You cannot teach someone when they are not willing to learn. If a child doesn't want to learn they should be expelled from school and given working papers. Why punish those that are there to learn with disruptive people?
Interesting. It's funny, because from a historical standpoint, you have it backwards. The expansion to force teenagers to attend secondary school that happened in the early to mid 1900s was something a lot of educational philosophers argued for to control dangerous delinquent juveniles, i.e., the very kids you now want to throw out. The educational system is still structured toward those early goals, which is one reason it's not very effective.
Citations for any of that? There might be a perceived risk of lawsuit in that situation, but a quick Google search...
Okay, here's the deal. Having taught at wealthy public schools where parents are overbearing (as well as lower middle class schools where student incidents were much more common), I can tell you that threats to sue are commonplace over all sorts of nonsense (from bad grades to the fact you pulled on Timmy's arm too hard to stop him from beating the crap out of another kid).
Often schools settle these things privately in ways that the parents appreciate. The more common outcome is that the parents leverage their threats to get special treatment, rather than money. You won't find any of these actions in a Google search, because there often is no legal record (or sometimes any official school record) that they happened. If you think rich parents won't use some threat about some random incident to get Tommy a passing grade, you have no idea what goes on in the school system. Poor people offer bribes and gifts to teachers. Rich people threaten them with lawsuits.
Anyhow, schools are terrified of actual lawsuits. So, all teacher training programs have classes where they go over all those few successful lawsuits where parents have sued for ridiculous things (breaking up fights, etc.).
It doesn't take a bunch of top Google hit lawsuits to cause the educational system to act this way. It just takes a couple lawsuits and a few lawyers who come in and give presentations to tell teachers how afraid to be. After all, precedent is important in winning a lawsuit, so if one parent gets away with suing one place, it could happen to you.
I'm not saying the system is functional. But the reasons for the dysfunction are buried deeper than the first page of Google hits.
The standard for claiming a discovery is 5 sigma, which is something like a 99.9999% confidence level.
Ah, if only all sciences were this rigorous. Meanwhile, much of psychology, sociology, and even medicine is out there looking at 95% confidence levels (often even juggling enough variables that a number of correlations will shake out of random data)...
I know it's impossible to hold all sciences to such a standard, given the cost of subjects for many human science experiments, but I do wish we could put something like your post in bold at the beginning of most articles.
I heard most of those rioters had feet. Maybe we should look into those parents who have been plotting for years to enable the riots, by raising those ambulatory children... teaching them to stand erect, to walk, even to run and evade capture.
Just to be clear, since I realized this was an assumption on my part which I didn't actually address directly -- I'm not a fan of lecturing at all, in class or otherwise. Face-to-face meetings should be interactive, and I absolutely agree with you on that point.
IMHO having the lecture occur outside of class time and having more time for interaction seems to work.
I understand what you're saying, and it can make sense in some circumstances.
The thing is, I find lecturing to be a rather time-inefficient way to present material, whether it is in class itself or prerecorded. Lectures that are too dense aren't effective, and even if you're viewing one that's recorded, it's tough to navigate. On the other hand, if you are an effective public speaker, you realize that the amount of material you can present effectively is very small indeed.
When I have a class meeting that is heavy on new material, my "lecture notes" for a 90-minute class usually could be read in about 5 minutes. (I often give a copy to students.) Granted, I encourage and allow a lot of discussion, but that's for a class with more "lecturing" than I usually do. Oral presentation is not really suited to conveying large amounts of information quickly, especially when technical. It's about giving the gist of something. (Of course, I'm not talking about the obvious value of lecture demonstrations or other things that can only be presented in a video format.)
I understand that some students may find it easier to learn from such things, but my experience (and that of many of my colleagues who have experimented with such things) is that it's really inefficient in terms of how much students learn for a given amount of time spent on an assignment. In the real world, people in most fields who have to learn new things inevitably resort to written resources, whether through web searches or in trusted books. Videos are just not fast enough and usually difficult to skim.
If I want to highlight things about the reading to students before class, I find a few targeted questions for them to think about or look for while doing the reading is effective. If there is stuff not in the textbook, I supplement it with other readings or my own materials.
I'm not averse to the idea of lectures as supplementary materials, but requiring students to watch them outside of class seems terribly inefficient (and a few colleagues who have tried it seem to agree). I'm not saying the students don't like it, but they spend more time doing it while learning less than they would have if they focused all that time on reading.
Honestly, this is just my opinion, but as someone who taught high school briefly before going to grad school (and who understands the way college forces you to teach differently), one of the things college is supposed to do is to teach you to learn for yourself. That's why you learn the same amount of material with a couple hours of meetings per week in a semester as you would in a year of daily meetings in high school. Less hand-holding. More private study, more digesting material for yourself and then coming to ask questions about it.
Pre-recorded lectures, even if done well, strike me as time-inefficient "pre-digested" material. I see no reason to present material as a lecture unless there is personal interaction, since when I lecture, the presentation of the material is always dependent on the responses I get from the class. Entirely new and intriguing ways of presenting material can happen in the moment and help to stimulate learning, if you just pay attention to questions, incorporate students' ideas into the solution of problems, highlight student questions and concerns that can lead you to other planned topics, etc. Lecturing, when done well, must be a dynamic process, not read from a script. If it is from a script, better to read it from the script in a quarter of the time.
Good teachers know that lectures are performances. Pre-recorded lectures are like pre-recorded comedy routines. Fine for a few stars who are fabulous and everybody would watch anyway, but the average comedians in a nightclub need to be more responsive to their audience to be effective.
-- You type something in one application/textbox/window and want to copy the whole thing somewhere else.
Why would you even do this?
Either you use the right application directly, or you find a way to feed a text file to your application.
You do realize that the whole world isn't full of people who only use computers for coding, right?
As someone who does a lot of (non-fiction) writing, here's one possible scenario that I use on occasion. I often generate short bits of writing that don't quite fit in exactly to a larger piece of writing that I'm working on at the moment. It's better to save such things as a separate file or note or something, rather than as part of a larger document that has miscellaneous bits of stuff in it, which would make it harder to find.
When I later write something that where I want to incorporate this short bit (usually at least a paragraph, often multiple paragraphs), I find the file/note, select all, and copy it. Sometimes I'm copying into another document file, sometimes into an online post, whatever.
Or sometimes I might realize I need to merge two short pieces of writing I started creating separately. Or sometimes I start writing something in an online post or something, and then I realize that I'd prefer not to post it, or not to post it at that time, so I want to save it to a file on my computer. Or...
Just because you can't imagine ever using a shortcut doesn't mean that there isn't a use for it.
I would never say that lectures are equivalent to readings. My analogy was that recorded lectures are fixed elements that students can view outside of class, just as readings are fixed elements. Neither is very interactive. Good teachers in the past relied on students to do the non-interactive stuff before class so they could have good interaction in class. It's the same whether that non-interactive material is in written, audio, video, or some other form.
Now, whether such extra lectures are an effective pedagogical tool and an efficient use of students' time compared to readings -- that's a separate issue.
The thing is though, most professors really don't care about teaching, they care about research, and it makes sense.
In my post I admitted that colleges do not reward good teaching that much, nor do professional organizations. Obviously, if you offer jobs where people know that they are primarily interested in your ability to research, and those doing the hiring know that that's what kind of candidates they are looking for, who will get hired? Professors who don't care about teaching. Liberal arts schools that care about teaching more than research hire candidates who can teach, and they usually have better teaching. QED.
For example, if you have a passion for improving algorithms and really love researching them and have made great strides in the field and graduated near the top of your class for undergraduate work and got a PHd with no problem, you are going to get hired for a teaching job. Now, I don't know about you, but if I was that newly hired teacher I really wouldn't care all that much about the introductory programming class they put you with, teaching System.out.print to business majors who, aside from that one class, won't write a line of code in their lives.
The problem is equating "researcher" with "teacher." Sometimes that set of people overlaps; often it doesn't. Your example seems to make the assumption that people who have the drive to do well in a Ph.D. would have no interest in teaching.
I'm actually sorry to hear that sentiment. Believe it or not, there are lots of very smart people who believe that teaching is the most important thing that an intellectual person can do -- sort of like many parents believe that having a baby it their most important contribution to society. And, as someone who has taught introductory courses at the college level, I can say that I have inevitably found portions of them tedious, but they are also incredibly rewarding and intellectually stimulating if you approach them as more than some crap assignment you're forced to do. Only in academia are you hired to do a job that it's okay to tell your boss and all your colleagues that you hate doing and have almost no interest in.
In many other countries, there are lots of "research professors" who are rarely or never expected to teach. They are hired to raise the prestige of a university's research. At many colleges, there are special "lecturer" positions (generally considered inferior to "professorships") that are devoted to teaching, and may colleges offer "senior lecturerships" or other similar positions that carry a bit of job security for good teachers.
There is no reason why we can't have more such division and allow overlap when we have a person with the appropriate skill set.
Universities need to start hiring teachers based on their teaching abilities, a good teacher isn't always the best in their field and someone who is the best in their field isn't always the best teacher, especially since most of the time they don't even get to teach the class they have a passion for.
While I agree with the underlying sentiment, I object to your implicit assumption here that "the best in the field" is necessarily the person who does the best academic research. In most technical fields, there are usually lots of very bright people who will never get a Nobel Prize because they prefer to work for a private corporation where they get paid that amount of prize money every couple years and don't have to bother with teaching. Universities in many technical fields usually are not able to attract "the best of the field" except as visiting lecturers, not professors.
Universities try to hire the person who will bring the most fame and glory to the school, in terms of public professional achievements. While there is generally a correlation to quality of work, it isn't always the case. Except for the very top tier, the people with the most achiev
Students are told to watch the lectures on their own time and then class time is used for discussions, Q&A, etc. Personally I thought classes organized like this have been a good idea. Using class time for a professor to perform the same old lecture is a poor use of time. Face-to-face time should be for interaction, not one way communication.
You know, good teachers have known for years that "lecturing" without interaction is pretty stupid. Yeah, when colleges have lecture classes with a thousand students in them, that's pretty stupid, too.
The best approach is generally a hybrid -- lecturer presents material, and as he/she goes, he/she asks questions, poses problems, and gets students to participate in coming up with the material as it is presented.
Most lecturers are poor teachers or lazy teachers (they generally don't get salary raises, promotions, or professional respect for good teaching -- only for research), and many are open to other pedagogical practices are too self-conscious or disorganized or rhetorically challenged to be able to think on their feet while giving a coherent presentation. And, quite frankly, many lecturers don't even know much more about the material they are presenting than what they have in their pre-written lecture -- even intro courses can often involve material they probably haven't bothered with since grad school. Opening class to discussion puts them under the gun. Why should they do that unnecessarily?
The real problem with university teaching is that good teaching is not really rewarded. Except at a few dedicated liberal arts schools, it isn't appreciated or significantly considered as part of a professor's job (even if it is the nominal reason for the job). Why should a professor bother to improve the classroom if there is no reward and no one cares?
Start emphasizing good teaching, and I bet you'll see an improvement not only in classroom dynamics, but in student learning.
There's no substitute for being able to Google and learn on your own rather than need to have someone babysit you through acquiring knowledge. Which is what you'll need to do once you get out of kindergarten and start working.
Of course you're right. And good colleges used to be devoted to making people do this.
On the other hand, for at least the near future, companies still will often prefer a fresh candidate with a resume that says, "B.S. Stanford" or "S.B. MIT" or "A.B. Harvard" over one that says, "Spent many hours learning on my own through Google."
I think it would be bad business to spend time and money educating a person just to have them buy the degree from somewhere else.
Umm, no. Not in this case, or in any of the "elite" universities that offer such free materials. Those universities have many more students than they could possibly want dying to get in and pay them tuition. It is not bad business, because they have set the size of their "customer" pool, and the number of prospective customers is larger than the size they have set.
Besides, buying the degree somewhere else is pretty useless. Completion of the courses in TFA will not get you credit:
Online students who successfully complete their chosen course will receive a statement of accomplishment from the instructor, which will include information on how well you did and how your performance compared to other online students. Only students admitted to Stanford and enrolled in the regular course can receive credit or a grade, so this is not a Stanford certificate.
In other words, you get a gold star and perhaps the ability to say that you did better than X% of hundreds of thousands of other slackers. No credential.
See how far you get with a prospective employer by saying, "I know my degree is from Upper Bucksnort State Teachers College, but I've completed free courses through private study in MIT's opencourseware and I have a gold star form letter from Stanford saying that it is not an official record from Stanford, but I did better than 80% of people who probably didn't put in much effort for no credit either."
College degrees are only useful for getting you in the door to your first job or two. An elite name gets more attention in most cases. Offering free "unofficial" Stanford gold stars to anonymous internet folks is not going to dilute Stanford's ability to make money or to place its own graduates.
If people were known by their real identity then suddenly one part of the greater internet fuckwad theory falls away. Suddenly everyone can see just what a pimple on the ass of humanity you really are when you troll a forum.
You present a false dichotomy. Pseudonymity is different from anonymity. Real names are not the only solution.
There are problems on the internet greater than in real life. But people have walked into neighborhood bars all the time, had group conversations, even pontificated to an audience -- without having to flash a government ID badge on the way in. And their comments weren't recorded in a way connected with their real ID, so that everything they said at the bar was under review by their employer and spouse, and everything they said in their bedroom with their spouse was open to people at the bar and at church.
We may not need anonymity. But real life depends on multiple identities. Pseudonyms on the internet already solve many problems that true anonymity creates. But it also allows people to have the same sort of multiple identities that they have in real life.
There are various ways to deal with such issues that don't require real names to be posted all the time. If this is a move toward Google+ offering the option of both verified "real names" and pseudonym accounts (for those who want them), that's a real positive.
For a social network that claims it solves the Facebook problem of allowing you to easily choose what information about you is visible to what group of people, having to use your real name with all people is a real problem.
If on the other hand, Google is still going to insist on real names for everyone anyway, this makes no difference.
Meanwhile, in the real world, creators have been making things of value since before recorded history, all the way up until now, and will continue to do so in the future, whether there are any intellectual property protections or not. Not all, but a great many, and dare I say it, many enough.
Weird, but importantly: True.
Myths of romantic visions of artists. So 19th century.
Also, most of those people who had the time to make significant contributions were rich -- they often had slaves or servants to do their work for them, since they were generally born into privilege, which allowed them the freedom to devote their time to the intellect or art or whatever.
I'd like to think we've moved beyond a time when only rich people get to be creative.
There's a reason copyright came into existence, and that is that publication used to be an expensive and time-consuming task, when it first started. Whether and how it is still relevant to the production of copies today is an interesting question, but creators still need to invest time in creating quality works. When rich people stopped supporting creators, the copyright system was the only way someone could make a living. Almost all of the big artists of the past few hundred years worked for a living -- either for rich people, or by selling their work. You can't sell your work if you don't have control over it.
To your point, there are people who volunteer to do all sorts of things. Those who devote significant parts of their lives to things, if not their entire careers, often have a better chance of doing something well.
I'd prefer to have a surgeon who has had good quality training and who has worked professionally for a while. I'd prefer to have an engineer design a bridge after having quality training and experience. I'd be less certain about the surgeon or the engineer if they acquired their abilities through informal study on weekends in their spare time.
Does that mean that such a "spare-time" amateur surgeon can't be successful or an amateur civil engineer? Sure they might be occasionally. But I think we all recognize that there is enough value in having quality in surgery or bridges that we would prefer someone who devote much of their lives to something.
While there will always be rich people who want to be creative and poor people who muddle through life trying to be creative without proper training, don't we as a society want to support creativity -- to allow a poor or middle-class person to have the choice to go to a school, learn something about a craft, and then be rewarded in their lives for doing it?
Most artistic production (books, music, etc.) is already mediocre. Without allowing a person to be rewarded for investing time in such work (since all copyrightable work requires up-front time investment, not to mention generally training and practice beforehand), the chance that any particular person -- who isn't already rich -- will bother to produce something of quality and value is decreased.
We used to have rich people and a "leisure class" who produced most of the quality art of the past, or who financed it by paying artists to do it. You can make all these arguments about altruism or devotion to creation or whatever drive you think people have who will do it anyway, but Michaelangelo didn't paint the Sistine Chapel for free. Bach didn't write his music for free. Poets and novelists were often more well-off, but when they weren't, they worked for money.
Artists have to eat, just as much as doctors and engineers. But you have the temerity to insult artists by not valuing their craft enough to pay them. Shame on you.
(P.S. By the way, in none of the preceding do I mean to imply that our current copyright system is fair or just -- it is completely broken and needs major reform, as I said in my original post. But the mythology that creators just do things because they suit them and have done so throughout history... NO -- THE VAST MAJORITY OF THEM DID IT FOR THE MONEY, OR THEY ALREADY WERE WELL-OFF ENOUGH OR IN OTHER POSITIONS THAT THEY DIDN'T NEED IT.)
I also don't think it's an error to think of distributing someone else's work without their permission as a kind of "theft."
IMO then the question legitimately becomes, why [if you support that assertion], or why not for somebody who does not.
Words have meanings that are determined by cultural usage. In law, they are often defined to have particular legal meanings.
There are always some meanings that almost all speakers of a language agree on. For many words, there are often meanings that some people agree on or are aware of, while other people wouldn't use a word in that sense.
"Theft" is the taking of someone's property without their permission. While you are trying to have a semantic argument about "theft," you're really questioning the meaning of "property." In legal terms, "intellectual property" is a well-established concept, dating back as term more than a century, and as a concept for quite a few centuries.
When you sue someone for depriving you of property, you can often sue them for things that result from that property, as well as the value of the physical item (or the item itself). Damages are often computed based on what it cost you to be deprived of a piece of property, what value you might have accrued in said property had it been in your possession during the period of theft, etc. These are all intangibles relating to the theft of the property. I think one can reasonably understand a statement like, "When you stole that item, you also took my ability to do X," or "Your theft was not only of the item itself, but of the profits that would have accrued from it."
Perhaps you would classify such usage as metaphorical use of the word "theft," but I think most English speakers would understand your meaning.
In sum, intangible value can be "stolen," in the basic sense that theft deprives you of value you'd have otherwise. Yes, it's more abstract than the taking of a physical item, but people use such metaphors about intangibles ("He stole my time," etc.).
Anyhow, you obviously don't believe that intellectual "property" exists. All I can say is that the law says it does. We can have a semantic argument about whether or not "intellectual property" makes sense, but if it does, it can be the object of "theft," at least in a metaphorical sense that is analogous to theft of a physical object in terms of its value to the owner.
So there is no confusion, I suppose I should be even clearer:
"For any distribution, AT LEAST half of the population has a value at or below the median value." (From which it follows that "half" certainly does as well.)
I'd be curious. I'd be even more curious to know if these friends know other shortcuts beyond bold/italic/underline, cut/copy/paste, undo, new, and a few basic universals. Outside of tech geeks, I've met very few who bother to learn useful shortcuts for their own work, e.g., shortcuts only useful in a specific application, shortcuts for tasks that they need to perform repetitively, etc.
Anytime I find myself clicking a menu or button more than a few times, I look around to see if there's a shortcut for it. But I don't think that's the common working method for 99% of people.
While that's certainly one way to do it, I've never seen anyone actually do it that pessimally.
You've obviously never spent time around 99% of computer users. Probably more than 1% know some of the keyboard shortcuts you bring up, but I guarantee you that >99% do not know all keyboard shortcuts for all tasks they use multiple times per day.
Heck, I've seen very few people who know the shortcut to get to a search box in their web browser or to get to the URL box in their web browser, probably something many people do more than just about anything else these days.
Aside from fairly universal shortcuts (like cut/copy/paste, bold/italic/underline, quit/exit, undo, and new, to name most of the common ones some people know), many applications require specific shortcuts. In my experience, almost no one ever bothers to learn anything beyond these fairly universal ones, even if they appear on menus that people click all them time.
Ctrl-F works great if you know the word you are looking for, however, sometimes I'm looking for a picture or more loosely a concept. I know I've seen it, and in my subconscuous I have an idea of what it looks like which is why I like to flip through a dead-tree manual.
Yet another reason I like actual books (as a supplement to electronic versions). Electronic versions allow searches that allow you to find things that you wouldn't already know about.
But if you already have encountered something, and you can't remember an exact word to search for, a book is handier. I have a sense of how far into the book I was, what side of the page it was on, what sorts of illustrations, heading, and so forth were around it, etc. A PDF can sometimes work like that. A website or reflowing text in an e-book doesn't work as well.
WIfe: Oh, yeah. Well, why would you ever use Ctrl-F when you can just hit F3?
Because different applications/different OSes/different computer hardware supports different shortcuts. (By hardware, I'm referring to laptops that by default require you to hold down a function key to make function keys actually work.)
Ctrl-F is pretty universal and requires less hand motion than F3. But it's always good to know other options, since they may work in other circumstances.
-- You type something in one application/textbox/window and want to copy the whole thing somewhere else.
-- MS Word (or whatever random application), which you are forced to use for some reason, has once again "helpfully" screwed up formatting, and as a last resort, you want to implement a global change.
-- You want to be sure that MS Word (or some other dumb application) actually is using some global setting, so you select the whole document and go to a settings window to see whether it shows up as consistent for the whole document. (Even if you use styles well, random crap sneaks in -- or you want to check over a document that someone else has been editing.)
-- You want to clear a text box or other text area in an application. (follow with delete or something similar)
I'm sure I could come up with other common scenarios.
Slashdot Mirror
You cannot teach someone when they are not willing to learn. If a child doesn't want to learn they should be expelled from school and given working papers. Why punish those that are there to learn with disruptive people?
Interesting. It's funny, because from a historical standpoint, you have it backwards. The expansion to force teenagers to attend secondary school that happened in the early to mid 1900s was something a lot of educational philosophers argued for to control dangerous delinquent juveniles, i.e., the very kids you now want to throw out. The educational system is still structured toward those early goals, which is one reason it's not very effective.
Citations for any of that? There might be a perceived risk of lawsuit in that situation, but a quick Google search...
Okay, here's the deal. Having taught at wealthy public schools where parents are overbearing (as well as lower middle class schools where student incidents were much more common), I can tell you that threats to sue are commonplace over all sorts of nonsense (from bad grades to the fact you pulled on Timmy's arm too hard to stop him from beating the crap out of another kid).
Often schools settle these things privately in ways that the parents appreciate. The more common outcome is that the parents leverage their threats to get special treatment, rather than money. You won't find any of these actions in a Google search, because there often is no legal record (or sometimes any official school record) that they happened. If you think rich parents won't use some threat about some random incident to get Tommy a passing grade, you have no idea what goes on in the school system. Poor people offer bribes and gifts to teachers. Rich people threaten them with lawsuits.
Anyhow, schools are terrified of actual lawsuits. So, all teacher training programs have classes where they go over all those few successful lawsuits where parents have sued for ridiculous things (breaking up fights, etc.).
It doesn't take a bunch of top Google hit lawsuits to cause the educational system to act this way. It just takes a couple lawsuits and a few lawyers who come in and give presentations to tell teachers how afraid to be. After all, precedent is important in winning a lawsuit, so if one parent gets away with suing one place, it could happen to you.
I'm not saying the system is functional. But the reasons for the dysfunction are buried deeper than the first page of Google hits.
The standard for claiming a discovery is 5 sigma, which is something like a 99.9999% confidence level.
Ah, if only all sciences were this rigorous. Meanwhile, much of psychology, sociology, and even medicine is out there looking at 95% confidence levels (often even juggling enough variables that a number of correlations will shake out of random data)...
I know it's impossible to hold all sciences to such a standard, given the cost of subjects for many human science experiments, but I do wish we could put something like your post in bold at the beginning of most articles.
I heard most of those rioters wore shoes.
I heard most of those rioters had feet. Maybe we should look into those parents who have been plotting for years to enable the riots, by raising those ambulatory children... teaching them to stand erect, to walk, even to run and evade capture.
It's more likely the he was tipping his hat to "The Tacit Dimension" by Polanyi - a very dense book to read.
Polanyi's writing is pretty easy going -- not to mention reasonable -- as philosophy goes, IMO (try Kant or Hegel sometime).
Regardless, I think it's more likely he's just making a reference to the basic meaning of "tacit," i.e., silent... like sonar.
Just to be clear, since I realized this was an assumption on my part which I didn't actually address directly -- I'm not a fan of lecturing at all, in class or otherwise. Face-to-face meetings should be interactive, and I absolutely agree with you on that point.
IMHO having the lecture occur outside of class time and having more time for interaction seems to work.
I understand what you're saying, and it can make sense in some circumstances.
The thing is, I find lecturing to be a rather time-inefficient way to present material, whether it is in class itself or prerecorded. Lectures that are too dense aren't effective, and even if you're viewing one that's recorded, it's tough to navigate. On the other hand, if you are an effective public speaker, you realize that the amount of material you can present effectively is very small indeed.
When I have a class meeting that is heavy on new material, my "lecture notes" for a 90-minute class usually could be read in about 5 minutes. (I often give a copy to students.) Granted, I encourage and allow a lot of discussion, but that's for a class with more "lecturing" than I usually do. Oral presentation is not really suited to conveying large amounts of information quickly, especially when technical. It's about giving the gist of something. (Of course, I'm not talking about the obvious value of lecture demonstrations or other things that can only be presented in a video format.)
I understand that some students may find it easier to learn from such things, but my experience (and that of many of my colleagues who have experimented with such things) is that it's really inefficient in terms of how much students learn for a given amount of time spent on an assignment. In the real world, people in most fields who have to learn new things inevitably resort to written resources, whether through web searches or in trusted books. Videos are just not fast enough and usually difficult to skim.
If I want to highlight things about the reading to students before class, I find a few targeted questions for them to think about or look for while doing the reading is effective. If there is stuff not in the textbook, I supplement it with other readings or my own materials.
I'm not averse to the idea of lectures as supplementary materials, but requiring students to watch them outside of class seems terribly inefficient (and a few colleagues who have tried it seem to agree). I'm not saying the students don't like it, but they spend more time doing it while learning less than they would have if they focused all that time on reading.
Honestly, this is just my opinion, but as someone who taught high school briefly before going to grad school (and who understands the way college forces you to teach differently), one of the things college is supposed to do is to teach you to learn for yourself. That's why you learn the same amount of material with a couple hours of meetings per week in a semester as you would in a year of daily meetings in high school. Less hand-holding. More private study, more digesting material for yourself and then coming to ask questions about it.
Pre-recorded lectures, even if done well, strike me as time-inefficient "pre-digested" material. I see no reason to present material as a lecture unless there is personal interaction, since when I lecture, the presentation of the material is always dependent on the responses I get from the class. Entirely new and intriguing ways of presenting material can happen in the moment and help to stimulate learning, if you just pay attention to questions, incorporate students' ideas into the solution of problems, highlight student questions and concerns that can lead you to other planned topics, etc. Lecturing, when done well, must be a dynamic process, not read from a script. If it is from a script, better to read it from the script in a quarter of the time.
Good teachers know that lectures are performances. Pre-recorded lectures are like pre-recorded comedy routines. Fine for a few stars who are fabulous and everybody would watch anyway, but the average comedians in a nightclub need to be more responsive to their audience to be effective.
...like strapping a bat to your wrist to help you see...
From TFA:
This is a project I'm calling Tacit. No, I didn't bother making an awkward backronym for it....
I think he's not telling us everything. I'll bet the T in TACIT stands for pteropine... it's just that the 'p' is tacit......
-- You type something in one application/textbox/window and want to copy the whole thing somewhere else.
Why would you even do this?
Either you use the right application directly, or you find a way to feed a text file to your application.
You do realize that the whole world isn't full of people who only use computers for coding, right?
As someone who does a lot of (non-fiction) writing, here's one possible scenario that I use on occasion. I often generate short bits of writing that don't quite fit in exactly to a larger piece of writing that I'm working on at the moment. It's better to save such things as a separate file or note or something, rather than as part of a larger document that has miscellaneous bits of stuff in it, which would make it harder to find.
When I later write something that where I want to incorporate this short bit (usually at least a paragraph, often multiple paragraphs), I find the file/note, select all, and copy it. Sometimes I'm copying into another document file, sometimes into an online post, whatever.
Or sometimes I might realize I need to merge two short pieces of writing I started creating separately. Or sometimes I start writing something in an online post or something, and then I realize that I'd prefer not to post it, or not to post it at that time, so I want to save it to a file on my computer. Or...
Just because you can't imagine ever using a shortcut doesn't mean that there isn't a use for it.
Now, whether such extra lectures are an effective pedagogical tool and an efficient use of students' time compared to readings -- that's a separate issue.
I'm not sure we really disagree.
The thing is though, most professors really don't care about teaching, they care about research, and it makes sense.
In my post I admitted that colleges do not reward good teaching that much, nor do professional organizations. Obviously, if you offer jobs where people know that they are primarily interested in your ability to research, and those doing the hiring know that that's what kind of candidates they are looking for, who will get hired? Professors who don't care about teaching. Liberal arts schools that care about teaching more than research hire candidates who can teach, and they usually have better teaching. QED.
For example, if you have a passion for improving algorithms and really love researching them and have made great strides in the field and graduated near the top of your class for undergraduate work and got a PHd with no problem, you are going to get hired for a teaching job. Now, I don't know about you, but if I was that newly hired teacher I really wouldn't care all that much about the introductory programming class they put you with, teaching System.out.print to business majors who, aside from that one class, won't write a line of code in their lives.
The problem is equating "researcher" with "teacher." Sometimes that set of people overlaps; often it doesn't. Your example seems to make the assumption that people who have the drive to do well in a Ph.D. would have no interest in teaching.
I'm actually sorry to hear that sentiment. Believe it or not, there are lots of very smart people who believe that teaching is the most important thing that an intellectual person can do -- sort of like many parents believe that having a baby it their most important contribution to society. And, as someone who has taught introductory courses at the college level, I can say that I have inevitably found portions of them tedious, but they are also incredibly rewarding and intellectually stimulating if you approach them as more than some crap assignment you're forced to do. Only in academia are you hired to do a job that it's okay to tell your boss and all your colleagues that you hate doing and have almost no interest in.
In many other countries, there are lots of "research professors" who are rarely or never expected to teach. They are hired to raise the prestige of a university's research. At many colleges, there are special "lecturer" positions (generally considered inferior to "professorships") that are devoted to teaching, and may colleges offer "senior lecturerships" or other similar positions that carry a bit of job security for good teachers.
There is no reason why we can't have more such division and allow overlap when we have a person with the appropriate skill set.
Universities need to start hiring teachers based on their teaching abilities, a good teacher isn't always the best in their field and someone who is the best in their field isn't always the best teacher, especially since most of the time they don't even get to teach the class they have a passion for.
While I agree with the underlying sentiment, I object to your implicit assumption here that "the best in the field" is necessarily the person who does the best academic research. In most technical fields, there are usually lots of very bright people who will never get a Nobel Prize because they prefer to work for a private corporation where they get paid that amount of prize money every couple years and don't have to bother with teaching. Universities in many technical fields usually are not able to attract "the best of the field" except as visiting lecturers, not professors.
Universities try to hire the person who will bring the most fame and glory to the school, in terms of public professional achievements. While there is generally a correlation to quality of work, it isn't always the case. Except for the very top tier, the people with the most achiev
In the past, it was called "doing the reading."
Students are told to watch the lectures on their own time and then class time is used for discussions, Q&A, etc. Personally I thought classes organized like this have been a good idea. Using class time for a professor to perform the same old lecture is a poor use of time. Face-to-face time should be for interaction, not one way communication.
You know, good teachers have known for years that "lecturing" without interaction is pretty stupid. Yeah, when colleges have lecture classes with a thousand students in them, that's pretty stupid, too.
The best approach is generally a hybrid -- lecturer presents material, and as he/she goes, he/she asks questions, poses problems, and gets students to participate in coming up with the material as it is presented.
Most lecturers are poor teachers or lazy teachers (they generally don't get salary raises, promotions, or professional respect for good teaching -- only for research), and many are open to other pedagogical practices are too self-conscious or disorganized or rhetorically challenged to be able to think on their feet while giving a coherent presentation. And, quite frankly, many lecturers don't even know much more about the material they are presenting than what they have in their pre-written lecture -- even intro courses can often involve material they probably haven't bothered with since grad school. Opening class to discussion puts them under the gun. Why should they do that unnecessarily?
The real problem with university teaching is that good teaching is not really rewarded. Except at a few dedicated liberal arts schools, it isn't appreciated or significantly considered as part of a professor's job (even if it is the nominal reason for the job). Why should a professor bother to improve the classroom if there is no reward and no one cares?
Start emphasizing good teaching, and I bet you'll see an improvement not only in classroom dynamics, but in student learning.
There's no substitute for being able to Google and learn on your own rather than need to have someone babysit you through acquiring knowledge. Which is what you'll need to do once you get out of kindergarten and start working.
Of course you're right. And good colleges used to be devoted to making people do this.
On the other hand, for at least the near future, companies still will often prefer a fresh candidate with a resume that says, "B.S. Stanford" or "S.B. MIT" or "A.B. Harvard" over one that says, "Spent many hours learning on my own through Google."
I think it would be bad business to spend time and money educating a person just to have them buy the degree from somewhere else.
Umm, no. Not in this case, or in any of the "elite" universities that offer such free materials. Those universities have many more students than they could possibly want dying to get in and pay them tuition. It is not bad business, because they have set the size of their "customer" pool, and the number of prospective customers is larger than the size they have set.
Besides, buying the degree somewhere else is pretty useless. Completion of the courses in TFA will not get you credit:
Online students who successfully complete their chosen course will receive a statement of accomplishment from the instructor, which will include information on how well you did and how your performance compared to other online students. Only students admitted to Stanford and enrolled in the regular course can receive credit or a grade, so this is not a Stanford certificate.
In other words, you get a gold star and perhaps the ability to say that you did better than X% of hundreds of thousands of other slackers. No credential.
See how far you get with a prospective employer by saying, "I know my degree is from Upper Bucksnort State Teachers College, but I've completed free courses through private study in MIT's opencourseware and I have a gold star form letter from Stanford saying that it is not an official record from Stanford, but I did better than 80% of people who probably didn't put in much effort for no credit either."
College degrees are only useful for getting you in the door to your first job or two. An elite name gets more attention in most cases. Offering free "unofficial" Stanford gold stars to anonymous internet folks is not going to dilute Stanford's ability to make money or to place its own graduates.
If people were known by their real identity then suddenly one part of the greater internet fuckwad theory falls away. Suddenly everyone can see just what a pimple on the ass of humanity you really are when you troll a forum.
You present a false dichotomy. Pseudonymity is different from anonymity. Real names are not the only solution.
There are problems on the internet greater than in real life. But people have walked into neighborhood bars all the time, had group conversations, even pontificated to an audience -- without having to flash a government ID badge on the way in. And their comments weren't recorded in a way connected with their real ID, so that everything they said at the bar was under review by their employer and spouse, and everything they said in their bedroom with their spouse was open to people at the bar and at church.
We may not need anonymity. But real life depends on multiple identities. Pseudonyms on the internet already solve many problems that true anonymity creates. But it also allows people to have the same sort of multiple identities that they have in real life.
There are various ways to deal with such issues that don't require real names to be posted all the time. If this is a move toward Google+ offering the option of both verified "real names" and pseudonym accounts (for those who want them), that's a real positive.
For a social network that claims it solves the Facebook problem of allowing you to easily choose what information about you is visible to what group of people, having to use your real name with all people is a real problem.
If on the other hand, Google is still going to insist on real names for everyone anyway, this makes no difference.
Meanwhile, in the real world, creators have been making things of value since before recorded history, all the way up until now, and will continue to do so in the future, whether there are any intellectual property protections or not. Not all, but a great many, and dare I say it, many enough.
Weird, but importantly: True.
Myths of romantic visions of artists. So 19th century.
Also, most of those people who had the time to make significant contributions were rich -- they often had slaves or servants to do their work for them, since they were generally born into privilege, which allowed them the freedom to devote their time to the intellect or art or whatever.
I'd like to think we've moved beyond a time when only rich people get to be creative.
There's a reason copyright came into existence, and that is that publication used to be an expensive and time-consuming task, when it first started. Whether and how it is still relevant to the production of copies today is an interesting question, but creators still need to invest time in creating quality works. When rich people stopped supporting creators, the copyright system was the only way someone could make a living. Almost all of the big artists of the past few hundred years worked for a living -- either for rich people, or by selling their work. You can't sell your work if you don't have control over it.
To your point, there are people who volunteer to do all sorts of things. Those who devote significant parts of their lives to things, if not their entire careers, often have a better chance of doing something well.
I'd prefer to have a surgeon who has had good quality training and who has worked professionally for a while. I'd prefer to have an engineer design a bridge after having quality training and experience. I'd be less certain about the surgeon or the engineer if they acquired their abilities through informal study on weekends in their spare time.
Does that mean that such a "spare-time" amateur surgeon can't be successful or an amateur civil engineer? Sure they might be occasionally. But I think we all recognize that there is enough value in having quality in surgery or bridges that we would prefer someone who devote much of their lives to something.
While there will always be rich people who want to be creative and poor people who muddle through life trying to be creative without proper training, don't we as a society want to support creativity -- to allow a poor or middle-class person to have the choice to go to a school, learn something about a craft, and then be rewarded in their lives for doing it?
Most artistic production (books, music, etc.) is already mediocre. Without allowing a person to be rewarded for investing time in such work (since all copyrightable work requires up-front time investment, not to mention generally training and practice beforehand), the chance that any particular person -- who isn't already rich -- will bother to produce something of quality and value is decreased.
We used to have rich people and a "leisure class" who produced most of the quality art of the past, or who financed it by paying artists to do it. You can make all these arguments about altruism or devotion to creation or whatever drive you think people have who will do it anyway, but Michaelangelo didn't paint the Sistine Chapel for free. Bach didn't write his music for free. Poets and novelists were often more well-off, but when they weren't, they worked for money.
Artists have to eat, just as much as doctors and engineers. But you have the temerity to insult artists by not valuing their craft enough to pay them. Shame on you.
(P.S. By the way, in none of the preceding do I mean to imply that our current copyright system is fair or just -- it is completely broken and needs major reform, as I said in my original post. But the mythology that creators just do things because they suit them and have done so throughout history... NO -- THE VAST MAJORITY OF THEM DID IT FOR THE MONEY, OR THEY ALREADY WERE WELL-OFF ENOUGH OR IN OTHER POSITIONS THAT THEY DIDN'T NEED IT.)
I also don't think it's an error to think of distributing someone else's work without their permission as a kind of "theft."
IMO then the question legitimately becomes, why [if you support that assertion], or why not for somebody who does not.
Words have meanings that are determined by cultural usage. In law, they are often defined to have particular legal meanings.
There are always some meanings that almost all speakers of a language agree on. For many words, there are often meanings that some people agree on or are aware of, while other people wouldn't use a word in that sense.
"Theft" is the taking of someone's property without their permission. While you are trying to have a semantic argument about "theft," you're really questioning the meaning of "property." In legal terms, "intellectual property" is a well-established concept, dating back as term more than a century, and as a concept for quite a few centuries.
When you sue someone for depriving you of property, you can often sue them for things that result from that property, as well as the value of the physical item (or the item itself). Damages are often computed based on what it cost you to be deprived of a piece of property, what value you might have accrued in said property had it been in your possession during the period of theft, etc. These are all intangibles relating to the theft of the property. I think one can reasonably understand a statement like, "When you stole that item, you also took my ability to do X," or "Your theft was not only of the item itself, but of the profits that would have accrued from it."
Perhaps you would classify such usage as metaphorical use of the word "theft," but I think most English speakers would understand your meaning.
In sum, intangible value can be "stolen," in the basic sense that theft deprives you of value you'd have otherwise. Yes, it's more abstract than the taking of a physical item, but people use such metaphors about intangibles ("He stole my time," etc.).
Anyhow, you obviously don't believe that intellectual "property" exists. All I can say is that the law says it does. We can have a semantic argument about whether or not "intellectual property" makes sense, but if it does, it can be the object of "theft," at least in a metaphorical sense that is analogous to theft of a physical object in terms of its value to the owner.
So there is no confusion, I suppose I should be even clearer: "For any distribution, AT LEAST half of the population has a value at or below the median value." (From which it follows that "half" certainly does as well.)
Half the population doesn't have a below median number of legs.
Pedantic.
The use of the word "half" here instead of 49.999999...% is already problematic. That's where the real problem hides, for both mean and median.
"For any distribution, half of the population has a value at or below the median value."
Satisfied?
I guess I'll see what my results are.
I'd be curious. I'd be even more curious to know if these friends know other shortcuts beyond bold/italic/underline, cut/copy/paste, undo, new, and a few basic universals. Outside of tech geeks, I've met very few who bother to learn useful shortcuts for their own work, e.g., shortcuts only useful in a specific application, shortcuts for tasks that they need to perform repetitively, etc.
Anytime I find myself clicking a menu or button more than a few times, I look around to see if there's a shortcut for it. But I don't think that's the common working method for 99% of people.
While that's certainly one way to do it, I've never seen anyone actually do it that pessimally.
You've obviously never spent time around 99% of computer users. Probably more than 1% know some of the keyboard shortcuts you bring up, but I guarantee you that >99% do not know all keyboard shortcuts for all tasks they use multiple times per day.
Heck, I've seen very few people who know the shortcut to get to a search box in their web browser or to get to the URL box in their web browser, probably something many people do more than just about anything else these days.
Aside from fairly universal shortcuts (like cut/copy/paste, bold/italic/underline, quit/exit, undo, and new, to name most of the common ones some people know), many applications require specific shortcuts. In my experience, almost no one ever bothers to learn anything beyond these fairly universal ones, even if they appear on menus that people click all them time.
Ctrl-F works great if you know the word you are looking for, however, sometimes I'm looking for a picture or more loosely a concept. I know I've seen it, and in my subconscuous I have an idea of what it looks like which is why I like to flip through a dead-tree manual.
Yet another reason I like actual books (as a supplement to electronic versions). Electronic versions allow searches that allow you to find things that you wouldn't already know about.
But if you already have encountered something, and you can't remember an exact word to search for, a book is handier. I have a sense of how far into the book I was, what side of the page it was on, what sorts of illustrations, heading, and so forth were around it, etc. A PDF can sometimes work like that. A website or reflowing text in an e-book doesn't work as well.
WIfe: Oh, yeah. Well, why would you ever use Ctrl-F when you can just hit F3?
Because different applications/different OSes/different computer hardware supports different shortcuts. (By hardware, I'm referring to laptops that by default require you to hold down a function key to make function keys actually work.)
Ctrl-F is pretty universal and requires less hand motion than F3. But it's always good to know other options, since they may work in other circumstances.
No one ever uses CTRL+A, it's fairly useless.
-- You type something in one application/textbox/window and want to copy the whole thing somewhere else.
-- MS Word (or whatever random application), which you are forced to use for some reason, has once again "helpfully" screwed up formatting, and as a last resort, you want to implement a global change.
-- You want to be sure that MS Word (or some other dumb application) actually is using some global setting, so you select the whole document and go to a settings window to see whether it shows up as consistent for the whole document. (Even if you use styles well, random crap sneaks in -- or you want to check over a document that someone else has been editing.)
-- You want to clear a text box or other text area in an application. (follow with delete or something similar)
I'm sure I could come up with other common scenarios.