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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!
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!
What the fuck are you talking about? Sliding scales?
There are plenty of degreed programmers that can't get jobs, and it's because companies claim they need senior level guys. Then they go and hire Ackmed as their wage slave for next to nothing.
Is Ackmed an expert? No, but for one Anerican programmer you can get 3-4 Ackmeds, so why not?
This. +1 informative
I work for a major IT outsourcing provider... we're talking the scale of the good ole EDS.
In the US-of-A department... we don't have a shortage of qualified workers. Hell, we are laying off qualified workers left and right. And I'm not talking just programming... we're talking system admins, business analysts, finance people, guys who mop the floor, etc.
We're brining in H1B visa people because they are 50% (or less) of the cost of a USA worker. And that's only in the rare occasion we can't offshore to India completely (due to contractual requirements or such), where the cost is 20% of a USA worker. Hell even using Mexico labor is frowned upon because India is cheaper, although the resulting quality and work throughput goes to shit.
This has NOTHING to do with what sort of education you have, your work ethic, the color of your suit, or anything else. It's all about the money and how much it saves the bottom line.
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?
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.
Exactly.
This has to do with fabricating evidence for a fabricated argument used as an excuse for hiring more H1B visa workers.
There is no shortage of qualified domestic workers, they're just trying to make it look like there is.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Yea, the software dev manager here was complaining because he needed a new programmer for a project. I jokingly said I could code and he replied that I wouldn't take $20,000 a year but he could contract someone in the Philippines for $20,000 a year. I make quite a bit more than $20,000 but the cost of living is also a lot higher than in Manila.
http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-...
Indices Difference
Consumer Prices in Denver, CO are 88.95% higher than in Manila
Consumer Prices Including Rent in Denver, CO are 127.23% higher than in Manila
Rent Prices in Denver, CO are 243.15% higher than in Manila
Restaurant Prices in Denver, CO are 198.53% higher than in Manila
Groceries Prices in Denver, CO are 97.02% higher than in Manila
Local Purchasing Power in Denver, CO is 175.43% higher than in Manila
[John]
Shit better not happen!
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?
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.
When I hear "Took our Jerbs" I'm reminded of Bob.
Bob was 5 years away from retirement when I started in 2005.
Bob refused to learn AutoCAD. He "didn't trust it". Any task that required drawing would take Bob 5-10x as long as anyone else.
We put an intern in charge of shadowing Bob.
When Bob retired his job was taken over by a few python scripts (He didn't trust Excel's Sort either) and the other stuff was absorbed by fresh graduates that worked much cheaper than Bob.
Bob insisted he was 'highly skilled' because he had a Masters Degree. He thought he was in high demand and could take off to any company when in reality it was just too much work to fire him and he did his job 'ok' enough to make it to retirement. If Bob was in his 30s or 40s we would have dropped him for a fresh college graduate that had modern skills. Bob would have probably sat on Slashdot complaining about being "highly skilled" but not being able to find a job.
For all those "highly skilled programmers" looking for jobs, here are a few within 25 miles of Farmington Hills, MI.
- Simulink (99 of them are $100k+). (Simulink is a 'dirty' graphical programming language that Slashdot likes to mock.)
- RTOS
- dSpace
- OSEK
They even have sponsored job listings like this one.. (I doubt they'd pay to sponsor it if they're just using it as an excuse to hire a H1B). Full time. Very good Embedded C knowledge required. Also need to have relevant modern skills like knowledge of CAN, LIN, and FlexRay.
Those results can be replicated in multiple parts of the country. Look for locations near any Aerospace, Heavy Machinery or Automotive companies.
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.
Where have you guys been living? Outsourcing has been going on for decades. Yet the world keeps turning and things are pretty good in the US compared to the fucking Phillipines.
I think you are living an isolated life, because since at least mid 80s inflation-adjusted wages have been stagnant and job participation rates have been declining. This means that fewer people in US have jobs, and ones that do are being paid less (because of how inflation is calculated, having a smartphone over landline is somehow considered a wealth gain, despite it being progress-adjusted the same thing).
I am not even talking here about how millennials getting screwed with student loans and so on. Just US economy on the whole.
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.
Wow, so since we're not suffering complete abstract poverty like you'd see in say, Pasay, we need to shut our pieholes and stop complaining? How things are in Pasay doesn't help my friends & family here in the USA get jobs.
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.