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Bill Gates Has Spent $1+ Million To Get Mark Zuckerberg's Software In Schools
theodp writes: "Today is a milestone for personalized learning," boasted Mark Zuckerberg in a Facebook post Tuesday. "For the first time, more than 100 new schools will adopt personalized learning tools this school year. [...] A couple of years ago, our engineering team partnered with Summit [a Zuckerberg, Facebook, and Gates Foundation supported charter school network] to build out their personalized learning software platform so more schools could use it. [...] Congratulations to the Summit team, the new Basecamp schools and the entire personalized learning community on an exciting milestone!" Perhaps Zuckerberg should have also given a shout-out to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which awarded a $1.1 million grant last year "to support the Summit BaseCamp Program that will bring Next Generation learning at no cost to all partner schools that are accepted into the program." The New York Times characterized the Facebook-Summit partnership as "more of a ground-up effort to create a national demand for student-driven learning in schools." Before you scoff at that idea, consider that an earlier Gates-Zuckerberg collaboration helped give rise to a national K-12 Computer Science crisis!
A million is nothing to them. They only want people to believe we have no programmers here so they can continue to push H1-Bs.
... why is this news.
Zuckerberg is doing this because he loves children. There's absolutely no way he's trying to pull a younger audience to Facebook in order to increase ad revenue. That'd be just WRONG!
I love that there is a school system sponsored by the foundation. I hate the fact that it is only in 2 states California and Washington. What about the other 48 states? Like most other things , tech firms continue to ignore making investments in other states. Just as a reminder they make money from all 50 states.
Bill managed to convince J. Random Luser that Windows is the PC, now he's helping Zucker convincing the kids that Facebook is the internet. They just can't get enough.
a national K-12 Computer Science crisis
Really? A crisis?
Who's going to die because of this?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Oh look, another "lets not educate the children so I can keep my jerb" rant from theodp. How original.
So you know how to code, this alone won't get you anywhere. You also need to know something else useful and specific or someone in India can and will do your job for much less.
Because of this more coding as part of HS education won't get us anywhere other than creating more poorly compensated and/or unemployed coders.
They need to go to Arkansas and Alabama, not California and NY. The reasons are simple. Most "red states" would welcome this stuff with open arms. If they faced organized opposition to innovation in teaching, the political class of most red states would be more likely to curb stomp that opposition than support it. These are states where support for vouchers, homeschooling and other education reforms are extremely high.
Is this "innovation in education" or "innovation in data harvesting"? What student personal data do the companies involved harvest and store? How long are the data stored? How are the data used? What entities have access to the data, either directly or through purchase/lease agreements?
http://www.facebookdetox.com/p/from-httpwww.html
Vocational schools are still tied to the college system and that part is taking them down. As they forced to have college gen educations + filler and fluff (some are OK but near the full load?)
That is also an issue the full university's where that are lot's of classes that are a time / cost waste for most.
The credit transfer system seems to be very profit driven now days. You must retake our classes even then they are using the same books. It's so bad that some states have laws saying that state schools must take community colleges credits.
Now the trade schools in the past did fill the gaps of night schools for working people who the old fashioned university system did not cover.
The GI bill pushed a lot of people in to schools but why should some who as been in doing a tech job for years have to go to school for 2-4 years to get a price of paper saying the same thing? I think some non University places did give credits for military service skills.
But when the student loan rules where changed to stop discharged during bankruptcy then it was the start of schools jacking costs up and starting to be way more open to taking any one.
Some community colleges do have classes / tracks found in trade / tech schools but not all of them.
There are a lot of iffy tech boot camps (mainly in the costs / marking (you will get a job paying X / *We just take X% from you job for Y time to pay for this boot camp)
University of Phoenix was the online school and lot of the ad's billed it as business degree school for working pros who did not want to give up there full time jobs to get more / higher degrees but some where along that line it shifted somewhat to an easy place to get that piece of paper with out getting in the way of your job.
It is hard to imagine anything that has been as destructive to the productivity of the American work force as facebook. Now he wants to release educational tools to some how make up for it?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Please someone send him to Mars already.
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What you are talking about, and the devastation Gates has wrought on education in America is too extensive to note here. A good resource: www.dianeravitch.net. Search for 'Gates'.
...to control the plebeians. How is this "news for nerds?"
"Professors" that say how things are done in a real world they have never been in.
https://www.dslreports.com/for...
Don't get me wrong, if it weren't for math and technology my career wouldn't exist, but why exactly do we need entire generations of programmers? Shouldn't we be teaching kids to pursue their interests instead of forcing some ideal on them?
Okay, sure, computers are everywhere and its helpful to know how to use them. Math is helpful in most everything from following a recipe in the kitchen to designing space aircraft. Lets face it folks, not everybody gets to be (or even wants to be) an astronaut. Enable the kids to pursue stuff on computers to their little hearts content, but don't force a kid to program if they have no desire to. Let them find their own way through life.
Mike Rowe has what I think is a great outlook here. There's dozens or even hundreds of jobs out there that go unfilled because they aren't sexy. Many of which can pay more than your typically bachelors in CS or Engineering after a couple years in the trade.
The credit transfer system seems to be very profit driven now days. You must retake our classes even then they are using the same books. It's so bad that some states have laws saying that state schools must take community colleges credits.
I work with a lot of student interns over the summer, and I have to say, the community college students are not as well prepared as the four-year-degree students, even if they have nominally taken the same courses. The community college tends to emphasize "this is how you do this precise task" without every going into "this is how to understand how this works."
(But I will give them this: the community college students can do a decent job at soldering. The University students make solder joints that are so poor I think I could do better using a match.)
If a four-year college says that the community college course isn't sufficient for their educational credits, and they have to take the "same" course again: I would tend to believe them: the same course is not actually the same when you take it at a different school.
If technology in school is so great how come the employees of companies such as Apple and Google send their children to a Waldorf School in which they don't use technology (tablets, computers, etc) for teaching? https://www.theguardian.com/te...
It sounds as if you were able to take the money from all of these "silver bullets" that are supposed to save education and put it towards the best teachers it would go a long way. Then the union would have to let the underperforming teachers be replaced. (God forbid someone bad at their job should lose it!) And the administration should be cut back so that the teachers can focus on the teaching.
When the cashier at Panda Express asks me to round up to the next $1 to donate to Children's Hospital.
In my opinion, there's absolutely nothing wrong with adding some basic coding education in primary grades. Even if some of it is mandatory, it's better to make sure students are at least exposed to some core concepts. Things like logic, problem solving, etc. need to be developed for just about anyone to function in society these days.
What I don't like are two things -- first is the idea that everyone needs to become a computer programmer, and second is the obvious push for more H-1B visa labor that efforts like this imply.
In the case of "everyone needs to be a coder," here's a perfect concrete example. I'm a systems integration person, so I deal with developers all the time getting their code running in real-world environments. The company I work for has basically offshored all development, so the very few devs and us engineering folks get back a lot of interesting code from a mix of the Usual Suspects (Tata, Infosys, etc.) We're working with an offshore team on brand new development rather than the usual maintenance stuff we give them. They are absolutely incapable of doing anything that isn't explicitly written in a spec document. We have to handhold them through every single step; not once has an original idea come out of that crowd. I think a lot of the "everyone must code" workers domestically will be very much like that. It's not just following a set of procedures -- you need creativity, troubleshooting and problem solving skills to do well in IT or development. In the case I am dealing with now, someone higher up than us got sold the idea by the outsourcer that the offshore team they gave us was a bunch of architect-level, subject matter experts in the technology we're working with, and that's proving to be quite obviously false. But, this same situation could easily be repeated onshore if a bunch of "everyone must code" people are thrown on a project.
Now, for the "we need more H-1Bs" argument -- I don't buy the fact that there aren't trainable people companies can find domestically, and they definitely abuse the H-1B program and body shops to absolve themselves from the need to train employees. If I were elected king, I would fix the problem in 2 phases -- the first would be to turn off the entire program for a period so that no company would have the advantage over another, and re-introduce it slowly with the body shop loopholes closed. Companies only use H-1Bs or body shops because their competitors do -- if no one had access to this cheap labor pool, no one would have an advantage based on it. Until you get rid of the body shop loophole, you're going to have the self-perpetuating spiral of people not finding success in IT or development, and therefore, new entrants will decrease. If people feel they have a stable job ahead of them in their future, they'll continue to study in this field. Otherwise they'll just be rational actors and go into medicine or get an MBA.
The community college tends to emphasize "this is how you do this precise task" without every going into "this is how to understand how this works."
Which is why "Soldering" should be a trade by now along the same lines as pipe fitting, plumbing, electrician, etc. If you need circuits built you hire the solderer. If you need circuits designed you hire the engineer. (And that's not to say one can't learn to do the other).
If they unionized they could prevent offshoring, get decent wages, etc.
Any part of a job that is "This is how you do it" is a skilled trade. That's more or less exactly how skilled trades have always been. Leatherworkers, carvers, blacksmiths, etc. Germany still has a very good skilled trade program. When I worked there we had 17-18 year olds on rotations that were learning exactly how to do precise tasks while the engineers did other stuff.
the community college students are not as well prepared as the four-year-degree students,
Because they were prepared to do different things. You even commented on the difference in educations. If you hire someone that understands the theory when you need to do the precise task or hire someone that can do the precise task when they need to know the theory that's the hiring manager's fault.
At my job I have no shortage of work just shortage of skilled workers. I need a bunch of people to do precise tasks so that I can spend my time on the theory. I could outsource 80% of my job to skilled trades like that: Simulink modelers, Python coders, etc so. The US education system hasn't been turning these out (but they're starting).
Every time HR sends us another 'useless' engineering Intern I think to myself that I could hire a bunch of HS dropouts that loved Python/Minecraft and teach them to do what I needed done faster than I could teach an engineering student. And at a fraction of the cost.
college gym class are a big rip off for most where one class can cost more then a 2 year high end gym membership.
Some colleges still have the swim test that you have to pay for.
CIA. Microsoft is full government spyware, Google is full government network, devices, OS's spyware, and Facebook profiles and accordingly, is spyware. IP's and times logged and mapped human relationships.
Will it help any of them live longer? no.
What does this mean? A digital dictator deciding how many minutes reading have to be completed, how many preparation tests taken, how many comments written (eg OneNote)? That's just a glorified schedule that micro-manages a child's education. 30 years of computers in education has not changed the fundamental need in schools: Simple, interactive lessons on platform-independent software. It doesn't exist for the same 2 reasons; 1) administrators moving the goalposts, 2) copyright preventing the re-use of lessons. Schools are repeatedly re-inventing the wheel. There's been some progress in the open-source industry (eg. Khan academy, Coursera) but it's not being supported and expanded in the way it should be. Because there's no money in that.
Has anyone tried Peerless online learning?. That's where every student has to quiz another student on the lesson, every week. It has 3 problems: 1) The teacher/materials rushes through fundamental facts and definitions, leaving students ignorant, 2) 50% of students writing the same exam question (from the first 10 minutes of the lesson), 3) students who failed the lesson, writing the exam answers. Audience participation means learning, but this methodology just spreads the laziness and failures.
This is how spies distract the public from simple facts.. by running you around the block with various psychologies.
This case it is ask many questions.
I'm sitting here with a 4.0 CS degree and no one even calls me for an interview. Some crises this is. Maybe Zuck wants cheap labor. Seems to be a crisis in his wallet