership with Edhesive to bring CS to schools in June, around the same time Edhesive LLC was formed.
I didn't want that bastard teaching kids anything at all. I don't need any immoral cutthroat bastards in the family, thank you very much.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Give it a rest dude. We know you think that H1B's and teen coders are going to take your jerb, but we don't need an update every time code.org issues a press release.
To create a portal to the secret level, combine Wirt's Leg and a Tome of Town Portal in the Horadric Cube.
I'm a life-long learner. I can't get enough of learning. I have three college degrees, a couple of diplomas from community colleges, plus some IT certs. I try to attend conferences and training sessions whenever I can to afford to, time-wise and cost-wise. I've also taken several MOOC courses.
The MOOC courses have been, by far, the worst out of all of them. It isn't the quality of the lessons or the material that's the problem. Those actually tend to be top notch. It's the social aspect of MOOCs that are absolutely awful.
Let me give you an example. I took a MOOC course about a programming language. It involved some relatively simple programming assignments, followed by a final exam. The tutorial videos were good, and the assignments were good, too, but the forums for the course were abysmal.
So many of the other forum participants were from India, China, or some African country, asking for their certificate PDF even before the course had started! I mean, the course videos, assignments and exam weren't even available yet, but these people demanded that the professor leading the course send them the certificate that they had not earned right away!
This same sort of bullshit happened once the course started. Every day I'd go into the forums to try to find other actual students to converse with, but I'd end up wading through a huge pile of these useless third world comments demanding certificates, asking for exemptions from the assignments, asking for exemptions from the exam, complaining about how deadlines fell on obscure religious holidays, demanding re-grading of assignments and exams that had been failed, and so on.
Learning isn't just about watching videos. It's about interacting with your fellow students. MOOCs should allow this on a global scale, but instead all they allow is for third worlders to try to get unearned credentials easier. Not only does this ruin the learning experience for the few legitimate students, but it helps make the credentials seem very untrustworthy in the end. I don't mention the MOOC certificates that I've earned, even the verified ones.
After these numerous bad experiences, I no longer engage in MOOCs. I'd really like to, but I just can't justify putting up with so much bullshit.
Yes I am a cow, you were right all along. Moo moo moo! And I use a halberd.
Why wait 20+ years for cheap workers when you can bribe Congress to give you all the H1B's you want RIGHT NOW?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Been waiting for a bus all day. Leaving Chicago and bound for New Orleans.
Yours,
Jesus
A $371 M loss on an education program that never even got off the ground would have the GOP in the House and Senate calling for heads on platters. But if it's a big business, hey - it's a just a writedown.
And before you rank and file tea party start talking about "your money" vs "corporate money" you need to make sure that none of your 401k/IRA/retirement/investment holdings include this large cap stock (or any iteration of the S&P500) because if you do - it *is* your money.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Totally misread that initially as, "Rupert Murdoch won't be touching your children after all".
I was a bit disappointed when I reread it, not gonna lie.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
What really happened was that they found out that coding has a strong liberal bias.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Believe it or not, working for Newscorp wasn't bad in the ways that you might think. It was one of the more socially progressive companies that I worked for, even offering benefits coverage to domestic partners (which the law in no way required or even recognized the validity of here).
How was it bad?
Upper management. Really, they had no idea how to run such a large company. Rebranding, reorganizing, changing things around before they gave the last batch of massive changes a chance to succeed or fail. ADHD was at the helm. The executive politics were particularly toxic, a petty fiefdom in Atlanta acting like the tail wagging the dog for a time. And the tablet initiative. I mean, really, WTF?
For all of the public speculation about nefarious behaviors, there was really nothing to that. The undoing was a simple case of incompetent upper management. It's that simple.
It has a host of psychological,political, economic, and sociological factors which cannot be addressed by technology alone. Anyone who thinks that throwing a bunch of technology at the problem and then snapping their fingers to find everything fixed overnight is, to be charitable, arrogant or stupid.
There is no magic bullet.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Darn, I was looking forward to having my kids learn the fair-n-balanced API. Something must be done to counter the liberal program libriaries.
That URL is http://store.doverpublications.com folks. Still have good cheap math books, and will be around long after these edu-hesive things are forgotten.
Start here:
An Introduction to Functional Programming Through Lambda Calculus
http://store.doverpublications.com/0486478831.html
You'll learn more than all the MOOCs put together.
I must have misunderstood this "education" business completely, despite about a decade or so of teaching experience! If I had only known it was all about "snazzy graphics" and the right technology, maybe I would have been more successful at teaching!
Or not. This may be the most pathetic large-scale fail in the the history of teaching.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"Education" no, they didn't want to do this. "Reeducation", yes, they did want to do this. However, Murdoch found they can't compete with the existing entrenched reeducation system.
Seriously, if you have children or care about education AT ALL you should watch this link which details the practice of federal government personality profiles and promotion of group think to children. A friend has done something bad. Should you tell a parent, teacher, or keep the group's secret? The answer is keep it secret, and your kids are being graded on this. There is also a right and wrong answers for OPINIONS and ATTITUDE. You will repeat the reeducation process until you conform.
By the way, AP Pascal in a high school in upstate New York in the '80's had you programming recursive descent parsers in a Pascal environment on Apple 2 (II, //, //e, etc) computers and would have put you ahead of what most colleges were teaching in Freshman CS at the time. So, way to take a step back, nation's educational system.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?