I worked in a UK university for 4 years, and I can assure you that there is a mad dash in the last 5 years prior to retirement in which academics will take on as many responsibilities as possible in order to boost their final salary. Anyhow, back to the topic in hand.
Technology as an aid to teaching can be extremely useful, but it does inevitably break down sooner or later (be it a broken electronic whiteboard, be it the one faulty computer in a lab, be it the projector). Any of those failures can eat into the amount of time available to deliver the lecture, but it does not stop the lecture from occurring.
Making a transition to use technology as the means in which to deliver a lecture is just dangerous. Most of the technology will be off site (in the students homes) and therefore out of the jurisdiction of the IT support department. There are simply too many points of failure to make teaching in this way viable. All you need is one failure in the system, and lecture will be canceled.
Next consider the fact that most lectures just cannot be delivered in this way (Art, drama, animation, any lab sessions, product design, etc etc). At a guess I'd say maybe 10-20% of my old lecture material could be delivered in that way, but the vast majority could not. David Wiley may be able to deliver all of his lectures via web conferencing by 2020, but he's short sighted to think that all subjects are like his. They are not.
Working in a university often feels like a running battle between academics and the money-men, and often feels like you are living in the world portrayed in the film Brazil. Herein lies my biggest gripe with claims that technology will replace the need for classrooms. If claims of this sort are made by a respected professor, the people controlling the purse strings will jump on it, and will use it as a validation to reduce funding on a particular course.
"Hey, you don't need a lab full of PC's, the students can pay for their own laptops and work at home."
"Hey, you don't need lecture theaters this year, all teaching can be done via video conferencing."
"Hey, we don't need you to lecture this year, because your lectures from last year are available as pod-casts."
David Wileys sentiments are not helpful to the academic community at large.
That's not to say that I agree with everything David says, but at least I disagree with his ideas, rather than posting sloppy conjecture about his motivations.
You're talking about a single sentence of a post in which I did disagree with the ideas, and provide rationale based on my experience of lecturing. You've posted as AC, and you've failed to bring anything to the discussion.
yes. If someone asks a stupid question, it usually means that you need to re-evaluate the way you are delivering the material. Stupid questions are therefore the most valuable kind of questions.
But I'd also add that by the year 2020, it seems feasible that the "state of the art" in video teleconferencing would be FAR more advanced than what we've got now.
You're advocating a tonne of expensive equipment, for which most universities will not be able to afford, and will still not be as good as a traditional classroom.
Wouldn't an experience like THAT allow for good 2-way communications without need of a physical lecture hall?
No. It would be a bloody nightmare. Trying to find a lecture theater with a working projector in an average university is hard enough. As any lecturer will tell you, when technology is used in classes to aid teaching that's fine. It will however break down at some point, and can often eat up 10-15 minutes of the class time.
If you bring technology into the classroom that absolutely must function, all of the time, in order to deliver a lecture you're in big trouble when it breaks down (not if, when). Given that the majority of the technology will be out of the hands of the universities IT staff (i.e. student computers + webcams, typically with viruses and malware installed), when one of those pieces breaks, you'll be canceling yet another lecture.
The vast majority of lectures would be impossible to deliver that way, so why attempt to bring in technology for technologies sake?
Art: Now jimmy, hold your painting up to your webcam, and I'll try to see what's wrong with it.
Drama: Now then class, we are going to act out Shakespears Hamlet.
Biology: Now then class, place your frogs on your kitchen table (make sure you put the empty beer cans and half eaten kebabs in the bin first). Go Wash up a kitchen knife, and make the first cut...
ProductDesign: Now for this practical session, we're going to use a pillar drill. You probably won't have one of those at home....
Technology to compliment teaching is fine, but technology cannot ever dictate the way in which teaching is delivered.
Why pray tell would anyone want a degree? The simple answer is that you can learn far quicker if you can ask someone for help. That help may be the lecturer (who you'd hope is an expert), or it may be the 50 or so peers in your year group. I'd agree that the piece of paper at the end is largely irrelevant (aside from resumes), however the amount of knowledge you acquire along the way is far greater than attempting to go it alone
Education is not just a case of having the material available to you. Education is, and always will be, a two way process. The lecturer delivers a lecture, the students ask questions, the lecturer answers said questions, and as a result the lecturer may change/modify/update his material to better reflect the needs of his/her students. I used to lecture a few years ago, and the students have a tendancy to keep you on your toes, and as a result you are always refining and improving your materials.
If you remove the classroom and interaction from the equation, the lecturer can't push the student (academically), and the students can't push the lecturer to improve. After a few years without a classroom you'll have a stagnant department, in a stagnant university, taught by irrelevant lectures, and the final graduates will be largely ignored in the real world.
Sure there are ways in which new technology can help deliver teaching materials in new ways, but it can't replace real physical interaction.
My guess is that Prof David Wiley is approaching retirement, has a final salary pension, and is spouting any old drivel in order to form a committee to boost his responsibilities, and therefore earnings, and therefore pension pot. In my experience, that's normally the reason for crackpots spouting hugely flawed ideas.
Thought i'd take you up on that. Did a bit of research, and the only references I can find are to stories are from the 'fair and balanced' Fox news.
The other places reporting this say that of the 30,000 WMD's that the US claimed Iraq had prior going to war, they had found 500, degraded weapons that matched the technical definition of WMD's, but would not pose a serious threat to US citizens.
Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.) noted that the administration's prewar rhetoric, including a remark by then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," helped push Congress's October 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq.
That kind of language, Larsen said, "always has seemed to be much bigger than the facts that we end up reviewing in retrospect."
The smoking gun and mushroom cloud image, he said, "sounds a lot better than 500 artillery shells of various amounts of degraded material that fit the technical definition of chemical weapons . . . buried in various bunkers in various states of disrepair that we are not even sure Saddam Hussein knew about."
virtualbox? OpenOffice? They do seem to have a few decent devs there...
Re:because that is how sound cards work
on
Linux Needs Critics
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
To be fair, I think you have managed to provide a perfect case study of exactly what SerpantCage was saying. Rather than listen to the criticism, you've basically told him to GTFO. (That or it was a very bad attempt at a +1 funny).
There's also the Nvidia effect. All the old SGI engineers who worked on OpenGL and SGI hardware (Mark Kilgard etc al) all ended up working for Nvidia. Around the time of the geforce1, pretty much every single white paper and tech demo that came out of Nvidia was written by an ex-SGI employee. It was only going to be a matter of time before nvidia overtook SGI, and it's another reason why nvidia's openGL support has always been so strong.
Under the terms of the Agreement, Rackable or a subsidiary of Rackable, will acquire the assets for a purchase price of approximately $25 million in cash, $10 million of which will be placed in escrow and available to Rackable following the closing to reimburse Rackable for payments and expenses made or incurred in connection with certain tax matters. In addition, Rackable will assume certain liabilities associated with the acquired assets. Following the signing of the Agreement, SGI and certain of its affiliated entities located in the U.S. filed a voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition and motions to approve the Agreement.
So, if i'm reading this right, they bought the assets for $25mil, and immediately after SGI went into Chapter 11. Not sure what those liabilities are, but I'd assume it's more to do with maintaining the existing SGI customers out there rather than incurring all of their depts. I can't imagine SGI would need chapter 11 if Rackable had picked up the full $500mil of dept. Sounds like they put all the crap in one place and scuttled SGI....
BTW. I hear you can pick up killer SGI MIPS equipment on eBay for a song.
'Killer' is debatable. The fuel is the entry level one you'd want to be buying, and even then you'd be stupid to put any money down for one. I was tempted to buy one a year or two ago, however the reality is that you'll get a useless machine, with crap OS, a limited supply of (dubious quality) software, all contained in a pretty case. I'd imagine it'd take you at least 6 months just to get firefox compiled and running on it (and that's after you take a 6 month sabbatical from your job just to re-install the OS).
These machines are still workhorses for 3D rendering, audio and video production.
Not for years. We threw all of ours out when the pentium 2 hit 450Mhz. At any point since then, you'd have been mental to buy an SGI workstation, when for the same price you could have bought 2 top spec dual Xeon workstations, the performance of which, would have crapped all over SGI's offerings. Even SGI had to concede the fact at the time, and switch to Intel chips.
They were beautiful machines in their day, if a little overpriced, but now the only place for them is in a museum.
The nix part was ok, IIRC it was the god awful GUI implementation that really let it down. The hardware was awesome for apps like Maya/Softimage etc, however you had to learn ways of working that avoided the GUI entirely. Oh, and re-installing irix was as simple as constructing an atomic bomb in your garden shed, from 2 paperclips, some woodglue, and a dead panda, whilst your arms are tied behind your back. Actually. Now i think about it. You're right,.... irix was shit.
Even now, Maya still has some legacy hangovers from those days: Ctrl+Space to remove the GUI. Ctrl+M to remove the menus. Space to bring up the 'hotbox', which is basically a menu rendered using openGL (about the only thing Sgi's could do really well).
Even now, I'm still staggered by how far Sgi managed to fall from grace. Mind you, i think Apple learnt a lot from SGI about how to switch to Intel processors successfully. The way SGI did it made every single one of their existing clients run to the hills, and they never looked back.
oh come on now! The boingy boingy keyboard added to the spectrum in 1982 was not a bad feature. Even years after the machine died a death, mine still works fine as a coffee mat...
Slashdot Mirror
Technology as an aid to teaching can be extremely useful, but it does inevitably break down sooner or later (be it a broken electronic whiteboard, be it the one faulty computer in a lab, be it the projector). Any of those failures can eat into the amount of time available to deliver the lecture, but it does not stop the lecture from occurring.
Making a transition to use technology as the means in which to deliver a lecture is just dangerous. Most of the technology will be off site (in the students homes) and therefore out of the jurisdiction of the IT support department. There are simply too many points of failure to make teaching in this way viable. All you need is one failure in the system, and lecture will be canceled.
Next consider the fact that most lectures just cannot be delivered in this way (Art, drama, animation, any lab sessions, product design, etc etc). At a guess I'd say maybe 10-20% of my old lecture material could be delivered in that way, but the vast majority could not. David Wiley may be able to deliver all of his lectures via web conferencing by 2020, but he's short sighted to think that all subjects are like his. They are not.
Working in a university often feels like a running battle between academics and the money-men, and often feels like you are living in the world portrayed in the film Brazil. Herein lies my biggest gripe with claims that technology will replace the need for classrooms. If claims of this sort are made by a respected professor, the people controlling the purse strings will jump on it, and will use it as a validation to reduce funding on a particular course.
"Hey, you don't need a lab full of PC's, the students can pay for their own laptops and work at home."
"Hey, you don't need lecture theaters this year, all teaching can be done via video conferencing."
"Hey, we don't need you to lecture this year, because your lectures from last year are available as pod-casts."
David Wileys sentiments are not helpful to the academic community at large.
That's not to say that I agree with everything David says, but at least I disagree with his ideas, rather than posting sloppy conjecture about his motivations.
You're talking about a single sentence of a post in which I did disagree with the ideas, and provide rationale based on my experience of lecturing. You've posted as AC, and you've failed to bring anything to the discussion.
yes. If someone asks a stupid question, it usually means that you need to re-evaluate the way you are delivering the material. Stupid questions are therefore the most valuable kind of questions.
But I'd also add that by the year 2020, it seems feasible that the "state of the art" in video teleconferencing would be FAR more advanced than what we've got now.
You're advocating a tonne of expensive equipment, for which most universities will not be able to afford, and will still not be as good as a traditional classroom.
Wouldn't an experience like THAT allow for good 2-way communications without need of a physical lecture hall?
No. It would be a bloody nightmare. Trying to find a lecture theater with a working projector in an average university is hard enough. As any lecturer will tell you, when technology is used in classes to aid teaching that's fine. It will however break down at some point, and can often eat up 10-15 minutes of the class time.
If you bring technology into the classroom that absolutely must function, all of the time, in order to deliver a lecture you're in big trouble when it breaks down (not if, when). Given that the majority of the technology will be out of the hands of the universities IT staff (i.e. student computers + webcams, typically with viruses and malware installed), when one of those pieces breaks, you'll be canceling yet another lecture.
The vast majority of lectures would be impossible to deliver that way, so why attempt to bring in technology for technologies sake?
Art: Now jimmy, hold your painting up to your webcam, and I'll try to see what's wrong with it.
Drama: Now then class, we are going to act out Shakespears Hamlet.
Biology: Now then class, place your frogs on your kitchen table (make sure you put the empty beer cans and half eaten kebabs in the bin first). Go Wash up a kitchen knife, and make the first cut...
ProductDesign: Now for this practical session, we're going to use a pillar drill. You probably won't have one of those at home....
Technology to compliment teaching is fine, but technology cannot ever dictate the way in which teaching is delivered.
Why pray tell would anyone want a degree? The simple answer is that you can learn far quicker if you can ask someone for help. That help may be the lecturer (who you'd hope is an expert), or it may be the 50 or so peers in your year group. I'd agree that the piece of paper at the end is largely irrelevant (aside from resumes), however the amount of knowledge you acquire along the way is far greater than attempting to go it alone
Education is not just a case of having the material available to you. Education is, and always will be, a two way process. The lecturer delivers a lecture, the students ask questions, the lecturer answers said questions, and as a result the lecturer may change/modify/update his material to better reflect the needs of his/her students. I used to lecture a few years ago, and the students have a tendancy to keep you on your toes, and as a result you are always refining and improving your materials.
If you remove the classroom and interaction from the equation, the lecturer can't push the student (academically), and the students can't push the lecturer to improve. After a few years without a classroom you'll have a stagnant department, in a stagnant university, taught by irrelevant lectures, and the final graduates will be largely ignored in the real world.
Sure there are ways in which new technology can help deliver teaching materials in new ways, but it can't replace real physical interaction.
My guess is that Prof David Wiley is approaching retirement, has a final salary pension, and is spouting any old drivel in order to form a committee to boost his responsibilities, and therefore earnings, and therefore pension pot. In my experience, that's normally the reason for crackpots spouting hugely flawed ideas.
... Or the 1 app you'll run is XP in a VM.
Mars?
Your plan assumes that all the doors have been left unlocked. It wouldn't work if they had to force the doors to get in....
or it's been slashdotted...
The other places reporting this say that of the 30,000 WMD's that the US claimed Iraq had prior going to war, they had found 500, degraded weapons that matched the technical definition of WMD's, but would not pose a serious threat to US citizens.
Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.) noted that the administration's prewar rhetoric, including a remark by then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," helped push Congress's October 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq.
That kind of language, Larsen said, "always has seemed to be much bigger than the facts that we end up reviewing in retrospect."
The smoking gun and mushroom cloud image, he said, "sounds a lot better than 500 artillery shells of various amounts of degraded material that fit the technical definition of chemical weapons . . . buried in various bunkers in various states of disrepair that we are not even sure Saddam Hussein knew about."
It's common knowledge that exposure to 200+ decibels will make anything deaf.
Apart from deaf people.
virtualbox? OpenOffice? They do seem to have a few decent devs there...
To be fair, I think you have managed to provide a perfect case study of exactly what SerpantCage was saying. Rather than listen to the criticism, you've basically told him to GTFO. (That or it was a very bad attempt at a +1 funny).
There's also the Nvidia effect. All the old SGI engineers who worked on OpenGL and SGI hardware (Mark Kilgard etc al) all ended up working for Nvidia. Around the time of the geforce1, pretty much every single white paper and tech demo that came out of Nvidia was written by an ex-SGI employee. It was only going to be a matter of time before nvidia overtook SGI, and it's another reason why nvidia's openGL support has always been so strong.
pretty much...
you sure they are picking up the dept though? They put SGI into Chapter 11 immediately after the deal was signed...
Under the terms of the Agreement, Rackable or a subsidiary of Rackable, will acquire the assets for a purchase price of approximately $25 million in cash, $10 million of which will be placed in escrow and available to Rackable following the closing to reimburse Rackable for payments and expenses made or incurred in connection with certain tax matters. In addition, Rackable will assume certain liabilities associated with the acquired assets. Following the signing of the Agreement, SGI and certain of its affiliated entities located in the U.S. filed a voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition and motions to approve the Agreement.
So, if i'm reading this right, they bought the assets for $25mil, and immediately after SGI went into Chapter 11. Not sure what those liabilities are, but I'd assume it's more to do with maintaining the existing SGI customers out there rather than incurring all of their depts. I can't imagine SGI would need chapter 11 if Rackable had picked up the full $500mil of dept. Sounds like they put all the crap in one place and scuttled SGI....
yeah, I've still got an old O2, but i'm afraid to say it's not much more than a mantle piece decoration these days :|
I'm sure that when I'm a pensioner, I'll be the only one in the old folk home that has a mantle piece ornament that can play BZ flag!
Made NT4.0 look good, Irix did...
Lol. sad, but so very true....
BTW. I hear you can pick up killer SGI MIPS equipment on eBay for a song.
'Killer' is debatable. The fuel is the entry level one you'd want to be buying, and even then you'd be stupid to put any money down for one. I was tempted to buy one a year or two ago, however the reality is that you'll get a useless machine, with crap OS, a limited supply of (dubious quality) software, all contained in a pretty case. I'd imagine it'd take you at least 6 months just to get firefox compiled and running on it (and that's after you take a 6 month sabbatical from your job just to re-install the OS).
These machines are still workhorses for 3D rendering, audio and video production.
Not for years. We threw all of ours out when the pentium 2 hit 450Mhz. At any point since then, you'd have been mental to buy an SGI workstation, when for the same price you could have bought 2 top spec dual Xeon workstations, the performance of which, would have crapped all over SGI's offerings. Even SGI had to concede the fact at the time, and switch to Intel chips.
They were beautiful machines in their day, if a little overpriced, but now the only place for them is in a museum.
The nix part was ok, IIRC it was the god awful GUI implementation that really let it down. The hardware was awesome for apps like Maya/Softimage etc, however you had to learn ways of working that avoided the GUI entirely. Oh, and re-installing irix was as simple as constructing an atomic bomb in your garden shed, from 2 paperclips, some woodglue, and a dead panda, whilst your arms are tied behind your back. Actually. Now i think about it. You're right, .... irix was shit.
Even now, Maya still has some legacy hangovers from those days: Ctrl+Space to remove the GUI. Ctrl+M to remove the menus. Space to bring up the 'hotbox', which is basically a menu rendered using openGL (about the only thing Sgi's could do really well).
Even now, I'm still staggered by how far Sgi managed to fall from grace. Mind you, i think Apple learnt a lot from SGI about how to switch to Intel processors successfully. The way SGI did it made every single one of their existing clients run to the hills, and they never looked back.
I don't have that many peanuts unfortunately...
Can't wait for the page3 tweet.... (.Y.)
In other news, the release date for Duke Nukem Forever has been announced....
I can't wait for a VI emulation mode in firefox! Now that would be awesome (if my VI knowledge extended beyond :q )
oh come on now! The boingy boingy keyboard added to the spectrum in 1982 was not a bad feature. Even years after the machine died a death, mine still works fine as a coffee mat...