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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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.