Right! One of the reasons those 3rd graders oohed and ahhed so much was that they probably had never watched a launch of any kind. I also showed them a shuttle launch in HD and you would have thought it was Star Wars from the reaction I got. I really can't wait to see how students react when the first Ares test flight goes up next year (if it does). I think people will be surprised by the public reaction, especially young people.
You are absolutely right. The key word there is "play." The best education comes when kids do authentic projects they are interested in with support from teachers who are willing to let the spotlight be on the student instead of the teacher.
This, you'll note, is NOT the way most high schools work. We need to get away from "testing" kids and move towards letting them "play."
I also taught high school, and you are right that high school kids get left out. But I think it's less the fault of NASA and more the fault of high schools. High school is so rigid and change-adverse that any attempts by an outside agency to come in is usually shot down. This is even more evident with the focus on high stakes testing.
We can't just "un-retire the shuttle," mainly because it is a bloated, out-of-date, foam-shedding death trap.
Besides, with everyone talking about creating jobs, how does it make sense to cut NASA hard and put tons of people who are working on Ares out of work?
Sorry, but I have taught kids and the best way to turn children into future aerospace engineers is to launch some new rockets. I have shown 3rd graders poorly drawn CGI of a Ares 1 launch and it was enough to garner "oohs," "aahs," and "I want to do thats,"
This is key. As a technology facilitator (I show teachers in my district how to use technology better) I give my teachers free and open stuff all the time. They always worry about the free part. It's really a tough concept to understand in our window-dominated, malware-infested world. But once the idea gets through to them and they see Tuxpaint or Audacity or Gcompris or Gimp, or Open Office, they flip out and are converts for life.
One example I use when talking to teachers is worksheets. Teachers already share worksheets like crazy. One person creates it and then shares it with a friend. Then they make some changes and pass it on. When I was in the classroom, a friend once gave me a "great worksheet." It took me a minute to realize that it was a heavily modified version of a worksheet I had created two years before. Does this sound familiar?
There will always be some idiots like the teacher in this letter. But teachers, for the most part, will get it, they just need a metaphor they recognize.
You think college textbooks are bad? What about public school. In that case the victim isn't a poor college student, but YOU. As a teacher I have seen the way this works. The average high school literature book is well over $60. What do you get for your money? 75% is out-of-copyright book excerpts, poems and that are all out there for free on the net. Then you have the crappy pictures and lousy activites and questions that most teachers ignore anyway. Then every five years or so we do a new textbook adoption and toss out all the old books (many of which are still in good shape).
The sad part is that public school teachers are natural open-source advocates, even if they don't know it. For years we have created and shared tests, quizzes and worksheets. I once was given a thrice-photocopied worksheet that I had created myself two years earlier. If we could harness all those good ideas and activities that are already out there and combine them using collaborative software we could wean the big publishing companies from all that public money and use it instead to buy e-book readers and other technology for kids to read the books on.
Congrats on the test scores. I taught English for a year in Broward County (shudder) and I know what you mean.
I agree totally on your "cookie-cutter automatons" theory. I have actually had other teachers tell me that we need to give kids orders without telling them why so they can "get used to it." That conversation did not end well. The problem is that we are moving into the 21st century with an education system that is trained to produce workers for 19th century factories. Until a majority of teachers change their minds on this and stop acting like medieval overlords, we are screwed.
I'd love to see a utopia of public transit and cheap taxis, but for a vast amount of the U.S, it's just not feasible and won't be for some time. I live just 45 minutes from a medium-sized urban area (Charlotte, NC) but it is still rural enough that I live 5 minutes by car from the nearest crappy grocery store and 30 minutes to the nearest good one. Things are just too far away to walk or bike and the population is just too low to make reliable, timely transit possible. I don't see this changing and I don't think it should. The only alternative would be increase population, which would be more than we could bear.
Speaking as someone who has lived in a big city, the REAL solution there is just what you describe, but private, eco-friendly passenger cars are going to have to be part of the mix outside the beltways.
Amen. Up until now, I have been a huge supporter of this project. This article pretty much made me write it off as dead.
I work in a semi-rural school district in North Carolina with about 14,000 kids. Many of the kids and a fair number of the teachers are comfortable with computers. We have a decent WAN and a fairly stable Internet connection. Even given this, there is no way in hell I would try to implement a 1:1 laptop program yet. Deployment would be a nightmare. I can only imagine deployment in the wilds of Peru.
The problem is that you can't just throw laptops at the populace and wait for the Angelic choirs to start singing. You need policies, ways to charge the things, training for teachers on how to do wikis, blogs, etc. It takes time, effort, and a willingness to be open to new, paradigm-shifting ideas about education. This is hard enough in tech-savy America. I had always assumed that a big part of the OLPC project would be OLPC people going out in the community to help students and teachers integrate the machines into education. I was shocked to hear that there is pretty much NO plan for integration and deployment.
You see, computers in education are really not about the software. Computers are a tool. It's all about how you use the tool.
Get ready, this thing will crash hard and Bill Gates won't need to do anything to make it happen.
There's the rub. As a teacher, I had to sit on our "school improvement team." for two years. Our main job was shuffling through lists of absences and sending letters home when they reached three or more absences. Then we had to find the kid, and talk them into signing an attendance contract that said they would not skip anymore. As the semester wore on, the list of kids with over 5 absensces got longer and longer. It took every minute of my "planning" time to find them. If we weren't able to get an attendance contract signed at sent home, the kid could still graduate. It was somehow "our" fault that the kid was skipping school and it wasn't fair that we had not notified the parent, even though an automated callout system would call home every day a kid skipped.
So keep this in mind when teachers jump on this idea and praise it. Right now the responsibility is not on the kids or the parents, but on the teachers.
Works in a bar, but I always hated it in the arcade. I don't remember how many times I was standing in a line waiting on a game and some punk walks past the three people waiting to put his quarter on the game like none of us existed. I hated that.
Hmm, Okay. So according to you, these are the "benefits" I would get from a Ron Paul non-administration.
Points 1 and 3 - With no national standards of education at all, my local "town" would get to decide what teachers can and can't teach to everyone. Well, here's a clue buddy, Every teacher in my district would have to ditch everything prior to the enlightenment and start teaching young-earth creationism if Ron Paul gets his way. The sad truth is that a lot of "towns" are run by very small-minded people. If you consider public education "theft," maybe you better look around a little bit and see how many fine people who make your world work every day are the products of a public education system that keeps both majority wishes and minority rights in balance. I think you should have to pay up for the benefits of such a system even if you don't have a kid in school. I'm also happy to pay for such schools. They allow me to go about my life safe in the knowledge that most of the people around me weren't brought up in the Christian version of a Pakistani madrassa.
Point 2 - You may not condem abortion as murder, but plenty of your co-religionist would be happy to do it for you and, while they at it, get out the flaming torches and pitchforks for anybody who doesn't agree. Once again, strictly local control often tramples on the rights of individuals. Ron Paul would gleefully let that happen.
Point 4 - I don't have too much of a problem with this, except there are some cases where the world would have to honor the marriage contract of two people, such as hospital visitation rights, adoption, insurance, etc. You can't just seperate marriage and government that easily.
Pont 5 - Your concern and care for those who need help are laudable and a good example for other who call themselves Christian. But even if everybody started acting like this I'm not sure it would work. Sometimes we need bigger solutions that can help large groups of people improve their own condition. As to immigration, the problem is not immigrants coming here looking for a handout. They are coming here looking for work. We are hiring them because we need the labor, but we aren't willing to adapt our immigration policies to match reality. I'm afraid a bigger problem is that too many Americans are using disdain for "lawbreaking illegals" as a mask for their fear of brown people who speak a funny language. I honestly don't know enough about Ron Paul to say which way he falls on this.
Stealing Wi-Fi internet access may feel like a victimless crime, but it deprives ISPs of revenue.
BWAHAHAHAHH . . .
Yes, I'll certainly have to turn my thoughts to poor AT&T being deprived of revenue and starving in the cold, cold, night.
Seriously though, anybody who relies on an Internet conection provided by a neighbor who is too dumb to secure their wifi doesn't strike me as a potential reveune stream for the poor ISPs. I doubt they would pay anyway. I think there's a distinction between people who piggyback as their sole source of Internet, and those who will hook on to an unsecured access point when they are out roaming and desperate for a connection. In my job I travel around my relatively rural county and the only legit public wifi I know of is a single coffee shop in town. If I can find an open router to go on and quickly hook up to the world, I'm going to do it with very little guilt. Now downloading a movie or something huge would be a different story . . .
If I had seen the video you described the day before the shooting, there wouldn't have been a shooting. I'm a teacher (and not an overly paranoid one at that) and this would have set off all kinds of alarm bells. You have a location, a date, and an obvious threat (the gun). The next aspect of this story will be that others from the school, probably students, saw this video and did nothing. Maybe if the teachers were a little more comfortable with technology they might have randomly come across the video while looking for other videos about their school.
I hate street lights. I live 45 minutes from a midp-sized city (Charlotte, NC) in what could still reasonably be called "the country." It's a growing area, but still rural. But for some stupid reason, every new subdivision that has popped up in the last year or so has to have these stupid decorative streetlights. Anything to make the yankee transplants and idiots fleeing the city feel more at home seems to be okay.
Suprising as seems to me, I gotta help Jesus out on this one. I seriously doubt he was divine or anything but he did say some great things about brotherhood and love and turning the other cheek. Granted, his philosopy was based on loving those who believed what he did, but it still is less violent than the rest of the bible and can be extended to modern times when we could all do with a little more empathy. Pity that most of Jesus' biggest fans are the ones with the least empathy.
"Students today can't prepare bark to calculate their problems. They depend upon their slates which are more expensive. What will they do when the slate is dropped and it breaks? They will be unable to write."
- Teachers Conference, 1703
"Students today depend upon paper too much. They don't know how to write on a slate without getting chalk dust all over themselves. They can't clean a slate properly. What will they do when they run out of paper? "
- Principals Association, 1815
"I find it stunning (and disturbing) that there is this notion that adding tech to the classroom is by default beneficial. This idea is complete rubbish and the studies are starting to mount that show this . .."
Wow! Your quote fits right in with the long-held view of technology in education. The first two quotes come from the book Edutrends by David Thornburg. Anybody out there still preparing bark?
To paraphrase edtech guru David Warlick, computers, interactive whiteboards and projectors, ipods, wikis, blogs and social networks are the pen and paper of our times. These are the tools that students are embracing outside of the classroom, and teachers who are worth a damn are CAREFULLY working out how to embrace them in the classroom. I can't imagine teaching without access to a projector. I have used still pictures and videos pulled from the Internet, a 3D walkthrough of the globe theater, a document camera to quickly share writing examples from the class, a hyperlinked powerpoint where students click on words in a sentence to find the right part of speech, sound effects, audio of poets reading a poem while the words appear on the screen and review sessions disguised as games of Jeopardy.
Of course I could have simply done all my teaching with a piece of chalk, but that, not turning off the lights, is what makes intelligent, bored students go to sleep. Kids who aren't engaged tend to zone out. Technology used effectively can sometimes keep them engaged.
I admit that a big part of the problem is unimaginative teachers. My new job this school year is being a technology facilitator to help spark some ideas for the teachers in my district. But another problem is that taxpayers tend to embrace convenient ideas like "you don't need anything but a blackboard." If we want to reach students and improve schools we need to buy the technology and then spend the money to train our teachers how to use it well.
I could say more, but I need to go prepare some bark.
I'm not sure where you got that "Amendmentive" thing from, but it sound like liberal, aethiest, terrist talk, and it might even be French. Do you realize what will happen if our police and army have to wait for a warrant? Think of the CHILDREN!
My current home computer is a nearly 5-year-old Sony 1.5 ghrtz with 1 gig of RAM, an 80-GB hard drive and a lot of miles on it. Yet with an upgraded graphics card and an external hard drive, it still does just about everything I need, up to and including video editing with Adobe Premiere. Granted, I am about ready to replace it, it's no emergency.
As as a teacher, I know what computer tasks the average k-12 student needs to accomplish, and this thing should handle it. I think it would be a great resource for that parent who wants a computer so their kid can excel, but CAN'T scrape up anything more than $300. Too bad it's being sold at the Evil Empire.
Both of these cases are great examples of the market at work and how ebay is leveling that market. Both Merle Norman and the car parts company have old-school, highly restrictive agreements with their vendors that are designed to drive the price up. If the product can only be sold in one place, then that place can charge a crapload for it. The free-market solution to this is for somebody else to design a similar product and then sell more of them for a lower, more reasonable price. When I see these products on ebay for cheaper (not that I'm a car tuner or need makeup) My reaction is to realize that the maker of the product is trying to scam me and that I need to search for an alternative.
Ebay has been great at this because it lets people know what something is REALLY worth because you can see what someone actually paid for it. Ebay has turned the antiques business upside down for the same reason. unscrupulous dealers have a tough time overpricing something when anybody can go see what a similar item went for and how many people were trying to buy it.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh, the time I saw them I just told them to fuck off.
Right! One of the reasons those 3rd graders oohed and ahhed so much was that they probably had never watched a launch of any kind. I also showed them a shuttle launch in HD and you would have thought it was Star Wars from the reaction I got. I really can't wait to see how students react when the first Ares test flight goes up next year (if it does). I think people will be surprised by the public reaction, especially young people.
You are absolutely right. The key word there is "play." The best education comes when kids do authentic projects they are interested in with support from teachers who are willing to let the spotlight be on the student instead of the teacher. This, you'll note, is NOT the way most high schools work. We need to get away from "testing" kids and move towards letting them "play."
I also taught high school, and you are right that high school kids get left out. But I think it's less the fault of NASA and more the fault of high schools. High school is so rigid and change-adverse that any attempts by an outside agency to come in is usually shot down. This is even more evident with the focus on high stakes testing.
We can't just "un-retire the shuttle," mainly because it is a bloated, out-of-date, foam-shedding death trap. Besides, with everyone talking about creating jobs, how does it make sense to cut NASA hard and put tons of people who are working on Ares out of work?
Sorry, but I have taught kids and the best way to turn children into future aerospace engineers is to launch some new rockets. I have shown 3rd graders poorly drawn CGI of a Ares 1 launch and it was enough to garner "oohs," "aahs," and "I want to do thats,"
Correct, Most teachers keep paying NEA dues because they will help cover your ass when some crackhead parent decideds to sue you.
This is key. As a technology facilitator (I show teachers in my district how to use technology better) I give my teachers free and open stuff all the time. They always worry about the free part. It's really a tough concept to understand in our window-dominated, malware-infested world. But once the idea gets through to them and they see Tuxpaint or Audacity or Gcompris or Gimp, or Open Office, they flip out and are converts for life.
One example I use when talking to teachers is worksheets. Teachers already share worksheets like crazy. One person creates it and then shares it with a friend. Then they make some changes and pass it on. When I was in the classroom, a friend once gave me a "great worksheet." It took me a minute to realize that it was a heavily modified version of a worksheet I had created two years before. Does this sound familiar? There will always be some idiots like the teacher in this letter. But teachers, for the most part, will get it, they just need a metaphor they recognize.
You think college textbooks are bad? What about public school. In that case the victim isn't a poor college student, but YOU. As a teacher I have seen the way this works. The average high school literature book is well over $60. What do you get for your money? 75% is out-of-copyright book excerpts, poems and that are all out there for free on the net. Then you have the crappy pictures and lousy activites and questions that most teachers ignore anyway. Then every five years or so we do a new textbook adoption and toss out all the old books (many of which are still in good shape).
The sad part is that public school teachers are natural open-source advocates, even if they don't know it. For years we have created and shared tests, quizzes and worksheets. I once was given a thrice-photocopied worksheet that I had created myself two years earlier. If we could harness all those good ideas and activities that are already out there and combine them using collaborative software we could wean the big publishing companies from all that public money and use it instead to buy e-book readers and other technology for kids to read the books on.
Congrats on the test scores. I taught English for a year in Broward County (shudder) and I know what you mean.
I agree totally on your "cookie-cutter automatons" theory. I have actually had other teachers tell me that we need to give kids orders without telling them why so they can "get used to it." That conversation did not end well. The problem is that we are moving into the 21st century with an education system that is trained to produce workers for 19th century factories. Until a majority of teachers change their minds on this and stop acting like medieval overlords, we are screwed.
Umm, one study?
How bout this.
http://www.no-smoke.org/pdf/SHSBibliography.pdf
I'm no math genius, that that's a few more than one.
FYI - when you go looking for news to post to prove something to the world, try skipping China's state-run propaganda machine as a source.
I'd love to see a utopia of public transit and cheap taxis, but for a vast amount of the U.S, it's just not feasible and won't be for some time. I live just 45 minutes from a medium-sized urban area (Charlotte, NC) but it is still rural enough that I live 5 minutes by car from the nearest crappy grocery store and 30 minutes to the nearest good one. Things are just too far away to walk or bike and the population is just too low to make reliable, timely transit possible. I don't see this changing and I don't think it should. The only alternative would be increase population, which would be more than we could bear.
Speaking as someone who has lived in a big city, the REAL solution there is just what you describe, but private, eco-friendly passenger cars are going to have to be part of the mix outside the beltways.
Amen. Up until now, I have been a huge supporter of this project. This article pretty much made me write it off as dead. I work in a semi-rural school district in North Carolina with about 14,000 kids. Many of the kids and a fair number of the teachers are comfortable with computers. We have a decent WAN and a fairly stable Internet connection. Even given this, there is no way in hell I would try to implement a 1:1 laptop program yet. Deployment would be a nightmare. I can only imagine deployment in the wilds of Peru. The problem is that you can't just throw laptops at the populace and wait for the Angelic choirs to start singing. You need policies, ways to charge the things, training for teachers on how to do wikis, blogs, etc. It takes time, effort, and a willingness to be open to new, paradigm-shifting ideas about education. This is hard enough in tech-savy America. I had always assumed that a big part of the OLPC project would be OLPC people going out in the community to help students and teachers integrate the machines into education. I was shocked to hear that there is pretty much NO plan for integration and deployment. You see, computers in education are really not about the software. Computers are a tool. It's all about how you use the tool. Get ready, this thing will crash hard and Bill Gates won't need to do anything to make it happen.
There's the rub. As a teacher, I had to sit on our "school improvement team." for two years. Our main job was shuffling through lists of absences and sending letters home when they reached three or more absences. Then we had to find the kid, and talk them into signing an attendance contract that said they would not skip anymore. As the semester wore on, the list of kids with over 5 absensces got longer and longer. It took every minute of my "planning" time to find them. If we weren't able to get an attendance contract signed at sent home, the kid could still graduate. It was somehow "our" fault that the kid was skipping school and it wasn't fair that we had not notified the parent, even though an automated callout system would call home every day a kid skipped. So keep this in mind when teachers jump on this idea and praise it. Right now the responsibility is not on the kids or the parents, but on the teachers.
Works in a bar, but I always hated it in the arcade. I don't remember how many times I was standing in a line waiting on a game and some punk walks past the three people waiting to put his quarter on the game like none of us existed. I hated that.
Hmm, Okay. So according to you, these are the "benefits" I would get from a Ron Paul non-administration. Points 1 and 3 - With no national standards of education at all, my local "town" would get to decide what teachers can and can't teach to everyone. Well, here's a clue buddy, Every teacher in my district would have to ditch everything prior to the enlightenment and start teaching young-earth creationism if Ron Paul gets his way. The sad truth is that a lot of "towns" are run by very small-minded people. If you consider public education "theft," maybe you better look around a little bit and see how many fine people who make your world work every day are the products of a public education system that keeps both majority wishes and minority rights in balance. I think you should have to pay up for the benefits of such a system even if you don't have a kid in school. I'm also happy to pay for such schools. They allow me to go about my life safe in the knowledge that most of the people around me weren't brought up in the Christian version of a Pakistani madrassa. Point 2 - You may not condem abortion as murder, but plenty of your co-religionist would be happy to do it for you and, while they at it, get out the flaming torches and pitchforks for anybody who doesn't agree. Once again, strictly local control often tramples on the rights of individuals. Ron Paul would gleefully let that happen. Point 4 - I don't have too much of a problem with this, except there are some cases where the world would have to honor the marriage contract of two people, such as hospital visitation rights, adoption, insurance, etc. You can't just seperate marriage and government that easily. Pont 5 - Your concern and care for those who need help are laudable and a good example for other who call themselves Christian. But even if everybody started acting like this I'm not sure it would work. Sometimes we need bigger solutions that can help large groups of people improve their own condition. As to immigration, the problem is not immigrants coming here looking for a handout. They are coming here looking for work. We are hiring them because we need the labor, but we aren't willing to adapt our immigration policies to match reality. I'm afraid a bigger problem is that too many Americans are using disdain for "lawbreaking illegals" as a mask for their fear of brown people who speak a funny language. I honestly don't know enough about Ron Paul to say which way he falls on this.
If I had seen the video you described the day before the shooting, there wouldn't have been a shooting. I'm a teacher (and not an overly paranoid one at that) and this would have set off all kinds of alarm bells. You have a location, a date, and an obvious threat (the gun). The next aspect of this story will be that others from the school, probably students, saw this video and did nothing. Maybe if the teachers were a little more comfortable with technology they might have randomly come across the video while looking for other videos about their school.
I hate street lights. I live 45 minutes from a midp-sized city (Charlotte, NC) in what could still reasonably be called "the country." It's a growing area, but still rural. But for some stupid reason, every new subdivision that has popped up in the last year or so has to have these stupid decorative streetlights. Anything to make the yankee transplants and idiots fleeing the city feel more at home seems to be okay.
Suprising as seems to me, I gotta help Jesus out on this one. I seriously doubt he was divine or anything but he did say some great things about brotherhood and love and turning the other cheek. Granted, his philosopy was based on loving those who believed what he did, but it still is less violent than the rest of the bible and can be extended to modern times when we could all do with a little more empathy. Pity that most of Jesus' biggest fans are the ones with the least empathy.
"Students today can't prepare bark to calculate their problems. They depend upon their slates which are more expensive. What will they do when the slate is dropped and it breaks? They will be unable to write."
."
- Teachers Conference, 1703
"Students today depend upon paper too much. They don't know how to write on a slate without getting chalk dust all over themselves. They can't clean a slate properly. What will they do when they run out of paper? "
- Principals Association, 1815
"I find it stunning (and disturbing) that there is this notion that adding tech to the classroom is by default beneficial. This idea is complete rubbish and the studies are starting to mount that show this . .
Wow! Your quote fits right in with the long-held view of technology in education. The first two quotes come from the book Edutrends by David Thornburg. Anybody out there still preparing bark?
To paraphrase edtech guru David Warlick, computers, interactive whiteboards and projectors, ipods, wikis, blogs and social networks are the pen and paper of our times. These are the tools that students are embracing outside of the classroom, and teachers who are worth a damn are CAREFULLY working out how to embrace them in the classroom. I can't imagine teaching without access to a projector. I have used still pictures and videos pulled from the Internet, a 3D walkthrough of the globe theater, a document camera to quickly share writing examples from the class, a hyperlinked powerpoint where students click on words in a sentence to find the right part of speech, sound effects, audio of poets reading a poem while the words appear on the screen and review sessions disguised as games of Jeopardy.
Of course I could have simply done all my teaching with a piece of chalk, but that, not turning off the lights, is what makes intelligent, bored students go to sleep. Kids who aren't engaged tend to zone out. Technology used effectively can sometimes keep them engaged.
I admit that a big part of the problem is unimaginative teachers. My new job this school year is being a technology facilitator to help spark some ideas for the teachers in my district. But another problem is that taxpayers tend to embrace convenient ideas like "you don't need anything but a blackboard." If we want to reach students and improve schools we need to buy the technology and then spend the money to train our teachers how to use it well.
I could say more, but I need to go prepare some bark.
I'm not sure where you got that "Amendmentive" thing from, but it sound like liberal, aethiest, terrist talk, and it might even be French. Do you realize what will happen if our police and army have to wait for a warrant? Think of the CHILDREN!
My current home computer is a nearly 5-year-old Sony 1.5 ghrtz with 1 gig of RAM, an 80-GB hard drive and a lot of miles on it. Yet with an upgraded graphics card and an external hard drive, it still does just about everything I need, up to and including video editing with Adobe Premiere. Granted, I am about ready to replace it, it's no emergency. As as a teacher, I know what computer tasks the average k-12 student needs to accomplish, and this thing should handle it. I think it would be a great resource for that parent who wants a computer so their kid can excel, but CAN'T scrape up anything more than $300. Too bad it's being sold at the Evil Empire.
Both of these cases are great examples of the market at work and how ebay is leveling that market. Both Merle Norman and the car parts company have old-school, highly restrictive agreements with their vendors that are designed to drive the price up. If the product can only be sold in one place, then that place can charge a crapload for it. The free-market solution to this is for somebody else to design a similar product and then sell more of them for a lower, more reasonable price. When I see these products on ebay for cheaper (not that I'm a car tuner or need makeup) My reaction is to realize that the maker of the product is trying to scam me and that I need to search for an alternative.
Ebay has been great at this because it lets people know what something is REALLY worth because you can see what someone actually paid for it. Ebay has turned the antiques business upside down for the same reason. unscrupulous dealers have a tough time overpricing something when anybody can go see what a similar item went for and how many people were trying to buy it.